I AGREE with your correspondent's point that rubbish and litter are detrimental to the environment and would extend this to mean urban areas as well as the countryside (March 31).

However, I do take exception to one particular group being singled out. It is not only travellers who deposit rubbish.

I travel to York everyday and this is what I 'clocked' on the litter scene today: a dustbin, plastic crate, mile upon mile of discarded drink cans and bottles, fast food wrappers, snack packets, dumped rubble and shredded plastic bags now interwoven through the branches of hedges and trees.

At other times of the year I have passed stripped and burnt-out cars, a supermarket trolley thrown in a river and, during the summer months, bundles of dirty disposable nappies tossed from cars after leaving the local pleasure park down the road from where I live. The list is endless, the onslaught of litter relentless.

I could also take the writer to see a travellers' encampment, not too far from where I live, which is spotlessly clean and tidy. The sad fact is that most people do not accept them and regard them with suspicion.

Sylvia Hutton,

Little Barugh, Malton.

Updated: 10:26 Thursday, April 05, 2001