LAST week P. Wingfield of Cinderford extolled the virtues of illuminating the Sculpture Trail and Dr Hart Arboretum. The following day The Times reported that, due to light pollution, one in five human beings are no longer able to see the Milky Way – "About two-thirds of the globe lives under skies polluted by artificial light." Any amateur astronomers in our Forest will no doubt be horrified by the addition of new sources of needless stray light in relatively dark areas. Cloud apart, it is a constant source of surprise how rare is a really clear bright night sky nowadays.

While I will happily agree that illuminating certain Forest trails/ attractions would have advantages (including somewhere off the beaten track, so to speak, for the local drug/vandal culture to thrive) I would ask for moderation:

•The least bright lights to do the job, installed in luminaires specifically designed to minimise skywards projection of stray light, and

• that they be extinguished by, say, 10pm.

And, while on the subject, during my schooldays ordinary Wiltshire street-lights turned themselves off soon after 'closing time' – perhaps the Forest of Dean District Council and other local authorities could save on their electricity bills by telling their lights to switch off at, say, midnight (excepting those at junctions and other places the traffic authorities deem lights necessary).

P. Wingfield is clearly afraid of the dark or he/she doesn't like our Forest ("lonely and dark environment" ... "sense of isolation ... extensive forest wilderness" ... illuminations to rival Blackpool etc).

I had cause to visit Cinderford last week and, given a warm and pleasant evening, left the car and walked over through the Forest. I met no-one, bar a dog walker in an overgrown grove (I guess the sheep used to mow it) in Cinderford itself, and the return journey, in the twilight and eventually the dark, was a delight. Shy deer were on the trackways before I disturbed them and they dematerialised – as deer do – but otherwise a wonderful sense of having a peaceful universe to myself.

The sheer variety of our Forest, with a rapidly changing succession of beech, oak, silver birch and softwoods of many types, some young, some old, some tidy, some a tangle, plus the flat bits and the steep bits, immediately dispels any sense of dark foreboding or threat (or maybe some of Tolkien's Ents look after it for us).

My impression from your letters column is that many people move into the Forest since they find the idea attractive (as I did a few years back), but then soon want to change it into a rural Surbiton. Maybe people with this attitude should not stay here, since if they start changing the Forest it will soon no longer be the Forest we know and love – and that which we came to will not longer be here (ship and all). – Clive Akerman, Lydbrook.