Hemlock: Anger after poisonous plant found near Bucklesham school reads the BBC headline. “Children’s lives are at stake” warns a parish councillor, while the head teacher says that children are walking in the road rather than dare approach this plant.
Hemlock, Conium maculatum, is an incredibly common plant that grows across much of the UK. It favours damp, high-nitrogen grounds, so is common in verges and near footpaths. It is part of the carrot family and has white umbrella-like flowers at the top of long stems. Its leaves look like parsley. It is toxic when eaten, and there are some reports that prolonged touching can enable toxins to penetrate the skin. It was famously used to execute the ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates, following his conviction for impropriety and corrupting the youth.
My social media was full of people – quite rightly – condemning the terrible risk assessment that has resulted in people thinking that walking on the road is safer than walking past this plant. Children are not being harmed by hemlock. A German review of reports to poison centres regarding accidental ingestion of outdoor plants by children found that there had been a total of 19 cases reported between 1997 and 2013, of which 7 had mild symptoms, 1 moderate symptoms and the rest no symptoms at all. A quick literature review of the last decade revealed one case that led to hospitalisation – a 6 year old girl in Turkey ate some thinking it was parsley – but she had a full recovery and was released from hospital after three days. As long as your children don’t have a habit of eating random plants growing on the side of the road, they will not be harmed by having to walk past hemlock on their daily commute.
Walking in the road to avoid the plant, however, is much more fraught with danger. While I was unable to find recent data specifically regarding the school run, a Department for Transport factsheet from 2015 showed that an average of 1 child per week was killed and 37 seriously injured using roads with the majority occurring at times coinciding with travelling to and from school. 58% occurred in the hours just after school (3pm – 6.59pm) and a further 13% occurred between 8am and 8.59am.
More recent data is more circumspect. Using the Department for Transport’s dashboard and selecting accidents involving pedestrians aged 15 or under in areas with 20mph or 30mph speed limits, we can find 17,588 casualties between 2018 and 2021, including 63 fatalities. While these numbers are still far too high, the good news is that the 2015 factsheet showed that casualties had decreased significantly over the years, dropping 92% between 1979 and 2013, and the latest figures show this trend is continuing.
However, regardless of this decline, it is clear that children are far more at risk from cars than they are from hemlock, or indeed from any of the other plants that the BBC has chosen to scaremonger over as a result of this non-story.
But is this really a case of people being more scared of plants than cars?
Digging slightly deeper – by which I mean looking for local news reporting rather than relying on the BBC’s narrative – it seems that hemlock isn’t really the issue here. It’s being used to attract attention for a problem that many pedestrians will recognise – that of poorly maintained footpaths. The Ipswich Star reports that
The public footpath leading towards the primary school has become so overgrown with hemlock, as well as brambles and stinging nettles, that pedestrians were having to being forced to walk in the road. (sic)
Pedestrians were being forced onto the road by the volume of vegetation, not its composition, but no-one in positions of authority seemed to care. Cutting back the vegetation meant closing the road to traffic, and that wasn’t something the council seemed prepared to do. They needed to be forced into action, and hemlock seems to have been the solution.
While hemlock does have its own dangers, I suspect that some people were getting confused – or hoping to exploit the potential confusion – with giant hogweed. This invasive plant has phototoxic sap, meaning it causes burns when exposed to sunlight. This phototoxicity can last for days, even months or years in some cases. It looks similar to hemlock, and in England and Wales councils have legal powers over landowners where it obstructs a public footpath.
In England and Wales, councils or unitary authorities are responsible for ensuring that public footpaths are accessible to people on foot and those using mobility scooters and powered wheelchairs. This means they should be free of obstructions and the surfaces should be sound. Yet anyone who has spent time walking along the UK’s pavements and footpaths in recent years knows that many do not meet this criteria. Surfaces are often cracked and uneven, and spring and summer growth can lead you to fighting through a jungle in places.
While the government has been promoting active travel, it has done very little to ensure that pedestrian and cycling infrastructure is safe to use by everyone. People are being encouraged to ride bikes on pothole-riddled roads, and walk on uneven pavements and footpaths which can end with no warning, be blocked by vehicles parking on them, or disappear into the undergrowth, leaving people with no choice but to walk on roads, and put their lives at risk.
In other words, this isn’t really a story about hemlock. It isn’t even a story about people being unnecessarily scared about hemlock. The real story is poorly maintained pedestrian access and council neglect. But where’s the clickbait in that?
