One of the pleasures of a walk on the Downs is to be a few meters from Ladies Mile, yet to be unaware of the presence of the road. There are parts of the Downs where you would scarcely know that you are in a city. The green around Observatory Hill is another. These oases of peace and quiet are threatened by "scrub clearance" which would make road traffic and parked vehicles visible. Similarly, tree felling on the Gorge slopes would bring even worse noise and pollution up from Portway onto the Downs, and make parked cars visible from Leigh Woods and the Suspension Bridge. The sense of wilderness refered in the Council's own Landscape Appraisal document, and of green enclosure, would be lost
The thickets of ivy, wild clematis, and wild rose that are such valuable features in these intimate Downs landscapes are often supported by old hawthorn trees. There are calls to remove the climbers from these old 'thorns. This is wrong headed, except where the ivy is relatively new. Removal of ivy can make a small, or old tree more vulnerable to the elements. The trees are at the end of their lives, and little is to be gained by killing the climbers, which would then present an unsightly dead appearance that lasts for years. In one experiment where ivy was cut from one side of a forked 'thorn, the side cleared of ivy has collapsed and died, and the side covered in ivy has fallen but still lives. There old 'thorns without ivy that are dying, and old 'thorns covered in creepers that are thriving. What is certain is that the ivy, clematis, rose and hawthorn clumps are very beautiful features in their own right. Little is to be gained by over-zealous management resulting in brown, dead-looking vegitation all over the Downs. The dead ivy is very durable and the old 'thorns do not "burst through" subsequent to this management. They reamin very much as they were. Quite apart from all of this, the ivy provides an important nest site for the birds.