Wednesday 27 July 2011

Walk 11 - A Flash of Blue: Steanbridge House lake and woods

Steanbridge House and stream
It's now high summer, or at least as high as it's likely to get this summer, which has been pretty patchy to say the least.  Today's reasonably summery, though, with blue skies, high clouds, sunshine and quite warm.  I've had a break from my walking project for the last two or three weeks, due to exhibitions and other distractions, and I'm glad to get back to it.  I'm starting from the village pond and the plan is to walk follow the stream through the land belonging to the Steanbridge estate.

Steanbridge House is the Big House of the village, and for generations the home of the Townsends, who owned most of this part of the valley including Steanbridge Mill.  The current estate is smaller, but includes a big chunk of the Slad brook ,which the present owners have kindly allowed me to explore.

A genuinely good place for kingfishers
The pond is busy with ducks today and they oblige me with a volley of quacks for the sound recorder - presumably saying "Give us yer bread then" in duckish - before I climb over a gate on the opposite side of the little bridge and set off into Steanbridge estate land with the stream on my right.  I've not taken more than a few steps when a flash of electric blue darts out in front of me and disappears downstream.  A kingfisher.  What a brilliant (literally) start to the walk.  It's really good to see it, because last winter was very cold and kingfishers are one of the species known to suffer in a bad winter. And not so far away from the bit of stream I imagined as a good place for kingfishers.  Though probaby this bit is even better, being deeper and less shaded by trees.

I'm walking through a field, the grass still shining with water droplets.  This part of the stream has a thinner clothing of trees than elsewhere, and the trees seem to be bigger and more varied than the usual hazel/alder combination.  Here's a sycamore, a stately willow, and a beech.  The stream itself looks as though it has aspirations to grow up into a real river one day, being wider and slower-flowing.  It has the air of somewhere that significant fish (i.e. ones you can see without a magnifying glass) might live, which presumably it is if kingfishers hunt along here.  I suspect the difference is the result of active management in place of the benign neglect that seems to operate along most of the stream up to this point.

The kingfisher is rapidly followed by fourteen teenage mallards, doing what teenagers do, viz: going around in a big gaggle, flapping their wings and making a fair amount of unnecessary noise.  I wonder if some of them are the group I saw a few weeks ago on the pond.  I follow them down to the point where the stream opens out and becomes a long, narrow lake, reflecting mown lawns and the handsome profile of Steanbridge House.


This is a very different environment from those I've been walking in up to now. There are only occasional trees along the bank and those that remain are well-grown, ornamental-looking specimens. Instead, the banks wear intricate sharp-edged patterns of tall grasses, reeds, bullrushes and iris, punctuated by brilliant pink spears of purple loosestrife and fluff-explosions of meadowsweet.  The water is deep and very clear and full of a curly weed that I've seen nowhere else on the stream.  I can't see any fish, but I don't doubt that there are some.  The centre of the lake sprouts an ornamental duckhouse and a lot more ducks than would fit into it, some mallards, some more exotic.  As I watch, a lone swan sails stiffly downstream, driving a swathe of ducks before him, including four baby coots (cootlets?) and a moorhen.

In the centre of the opposite bank a massive oak tree spreads its arms wide over the scene.  It's a truly magnificent tree, so large that I have to retreat some distance to get its whole width into the camera frame.  It must be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, tree I have seen along the stream so far.  It makes me realise that I've seen very few such huge trees anywhere in the valley.  I wonder if it was planted when the house was originally built.

A little further on is a similarly venerable and beautiful willow.  A scatter of Large White butterflies are enjoying the purple loosestrife.  As I follow the eastern bank, I'm startled by the sharp squawk of a moorhen, apparently under my feet, so she must be hiding in the reeds right beside the bank.  Overhead, a couple of buzzards are circling and mewing.  The scene is a curious mixture of wild-ish and garden-ish, and it does make a very interesting change from my walking so far.  The sound recorder isn't getting much action, though - apart from the occasional moorhen shout, there's not much noise on this wide, smooth, unobstructed water.

At the far end of the lake, the stream flows out under a little bridge and drops down several feet into a stone-walled channel via a man-made waterfall, so there's meat for the sound recorder in that, and also further on where the stream loses more height in a series of small cascades.  At the end of its tumble the stream is once more its normal self - shallower, fast-flowing, surrounded by trees and busy with debris, like someone reverting to comfortable scruff attire after a poshed-up night out.  And the garden has morphed seamlessly back into woodland and scrub.  Hazels, alders and willows are once more the order of the day, but with an added leaven of sweet chestnuts, which is less usual.  The scrub is attracting butterflies - a pair of red admirals skitter past me, and others which won't sit still long enough to be identified - pale brown and vaguely brindled.  And here, in the middle of this wildish woodland, is an elegant little iron bridge.  It's a bridge to nowhere, since once you've crossed it you're hard up against the barbed-wire boundary fence with the field next door and there's nowhere to go except rather precariously along the opposite bank.  I can't work out why it's here, and feel there must be a story involved.

