But that is the hard lesson learnt by secondary school students when they set fire to their textbooks at the National Trust for Jersey’s La Coleron Battery, at the western end of St Brelade’s Bay.
And, after the States police and the Environment Department became involved, the teenagers who started the blaze were hauled into their headteacher’s office during the summer holidays and given a stern warning.
During the same month, wildfires damaged Point Le Grouin – the headland between Ouaisné and St Brelade’s Bay – after a bonfire started with used GCSE textbooks got out of control.
Jon Parkes, lands manager for the National Trust for Jersey, said that he was concerned about how dry some land had become due to the exceptionally warm summer and urged Islanders not to start fires.
‘It usually happens when kids break up from school, around the sort of time they are finishing their GCSEs. What we find is that they often set fire to their textbooks,’ he said.
‘We have also had a number of issues with people leaving rubbish on our land – it tends to be a seasonal thing for us.
‘There is a site behind St Brelade’s Bay pier called La Coleron Battery where we often find that people have set fire to things and have thrown glass and other rubbish into the gullies.’
Mr Parkes added that in one recent case at La Coleron Battery, he and his staff were able to track down the culprits behind a recent bonfire.
‘We have been working with Environmental Protection and we are very grateful to the States police who have also helped us with this,’ he said.
‘We managed to identify some of the students involved as their names and the names of their teachers were actually written on their textbooks.
‘The kids in question were called back into school to have a meeting with their headteacher about it and since then the situation seems to have improved slightly.’
However, Mr Parkes added that the problem of litter being left along the south coast site was becoming increasingly worse and his staff were clearing several bags of rubbish from the site every week.
‘It is the worst it has been there for a while and I would say we were down there about every Monday morning taking away quite a few bags of rubbish,’ he said.
‘We often cannot send our staff down to the gullies to get the rubbish that gets thrown down there as it is too hazardous.
‘I would not say this is the worst year I can think of but it is getting worse.’
