Walk 15 - A Cat's-cradle of water: Vatch House garden

Here we are at what should be the back end of autumn, but autumn has gone in fits and starts this year and seems to be lasting longer than usual.  Many of the trees have now lost their leaves, but not all, - the oaks, in particular, seem to be hanging onto theirs.   It's a semi-cloudy winter afternoon with not too many daylight hours still available and I'm in the garden of Vatch House, being given a guided tour of the extraordinary things that happen to the Slad Brook as it travels through here by the owner, John.  This is a walk out of sequence - if you remember, I had to miss out a section of the brook between Painswick Slad Farm land and Vatch Cottages, and this is part of that missing section, the other part being in the garden of Upper Vatch Mill.

Beyond Painswick Slad Farm, I saw the stream disappearing over a waterfall and into a culvert in the garden of Upper Vatch Mill.  Evidently it then goes around the house (I haven't seen this yet) and reappears from another stone culvert at right angles to the boundary with Vatch House - this much I can see from the fence - before flowing into John's garden.  At this point there's an accumulation of debris from a collapsed wall and fallen tree, which according to John is a legacy of the Great Flood in 2007.  Apparently the pressure of flood water surging out of the culvert carried all before it and swept the wall away.  It's a visible reminder of the power of the flood, when the water was thigh-deep in the lane.  There is also a startling clutch of toadstools clinging to the side of one of the trees like muddy soap bubbles.

Situated at stream level as it is, most of this garden is flattish, but the valley rises rapidly on either side of it. The stream is about 3 feet wide at this point and running close to the edge of the garden, flanked on one side by alder and ash trees, which mark the boundary with the field next door, and on the other by a flat area which John describes as 'wilderness' and has had a chequered history.   During the valley's industrial past, this section of the stream was extensively reorganised to serve the Vatch mills.  As far as I can work out from local history books, there were several  mills in the Vatch mills complex, including Upper Vatch Mill, a couple of buildings on the site now occupied by Vatch House, and the seven-storey Vatch Mill which once stood in front of Spring Cottages. There was a complicated water infrastructure which served the various mills, in which John's 'wilderness' had a bit-part as a 'balancing pond', filled from a spring on the further side of the garden.  At some point in more recent years the old pond was filled in and became a tennis court, which was eventually abandoned, and is now a haven for the likes of nettles and rose bay willow herb.  John has an ambition to restore the balancing pond and take its run-off into the former swimming pool, now lily pond, built next to it by a former owner.

The leat

Through most of the garden the stream flows in a man-made leat which runs along a bank and straight as a die towards the back of the house.  According to John, it's now at the lowest they've seen it in the four years they've lived here, probably as a result of the dry summer.  Halfway along is a massive multi-stemmed tree - hazel? alder? I'm still getting them mixed up, even now - the largest I've seen so far, anyway, with a great mat of roots trailing in the water which causes the stream to chatter noisily as it struggles to find a way round.

There are some sycamore trees here, which are not as common as you would think along the stream, plus a couple of slim and elegant birches.  As I approach the house, the winter sun is fast dropping behind it and the last golden rays are lighting up the fine haze of small yellow leaves still clinging to the birch branches and reflecting off the pale bark of the trees so that they seem to glow all over.  There is that feeling of pleasant melancholy which I associate with late autumn, when everything is dying back and revealing its beautiful bones.  A scatter of windfall apples lie on the path amongst a litter of dead leaves.

Stream descends in steps

The stream now divides; one arm of it continues along the leat, directly towards the back of the house, while the other arm branches off at right angles, descends quite steeply by a series of steps to run parallel with the house, then turns left towards the front of the house, round two sides of a square.  If you were feeling poetical in a Victorian sort of way, you might say that the house sits in the arms of the stream.  Though that might suggest rather too kindly a relationship, given its history -' in the clutches of the stream' might be nearer the mark.

I elect to follow the leat along the back of the house, where it becomes no more than a trickle of water, choked with plants, and ends abruptly in a sort of earth bank.  Originally, it would have continued straight ahead and into a culvert behind the house which then took it across the lane and into the mill pond, up behind the big mill at Spring Cottages.  (This mill pond is still visible as a swampy area of woodland behind an earth bank.)  But the old culvert is long blocked off and the water now runs off at a right angle, under a bridging chunk of concrete, and down a steep mill-race into a stone channel which carries it right underneath the back of the house, round the corner and into another culvert at the front of the house.

