SINCE the new motorway came, life on my road has been hell. I never thought that at the age of only 16 I would be able to say: "I remember when all this used to be fields."

All my life I have lived on our private little unmade road where everyone knows and helps each other. There was a beautiful field next to my house, full of old oak trees and tree houses where my friends and I used to play, with wild animals in the long grass during the summer and in the winter everyone on the road used to bring sledges and race down the hill.

I thought my playground would have been here for ever, until the day when I could race my own children down the hill on sledges. Then they came - huge yellow monstrosities with giant buckets connected to the front were tearing up my second childhood home, ripping trees out by their roots. Trees that hadn't been touched for more than 200 years were being torn up and thrown to the ground like annoying weeds.

My childhood playground and teenage haven where I took my dog for walks and played with my little sister was now being infiltrated by developers who were destroying not only our field but also the homes of such animals as fox, rabbit, vole, mink, owls and a family of herons that used to nest by the river.

No more trees, no more summer walks and winter racing, no more heron, owls or any other wildlife. Just mud. Mud and huge diggers, bulldozers and dump trucks, spooning out a chunk of field, like a piece of ice cream.

All this just to build a couple of storage units for the damned motorway. Why?

Why couldn't they build on land that doesn't have a use or has already been butchered by the developers, and to top things off, it's our hard-earned money that has been used to pay for it.

If it's our money that's paying for this massacre, then we should have a say in what is going on!

BENJAMIN CANNON, Tottenham Road, Lower Darwen.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.