Clear-up costs will be a lot more than £2.50 per item

Most of the time it’s a very nice way to spend an hour or two, wandering about the highways and byways of what seems like Hampshire’s most rapidly-expanding village.

But, increasingly, our lovely walks in the countryside are marred by the discovery of fly-tipped waste, just dumped by the side of the road or in a field because the owners couldn’t be bothered to take it to a tip.

Once an entire road was closed because tyres had been dumped across the middle of it.

Who would do that? Who would ever think that was an acceptable way to behave? The road was closed for days waiting for the council to clear it up.

Why someone didn’t ask a farmer to collect them and get the whole lot cleared up quickly is beyond me, but perhaps that would be too sensible.

The fact of the matter is there are people out there who think it is their divine right to dump their rubbish wherever they please, blighting a landscape that the rest of us love.

And it’ll get worse.

In less than two weeks Hampshire County Council will start charging for DIY waste to be taken to its waste recycling centres.

For most of us, that’ll mean we can’t take our plasterboard or rubble sacks to the centres at Havant and Port Solent, or the new one at Waterlooville, without incurring a charge.

I suspect the vast majority of us will either suck it up and pay the £2.50-an-item charge, or hire a skip, without too much whinging.

But there will be a set of people who will turn into our tyre-tipping waste-dumping friends, upending the contents of their flatbed trucks or estate car boots on public land, private property or, in fact, anywhere other than where they should be taking it.

And at what cost will that be to clear up?

More than £2.50 an item, I’d wager.