Unable to go further, I return to the other arm of the stream, the decorative arm which branches off from the leat in a series of steps, created by low stone-and-tile walls which the stream doesn't exactly flow over, more through, with a flat pond behind each wall.  The whole thing wanders prettily through the garden before veering back towards the corner of the house where its twin emerges.  Here, things get even more complicated.   The water from the race which goes under the house then dives into a Victorian brick-built culvert (John takes the lid off an inspection chamber to show me water gurgling away in the depths) whereas the water from the decorative steps runs into a modern plastic pipe.  Both then run in parallel under the driveway to join up with the main culvert which carries the reunited stream under the road and down the small lane opposite towards Spring Cottages.   Whew!  With me so far?  There's a manhole cover at the point where they join, from which issues the sound of rushing water, particularly after heavy rain.  During the flood, I remember the water absolutely foaming out of it.

That's not the end of the cats-cradle of water in this garden, though.  On the further side of the garden, John shows me another, much smaller stream which comes down the hillside, through the garden of Vatch Cottage, across the field next door and into this garden where it runs in a narrow stone channel and then, via a series of stone steps, executes a bizarre u-turn back along itself and down towards the house.  John reckons that originally it went into the old balancing pond, and that after the pond was filled in, it was given a new life as another bit of ornamental water, and directed back into the garden. Hence the strange hairpin bend in the middle of it.  After coming down the levels in a mini-version of the main stream's pools and steps, this spring water runs back down the garden and into a pipe - John removes another inspection cover to show it trickling below - after which, it presumably joins the main stream somewhere, though no-one knows where.


Confused?  You and me both.  After John has left me to wander round the garden with the camera, I have to walk the whole thing again to try to get the water system sorted out in my head.  This is the most visual evidence I've seen so far of the industrial past of the stream and this valley.  It's sad, in a way; like an abandoned house, or a once-busy road now going nowhere, the purposeful straightness of the leat ending in a purposeless bank, the carefully channelled spring water now wandering about the garden without a job to do, and the whole complicated water-weaving disappearing into a bodge-up of pipes and culverts.  On the other hand, the stream has a life of its own, no matter what we do to it, and it brings movement and interest to a garden like nothing else can, even in the dull days of autumn.


Google map of this walk

Walk 14 - Fungi and flashes of colour: Spring Cottages and Stroud Slad Farm

I'm a little out of sequence here, because I haven't yet managed to make arrangements with the owners of Upper Vatch Mill and Vatch House through whose gardens the Slad Brook runs after it leaves Painswick Slad Farm's land.  So I'll have to come back to that section shortly. From the garden of Vatch House, the brook disappears into a culvert that runs under Slad Lane and parallel to Vatch Cottages, emerges by the little bit of woodland opposite Spring Cottages.  Today I'm walking the bit that follows, courtesy of the owners of 2-3 Spring Cottages and Stroud Slad Farm.

View down the valley across Stroud Slad Farm's fields

The season has moved on since my last walk, over a month ago.  We're now in the season of shorter days and colder nights, mists and mellow fruitfulness etc.  Well, mists and general dampness, anyway.  I've been looking forward to seeing the valley in autumn colours, but that hasn't happened quite as expected.  It's being described as a 'double dip autumn' because many of the trees started changing at the end of August, but then the weather went very warm at the end of September and slowed things down; it's only in the last two or three weeks that we've begun to get the traditional colours, and the process has been very patchy.  Some trees are already bare, others have turned interesting shades of orange and yellow, and some are still quite green.  In fact, as far as there is a 'normal' autumn, this is not it.  The weather's gone on being quite dry until very recently, but a real downpour at the end of last week started the leaves coming down in a big way.  Today is misty, moisty and low on light, so the ambience is going to be quite different from the other walks.