I'm now following a track through the woodland.  I'm back in the world of the secret stream; even with the iron bridge as a reminder, the world of the lake and the house already seems miles away.   It's that part of the year when the trees are summer-heavy with so much leaf that any view of the outside world is blocked as if by green velvet curtains.  A large brown bird flaps out of the leaf-curtain above me and crashes away into the canopy, only identifiable as a buzzard by its characteristic mew.  I can also hear green woodpecker laughter somewhere in the vicinity, but not, of course when I've got the recorder turned on.  Think maybe I should start a list of The Sounds That Got Away, which would include the earlier moorhen squawk.

On a deep meander in the stream stands another massive tree, all dolled up in ancient ivy.  It's so surrounded by smaller hazels that it's hard to make out what its own leaves are but I'm sure it's an oak.  I wonder, from its size, whether it was planted at the same time as the one by the lake, and whether there were once more of them.   An avenue of oaks?  The ivy growing on it is so ancient that its bark is as ribbed and textured as the bark of the tree itself.  It is currently home to a multitude of spiders who have spun their webs between its stems.

The woodland floor is carpeted with hazelnut shells here.  Having recently been on a course with Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust on identifying signs of small mammals (starting to take all this a bit seriously, you see) , I am looking out for any that show signs of being nibbled by voles or mice.  Unfortunately, all the ones I can see have clearly been scrunched by squirrels.  It's like searching a clover patch for the one with four leaves.  But then I find a small mammal-sized hole in the ground, and satisfactorily close to it, a nut with a small circular hole chewed in the top of it.  Not squirrel.  Are there tooth marks round the edge of the hole?  Hard to tell, in this light, but there are no tooth marks on the rest of the nut (I think) so that means it could be a vole (bank or field) or a dormouse.  Probably a vole - judging by the number we saw on this excellent course (good fun - try it yourself!), voles are in the majority.  It's pretty exciting to think I might be sitting on a vole's doorstep.  Doing the equivalent of rootling through its dustbin.  Hmm.

Large white on purple loosestrife
The stream now disappears briefly into a pipe.  The track I've been following crosses it and heads for a gate in the field beyond, but the stream is still on this side of the field boundary, so I stick with it, despite the fact that this looks likely to involve wading through shoulder-high nettles.  Forging into the undergrowth, I disturb a wren, which darts away in front of me, calling names loudly.    Now my attention is attracted by an unexpectedly steep bank on my right, which looks for all the world as though someone - several someones -  have been sliding down it repeatedly on their bottoms.  Reasonably substantial bottoms - I have a mental image of roistering badger cubs...  On the far side is what looks like an old watercourse, perhaps a mill leat, which would explain the bank.  Following it, I find that it curves around and joins up with the stream.  I'm guessing it's probably part of an old mill system.  Only a little further on, barbed wire fences march right down to the stream on both sides and I need to cross one or other of them in order to find out where I am because I suspect that the fences mean I've now reached the end of the Steanbridge estate land.  It's surprising how difficult it is to pinpoint your position in country like this, even with a detailed map.  Some scrambling gets me over the right hand fence and into an area thigh-deep in nettles and brambles, all overlaid with a mattress of goose-grass.  A little more wading through this plant chaos gets me into a position to see ahead, and confirms my suspicion that this is indeed the church field, which is the next bit beyond beyond the Steanbridge land.  I've hit the furthest end of today's walk.  Time to retrace my steps.

I decide to try walking back up the old watercourse to see where it goes.  I think I've found it on the map, where it's shown as a straight, blue line coming away from the Steanbridge lake and parallel with the main stream.  So it is supposed to have water in it, as far as Ordnance Survey are concerned.  The plants growing in the bottom of it suggest this hasn't been true very recently, but its appearance on the map adds credence to the idea that it was part of a man-made water system.  It runs higher up the hill than the main stream and skirts the edge of an area of beech woodland.  Partway along it, dug into the steep and sandy bank in the roots of the beech trees above, is a series of holes, increasing in size and a substantial accumulation of poo.  Not twisty-tailed poo but well, basically just squidgy.  (Too much information?  Blame Chris Packham.)  Cudgelling my brains to remember what we were told on the mammal course, I wonder if this could be a badger latrine.  Which adds fuel to my wistful speculations about badger cubs and the bank...

