HAVING driven through thick smoke as she did the school run along the A325 in Whitehill, a woman expressed her anger at the “dangerous situation” she alleged that it created for her and her two children, as well as for other motorists.

The complainant, who asked not to be named, was even angrier when she found that the smoke had also drifted into her house and garden, filling the rooms with smoke and making the family cough.

She said that her neighbours had also been affected.

“It started on Monday, September 21, in and around the area of the roundabout at the top of Whitehill,” she told the Herald last week. “The only clear day was on September 25, maybe because the wind was in a different direction.”

The woman, who lives in a street off the A325 in Whitehill, said the smoke was caused by piles of logs being burned along the roadside.

“The only time it cleared off the road and from our houses was when it rained,” she said. “I was driving through it when I took my son and daughter to and from school.”

She said that it was so bad that she had to close her windows and take in her washing.

"The garden was covered in smoke,” she added.

Worried about possible driving and health hazards, she contacted East Hampshire District Council’s environmental officers whom, she continued, said they would investigate, but they thought smoke on the road was a police matter.

She wrote to East Hampshire MP Damian Hinds, concerned the burning logs were linked to tree felling to make way for the new town relief road.

But a spokesman for the district council said the wood-pile fires along the A325 had nothing to do with work on the relief road. “Our officers did go to the site, but there was no one there so we are now trying to find the owner of the land,” the spokesman said.