A FORMER postman has highlighted just one of the changes he has seen over the years from his days of delivering letters to his frequent trips into town on foot from Wyesham.

Fred Beach used to walk into town across Wye Bridge several times a day for a big part of his life and noticed last week how the area on the north side of the bridge has become overgrown.He contacted the Beacon and pointed out it how sad it was to see the mess each side of the Wye Bridge at what was a right of way down the steps for anyone taking a walk downstream or over the other side of the road the path down to the riverside. "This area was once maintained by the Wye River Board and cleared of undergrowth and any areas that had silted up following winter floods above and below the bridge," he said.The idea was to allow the maximum flow of water past the bridge during floods. "This path was well used by grammar school boys walking to their boat house, and also on hot summer days it was a stop off point before walking home with my mum to Wyesham," he explained.Although access to the steps was blocked off with a stone, they would step over the low wall and go down to a little pebble beach. "We might sit and eat our ice creams maybe which would be bought at Miss Moses’ grocers on the exit from Granville St, and of course once there we had to paddle in the river" he reminisced."There were always people above and below the bridge, mums with children and older gangs of kids splashing around or just skimming stones. It wasn’t all about being 60 years ago, when I was a postman in the town."I changed on that pebble beach and waded in to swim to the bridge arches, something I’d done years before, we sometimes swam down from the Boat House steps on warm evenings after training. "But now that area is just a mass of brambles and rubbish, look at the view there used to be, a view good enough to be on a postcard but not any more," he added.Natural Resources Wales (NRW) was contacted for a comment and replied: "This section is classed as ’main river’, so it would be NRW’s responsibility to maintain this stretch of river as part of our maintenance programme and make sure vegetation is periodically cut back and blockages that could increase flood risk are cleared."