Walking in the watercourse is tricky because it's deep in branch debris and leaf litter.  After stumbling along it for some distance, I emerge into sunshine and a major nettle patch behind the summer house at the end of the lake.  Which proves that I've been walking along the blue line shown on the map, although from this vantage point it seems to me that the lake and its surroundings are not quite as they are shown on the OS map.  The whole position of the lake relative to the stream seems to have changed.

Anyway, I'm now on the homeward path, back up the lake, past the swan, past a moorhen and her two small chicks, diving just in front of me, past the house and back to the gate by the village pond.  Here, just before I turn the sound recorder off, a buzzard flaps heavily away just ahead of me and gives me something I've been hoping for - a really good, closeup recording of his cry, which to me is one of the defining sounds of the Slad Valley.

Google map of this walk

Tuesday 5 July 2011

Walk 10 - Of hazels, holes and giant squirrels: Upper Steanbridge Mill garden

I'm on my way back down Steanbridge Lane, having now got permission to go and look at the bit of stream which, after leaving Down Farm land, runs through the garden of Upper Steanbridge Mill and then under the lane to join up with the Dillay running through the Fairgrieves' garden in the other half of the mill.  And if that sounds confusing, it's because the garden of Upper Steanbridge Mill is actually on the other side of the road from the house itself, and is a narrow triangular tongue of land along the stream, projecting into the Down Farm fields.  This is going to be another short walk in distance (less than 100 yards, I judge) - but in time?  Who knows?

On my way down the lane I meet friends from the village returning from walking their dog.  They describe having seen a fox and two deer at unusually close quarters.  As I discovered after my recent fox cub experience, there's an element of mild competition about discussing wildlife encounters with local friends, of the 'I'll see your two deer and raise you five fox cubs' variety, which is quite entertaining, as well as instructive, since it makes you realise that for people who are out in the valley regularly, such as dog walkers, there is plenty of wildlife to be seen.

A brilliantly sunny morning, but chilly for this time of year, feeling almost autumnal, which is slightly worrying as it's still only early July.

Bosky path
I enter the garden via a gate from Steanbridge Lane.  The first part is relatively garden-like, with mown grass and a vegetable plot and summerhouse, but also plenty of trees and laurel bushes.  A fallen willow has been creatively propped to form a children's climbing frame and there's a platform in a tree which ought to be brilliant for watching birds.  Then the domesticated part of the garden simply stops, and I'm in woodland, following a slender green path winding through the trees.  The word 'bosky' must have been invented for this particular path. Once again there's that sense of being in a secret place - I can't see the outside world at all.  I tell a lie - I catch the odd glimpse of the racehorses grazing in the fields beyond.  But there's no sense that they might see me.  In fact, I feel I am walking unseen by all eyes except the birds chittering disapprovingly in the trees above me.  These seem to be youngish trees, for the most part, tall and slim, many of them ash.  There are occasional piles of old logs which have been left alone to be covered by moss and ivy and other creeping plants and must be appreciated by the local wildlife.

Pause for a Chris Packham moment as I discover a little mound of poo.  All those of a sensitive disposition, look away now.  This does not look like the usual (i.e. dog's) and some of it has a twisty tail coming off it which (I seem to remember from Springwatch) means it could be fox.  Nearby are signs of shallow digging, so someone, fox or otherwise, was busy here recently.  Why do I get excited about finding signs of the other mammals who share this countryside with me?  As my earlier conversation with my dog-walking friends indicates, there are plenty of them about.  Can't imagine a badger nosing thoughtfully at a dropped crisp packet and saying 'Hmm - looks like human; wonder what they were up to last night?'

The woodland gets narrower and narrower until it comes to a stop up against fences on both sides.  I'm now at the apex of the triangle, and the point where I stopped on my last walk, but on the other side of the fence I saw the stream disappearing under.  The sound recorder and I stand here for a while, listening to the sound of the stream squeezing itself past the debris which has accumulated against the fence.  There's an unusual-looking tree in front of me.  I think it's an ordinary ash tree, but it has lost a long, v-shaped swathe of its bark, like a tear in a piece of paper, up to a height of about 10 feet.  Unfortunate for the tree, but it gives it a most striking appearance, revealing watermark-like patterns in the heartwood, and orange tinges along the torn edges of the bark .  I wonder what might have caused this - if this was Africa, I'd have guessed elephant, but we only have squirrels here. I'd have thought it would take a squirrel an enormously long time to achieve the same effect.  Pause to ponder the possibility of an elephant-sized squirrel lurking somewhere in this woodland.  Return of The Beast of Slad?