I know the beginning of the walk very well because it's almost outside my house.  The stream emerges briefly from the culvert, currently almost invisible under the weight of undergrowth, before disappearing under a bridge of railway sleepers which gives acess to our cottages.  Just here, I know the brook mainly as a noise of water, but I've learned to tell its likely depth from how it sounds.  I've learned not to underestimate it, too.  It's perhaps three feet wide here, if that, but in 2007, the year we moved to the The Vatch, after days of heavy rain, the culvert backed up and the stream burst its banks, surging thigh-deep down our little lane.  Vatch residents in pyjamas and wellies lugged sand bags, cleared drains and lifted the railway sleeper bridge so that the water could flow back into its course.  (It's a strange but curiously effective way to meet your neighbours!)  The water lapped at the doors of the lower cottages and then subsided.  I regard the brook with more respect now.

Spring Cottages

Today it's a peaceful trickle and, if anything, a bit low for the time of year.  After the plank bridge, it's in a pipe briefly through the corner of the cottage gardens before emerging in the garden of the middle house.  The gardens here are complicated; Spring Cottages were mill-workers' cottages originally, with a seven-storey mill building behind them.  What now looks like the back of the cottages was then the front, and each cottage had a strip of land away to the side, presumably for growing vegetables.  The strips have been rationalised over the years, but it's still hard to tell who owns what by looking at it.  The stream runs plumb through the garden of the middle house and Rod Shaw, who owns this bit, has tales to tell of the wildlife he's seen on it over the years, ranging from water voles to white egrets.  The latest visitor is a dipper, apparently, which he spotted earlier today.  I'd like to see it, but the chances aren't good because the garden is open up to this point and while Rod can watch hidden behind his windows, there's no way for me to approach without being in full view of any wildlife on the stream.

Needless to say, there's no sign of the dipper when I get there, but Rod's pretty plank-and-rail bridge is a good place to stop and watch the stream finding its way round the roots of several big alder trees.  These trees are still mainly green, but a nearby silver birch is bright with orange and yellow and there's a scattering of red rosehips and other berries.  With much of the colour leached out of the landscape by the change of season and the flat, low light, these bright spots really stand out.

Google map of the first part of this walk

The same is true on the other side of the gate, in the first field belonging to Stroud Slad Farm.  From a distance, it's all monochrome, but up close, there are little specks of colour and interest.  My eye is caught by a single fallen leaf, bronze-coloured except for a couple of symmetrical, bright green spots.  And another with green stripes, and a hawthorn leaf in red with brown speckles.  The more I look, the more pattern and colour there suddenly is to see.  I could spend a whole morning looking at individual leaves, if I didn't have four fields-worth of stream to cover.

The valley feels much narrower and more single-minded from this angle, with only a field's width actually visible on either side of the brook, fringed by woodland on the heights.  The mistiness of the upper edges, reduced to grey silhouettes, helps to close down the perspective.  This is what my mother calls 'quiet weather', with hardly a breath of wind.  Everything is cloaked in droplets of water and the trees by the stream are wading in wet brambles and hung with soggy-looking ivy.  There are plenty of birds around - I disturb a blackbird having a bath in a puddle and spot a robin on the wing snatching a blackberry from a bramble thicket.  In the trees above, any number of others are providing material for the sound recorder.   It's bad light for identifying birds because most of them are just black shapes in black trees against a dead white sky, so I'm rather pleased with myself for spotting the bird I've just been recording - a nuthatch, lurking in a hawthorn bush.

As at Down Farm, I have to zigzag up and down the fields to cross from one to the other via gates at the top.  It's brighter up here, with open views towards Stroud, but also feels wetter.  I seem to be closer to the mist and cloud - almost in it, rather than merely under it.  At the top of the first field is a hawthorn tree heavily colonised by mistletoe.  .  It's a good time of year to enjoy the shapes of trees, especially the ones that have already lost their leaves, and from up here, I can take them in better than when I'm right underneath them .  Down by the stream I notice an unusual shape for the Slad Brook treescape - an oak tree.  The only others I've seen so far growing actually by the stream were the giant by Steanbridge House lake and another one just downstream from the lake.  Were there once more oak trees, I wonder, and are these few the survivors of felling in an earlier age?

