There is a ‘B’ path looping round from the main drag, which takes people round Coy Pond itself. This path was created by the Friends, and is a detour for dog walkers, and a delight for children, who can ‘lose’ the grown ups on a temporary basis. It is this path which leads to Bug City.
The foundation for Bug City is a large birch stump, slowly rotting down and therefore a suitable haven for wild life, notably the insect population. Crowning this, is an assembly of assorted offcuts, passing themselves off as miniature skyscrapers. This is an outward and visible sign for the haven below. It was also intended to discourage the use of the stump by the kiddies as a climbing frame; the steep slope with the pond below making this inadvisable.
Any city should sport its place name on the approaches, and Bug City is no exception. The place name, together with an illustration of a black beetle as a City gent, complete with rolled umbrella and bowler hat. Any large city attracts a criminal element of course. Although the ‘flowery dell’ notice does have a convict depicted, the barred window top left, indicates that he is in his ‘flowery dell’ =cell (your actual Cockney rhyming slang). Eventually, the kiddies training to be junior vandals, uprooted the notice. Leaving one foot encased in a ‘concrete boot’; reminiscent of the well-known methods of the mafia.
Long before this however, shots had been fired, in the vicinity of the Bug City notice. Not the insects fault of course: even the soldier ants do not carry small arms (only small legs). A number of small pellets were embedded into the noticeboard, fired no doubt from an air pistol or some such. by one of the junior vandals. Pellets, or to give them another name ‘slugs’: ‘Ordnance’, rather than ‘Orticulture’
