'Beyond difficult' HS2 earthworks take toll on Chilterns residents

Margaret Bunce used to look from her cottage window over a swoop of fields of wheat and small copses.

- Patrick Barkham

Now when she opens her curtains each morning, the rural valley between Great Missenden and Wendover is dominated by the concrete and earthworks of HS2.

Orange-clad men and their yellow diggers and dumpers are building cuttings and viaducts to take the high-speed railway on its path through a swath of the Chilterns area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB), now known as a national landscape.

The railway from London to Birmingham is Britain’s biggest building site, a linear stretch of earthworks almost 140 miles long including tunnels, much of it visible on Google Maps' satellite view as a vivid beige scar down the middle of England.