LITTER pickers aged eight to 80 got stuck in at the weekend to help ‘Polish up the Parish’.

It was the second year running that the Fernhurst Society has instigated a village clean up and the blitz on rubbish was back by popular demand.

Volunteers were given high-visibility jackets, strong plastic bags and litter picking tools and worked their way through Fernhurst from the north boundary southwards towards Henley and Easebourne.

Parishioners were also out and about in the run up to the main event collecting the rubbish dumped along the roads and footpaths.

They also cut back hedges and washed and bleached the road signs.

Fernhurst Society chairman Judith Turner said: “The whole parish looks much better for it.

“Wearing their hi-viz jackets emblazoned with ‘Clean Up Fernhurst’, they grovelled through the grass, dug in ditches and hedges, and cleared up months, in some cases years, of litter.

“The obvious litter includes bottles, tins, crisp and sandwich packets, plastic and cellophane.

“But the not so obvious included industrial filters, a stolen handbag from a long time ago, two car seats, dozens of broken tiles, one useful spanner, a lavatory cistern, a roll of carpet underlay, a Tanzanian flag, a working thermos and a stolen laptop bag without the laptop but with enough other information in it to trace the grateful owner down in Swanage.

“Far more people turned out to help this time. We were very grateful to Chichester District Council for the litter picking equipment.

“Pleasingly, several people said they are going to get into the habit of taking a plastic bag with them on walks.

“It would be nice to think that there might be less when we have our autumn clean up.”