During the first lockdown last spring, I walked some 500 yards of a tiny hill stream in mid Wales near my house.

I collected from the streambed and its banks two fertilizer bags and a 10 litre Tithebarn bucket and filled them with rubbish.

I was shocked; how could this upland brook, with only a lane and one unoccupied farmhouse upstream, have accumulated so much waste?

I supposed it was the accumulated detritus of many years, perhaps washed down from fields and the lane during major floods. Some plastic was, indeed, trapped between stones. Feeling virtuous, I scoured other neighbouring streams with similar results on weekly lockdown outings, leaving them cleared of visible plastic.

Without active clearance, such rubbish does not rot away; it fragments into tiny, then micro-, then nano-particles, and washes down rivers to seas and oceans, ending up in fish, plants, people, even in both mothers’ and babies’ sides of the human placenta. Plastic pollution is neither new, nor unique to Wales.

Some years ago, I visited for the second time the fort of Fatehpur Sikri, one of the architectural jewels of India, not far from the Taj Mahal and a major stop of the global tourist trail.

During my first visit, in 1984, I spent a night or two in the adjacent village, a tiny and impoverished place.

On my second visit, accompanied by wife and child in 2007, the fort was unchanged, still slowly decaying under the watchful eye of Government of India functionaries.

Descending to look for lodging, the village had grown, the children no longer asked for “one pen”, mopeds belched diesel fumes, but the most striking change was the hillside above the village.

Where, before, had been scrub bushes and goat trails leading up to the fort, now there was a precipitous hillside of impassable plastic rubbish; disposable India had arrived in force.

We turned and fled. Among the many dubious actions of the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is one that receives near-universal approval: Swachh Bharat, Clean India.

A country famous for filth has made tremendous strides since 2014 to improve sanitation, clean the streets and enhance public awareness of pollution.

During 2020 locked in Powys, I have exercised in Forestry Commission land and seen piles of McDonald’s cartons and Starbuck’s cups lying beside parked machinery.

I have walked along the sides of A-roads thickly-coated in garbage flung from passing vehicles and leaching into surrounding fields and moorland. I have strolled the lane above our cottage and collected soda and beer cans, crisp bags, fast food and sweety ‘papers’ in every passing place.

I even found a defunct vacuum cleaner in a hedge. Today, crumpled winter bracken easy underfoot, I returned to the stream I had cleared nine months ago — and collected half a stone of plastic rubbish.

The tally? A fresh Tithebarn bucket, two fertilizer bags - one partly eaten by sheep, a Snickers wrapper, a crisp packet, a tobacco pouch, a spray bottle of Terramycin livestock antibiotic , a large bundle of fragmented bailer twine and various sections of field drain.

In Wales, we pride ourselves on the civilisation of our green and pleasant land; yet tourism has been next to non-existent this year. Anyway, our lane and fields see no tourists. It is we, the local people of Powys, who are doing this.

Will our grandchildren thanks us, when they have to clean up the pollution left by Welsh men and women born in the 20th century? We could learn some cleanliness from the Indians; it’s past time for Swachh Cymru.

Meredith Hughes

Trefeglwys