I've got stereo stream noise in my ears; in the left ear, the sound of the stream forcing its way noisily past the fence and its accidental dam of debris, and in the right ear the rush of another set of miniature rapids 10 or 12 feet further on where it flows round a bend and drops over a lip of stones.  In fact, this bit of stream is noisy along most of its length; its bed is rocky, and every now and then a jutting rock creates a little rapid, or the roots of a tree induce a tiny waterfall.  (I'm piling up the sound recordings now.)  Where branches have fallen across the water, creating mini-dams, you get a brief pool of smooth water above the dam, then rapids below, in some places a series of them, like a necklace of smooth pearls held together with twisty ropes.  This transition from smooth water to the texture of the rapids fascinates me for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.  I try to draw it, to find out, and utterly fail to capture what I'm seeing, only succeeding in fixing it in my mind as something to remember.

I have an odd sense of freedom because this is such a short stretch of stream to cover and I haven't arranged to go any further today, so I don't have to worry about how long it will take me to walk it and can spend time exploring it in as much detail as I like.  Also, being a fenced-off garden, it's safe to dump my bag of art kit by a tree for the moment and scramble about the banks of the stream looking closer at things.

Multi-stemmed hazel trees lean down protectively over the stream, accentuating the sensation of hiddenness. It looks to me as though their roots are what's mainly keeping the banks together.  As well as roots, the banks are clad in ivy, hart's tongue ferns, brambles and nettles, with a scattering of pink and yellow wildflowers like battenberg cake crumbs.  There must be bluebells here in spring; their trefoil-shaped seedheads are visible in some places.  In a muddy area I find vague signs of some small animal having come down to the water to drink, and in a steeper, undercut section of bank, shaded by curtains of trailing ivy, I spot a significant-looking hole, perhaps three or four inches across.  Is it a lived-in hole, I wonder?  If so, by who?  Vaguely remember that water-vole holes can be identified by neatly munched 'lawns' close by, which rules this one out since there isn't a scrap of grass to munch.  It occurs to me that human dwellings can often be identified in the same way, though not always.  Perhaps this hole belongs to the vole equivalent of someone who prefers paving stones to grass.


Further on are other, smaller holes.  The undercutting of the bank suggests to me that at some point the stream had more water in it than now.  There are slots in the mud by the stream - maybe deer.

Remind myself to look up.  Because the trees are close together here, they have all grown up very tall and slim with few branches at the lower level, but the ashes, in particular, make a beautifully patterned canopy of gold and green, sun and shade.

My attention is caught by a lot of buzzard mewing going on in the field, in much the same area where I heard a lot of bird fussing going on at the end of my last walk, so I'm wondering if it was the buzzard causing the general alarm then.  I've noticed that I often see them in the same places on my regular walks, so I assume they have regular roosts and hunting areas.

With time to spare, I've no excuse for not making a more detailed drawing, except that there's so much visual stimulation here that it's hard to decide what to concentrate on.  In the end, I choose a view up the stream towards the top-of-the-triangle fence, because of the intricate patterns made by hazel stems across the stream.  While I work, I vaguely register movement in one of the trees in front of me, track it to a hole in the trunk.  This hole is definitely occupied; a wood pigeon is nipping in and out of it, so presumably has a nest there.

It's always good to spend time sitting still and drawing - I find it fixes my impressions of a place much more vividly than any amount of looking through a camera lens.  Trouble is, I'm not a quick sketcher, and one can capture so many more impressions with a camera.  Wish I'd been trained to draw fast.  Wish I'd been trained to draw properly...

I follow the stream back into the domesticated garden, past a triptych of majestic willows, tall and graceful, past the spears of irises growing with their feet in the water, to the point where it tumbles over a small waterfall and disappears into the mouth of a pipe and under the road.  A few yards from here, in the Fairgrieves' half of the mill garden, is the point where it joins up with the Dillay.  Before leaving the garden, I look back towards the beginning of the woodland path, disappearing into a haze of green, and it strikes me that it could have been the original for the road to fair elfland, the one that (according to the song) runs at right angles to the road to heaven and the road to hell.  Those who follow it disappear for years and return, still young, to a world grown old without them.  This place has something of that other-worldly spirit about it.   Certainly I seem to have spent a lot longer here than I intended.