Looking Back

Looking Back
Originally uploaded by Alan Norsworthy

I am most at home in the wilderness, but sometimes an area that has been 'tamed' can affect me in a very similar way to that which I feel when I am "out there".

There is something about a cool, foggy morning that makes you think. Well maybe I should rephrase that; a long walk on a cool, foggy morning makes you think.

Walking the soon to be bulldozed lanes, barns and buildings of what was once Winfields Farm in Oshawa, Ontario, leaves you with mixed emotions; primary sadness. 

Yes it may only be a "Farm", a man made place, but it's shear size makes it special. 6000 hectares and once home to 600 horses, a magnificent equestrian past, all gone, to be gobbled up by 'development'.

There are graves here, not of people, but of horses.

Will the sounds of these magnificent creatures be heard above the din of the subdivisions that will, all too soon, sprawl across this space?

Will people talk in whispers about what they have seen galloping down their tarmaced streets on a moonless night?

I doubt it, but they are there....


So bleak is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century. ~Philip Shabecoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978