In ‘A Shropshire Lad’ published in 1896, A. E. Housman (1859–1936) wrote:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

It’s a poem that has stayed with me throughout life since I first heard it and memorised it at Market Drayton Junior School in Shropshire some five decades ago: and I must agree with dear old A.E.; the cherry is a lovely tree. The Japanese even have a cherry blossom festival.

Eastertide was early this year in March and was unusually cold, so the cherry trees still had bare boughs then.

They’ve only just started blooming properly in Bristol now.

A Shropshire Lad is available free from Project Gutenberg.

Yesterday’s Bristol Post carried a report on the start of building works at Wapping Wharf down by the city docks.

On the whole the report is fairly bland and it looks like a standard bit of blurb produced from a property developer’s press release.

Nevertheless, one sentence in particular drew my attention. It reads:

In recent days large machinery has moved to the site to prepare for the start of remediation and ground works.

After reading that, I began wondering how many of the Post’s readers know what remediation works actually are or what they involve.

Turning to the dictionary, remediation is defined as “the act or process of correcting a fault or deficiency.”

Correcting a fault or deficiency sounds fairly harmless and definitely a good thing to do, doesn’t it?

However, one has to add the word ‘site’ or ‘environmental’ to remediation to get at its actual meaning as used in the Post’s report, which is cleaning up pollution or contaminated land.

There are various means of effecting remediation, depending on the contamination or pollutant involved, but one very common means (and one which has been used extensively in the past by developers in Bristol. Ed.) is the use of heavy plant to dig up the contaminated soil, load it into lorries and cart it off to a toxic waste dump.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the Wapping Wharf site accommodated some as yet unspecified industrial buildings, but a contaminated land survey of the site mentioned in a Bristol City Council document from 2006 revealed contamination by heavy metals, hydrocarbons and solvents, hence the need for the clean-up.

Finally, a small piece of advice: if you know of any remediation works taking place, for the sake of you health do try not to be downwind of them, especially in dry and/or windy weather.