I sit by the pit, running my fingers through the fresh tyre tracks. A bat clashes with a ball off in the distance and a motor hums as Dad drives away. I breathe in deeply, knowing that all this I see in front of me – the rolling hills, the long green grass and the sheep that graze in groups metres apart from each other – will soon be overrun and destroyed by housing.

I stand, my shoes sinking deeper into the soft, squelchy earth. As I drift past the tree logs, memories flash through my mind. My fingers drift across the rough surface of the bark. The small indents I recognise as the ones my brothers and I made building a hut. We’d gotten Dad to make sure it could hold us by going on himself. I remember the loud crack and the splitters that scattered across the grass like snow on a mountain. The shrieks of our laughter still haunt this place like a pleasant ghost. Soft black clouds slide across the sky, dimming the sun's rays. I shiver.

The last cold tendrils of frost wrap themselves around the tips of my toes as I make my way up the small hill, across ripples of uprooted dirt and long lost rabbit holes. There used to be many thick logs on top of this hill but now there's nothing but a clump of saw-dust. I remember how Josh and my cousin Ben used to have fights with it and would come back to the house with itchy backs.

Knowing all these memories will disappear once these places are reduced to an overflowing amount of housing is a scary feeling, one that creeps in and locks me down. I turn around. The lump in my throat disappears as I hear a soft tweeting from the trees that sit at the edge of the bush. The birds are scrummaging around for their next meal. Rain plasters itself onto my head as I tread carefully back through the now damp and soggy earth.