Toadstool collar

I go down to take a closer look at the oak, and find an old stone bridge, similar to others I've seen along the stream.  Closer inspection underneath it reveals water flowing out of an opening in the side of the bridge - a spring or underground stream or run-off, I suppose.   Also nearby is a slim young tree with few branches and fewer leaves and an extraordinary lacy collar of fairy-like toadstools.  Fungi are due to become one of the defining features of this walk - by the end of it I've seen more different kinds than I think I've ever seen in one day, enough to need a whole separate folder for the photos.  I've never been a great fungi enthusiast, but when they force themselves on your notice in such variety it's difficult not to get interested,  I've also noticed a proliferation of different toadstools on Swifts Hill recently, so maybe the weather conditions have been just right for them.  That's the thing about weather - whatever it is, it's always good for someone.  I guess the amount of dead wood and general dampness encouraged by the trees round the stream may mean good conditions for fungi.

There's no doubt that this is an oak tree because, apart from the leaves, the ground beneath it is covered in acorn-cups.  The actual acorns are missing, but the cups are mostly undamaged, which means that whichever nut-eater took the acorns sat down and carefully extracted them from the cups first.  Does that sound like squirrels to you?  No, me neither; in my garden I get hefty, thuggish squirrels with a very direct approach to food gathering.  But perhaps a colony of dainty, maiden-auntish squirrels lives in this oak tree.  Something fairly thuggish has stripped a couple of small trees nearby of most of their bark, though.

While I'm musing into the sound recorder about the way trailing tree roots have coralled dead leaves into patterns in the stream, bright yellow against dark water like an Andy Goldsworthy artwork, I'm stopped in mid-sentence by an unexpected sound.  A tawny owl, unless I'm much mistaken, hooting from one of the trees in the woods above.  Unusual, but not the first time I've heard them in the daytime around here.  There is other evidence of the local mammals - badgers have been rooting up patches of grass just here, and as I pause to look more closely, a deer dashes out of cover and away from me.  It was lurking in a triangle of rough scrub which is fenced off from the rest of the field.

As higher up the valley, the divisions between the fields are defined by small streams running in clefts down to the main brook, carving the landscape into manageable chunks.  The further towards Stroud I go, the more lumpy the landscape becomes and the sharper the hills between the clefts.  Walking in the third of Stroud Slad's fields, with their sheep for company, I find myself looking across the stream to Hazel Mill, a beautiful Cotswold stone house with part of an old mill building in its garden.  From this side of the stream, I can see a leat or channel of some sort running through the garden parallel with the stream but higher up, and a cascade where the water from the channel joins the main stream.  I make a mental note to investigate more closely at another time.  From here, the stream plunges into a thicket of brambles.

In the garden of Hazel Mill is a tree which has turned a uniform, vivid gold and makes a brilliant spot of colour in an otherwise drab landscape.  Something similar occurs at micro level down by the stream - here is an unexpected flash of shocking pink where the last red campion is still flowering.  Otherwise, the brightest colours in this field are the identifying flashes of orange on the bottoms of the sheep!



And while we're on the subject of colour, here's an interesting thing.  The hazel and alder trees by the stream are mainly still green, but the ground beneath them is carpeted with yellow and brown leaves.  In this third field  I find a beautiful example; a classic hazel clump, its remaining leaves mostly green, but with a russet-coloured leaf shadow beneath it.   Which means that the leaves must be turning in stages and falling off almost as soon as they turn - perhaps because of last week's rain?

Leaf shadow

The final field is not so much a field as a big green hump, with a view from the top up to a bronze glow of  beechwoods on the ridge.  At the field boundary, the stream suddenly becomes broad and quiet, the water spreading like glass and reflecting its entourage of trees beautifully.  Drifts of yellow and orange leaves lie on the water, leaves sitting on reflections of leaves.  Then the stream plunges over a little waterfall and becomes narrow between steep banks, noisily negotiating an obstacle course of trailing roots and seeming to gather speed as it rushes towards Stroud.  It's been less of a secret stream today - the trees growing beside it are confined to the very edges of the banks and are more widely spaced, so there isn't this overhung area of bank to walk in and it feels more open.  At the end of this field is another tributary, coming in from the road side this time, and making a pleasing noise as it splashes into the stream via a discarded bit of metal.   I have to make three attempts to record it because of aeroplanes going over - I've noticed this before, that every time I hit the 'record' button there seems to be a plane looming.  Do we really have so many planes here?  I don't seem to notice them normally.  I'm now close enough to Stroud to pick up, faintly in the distance, the voices of children in a school playground.

Leaves and reflections of leaves

That's the end of today's section of stream, but not of the walk, which has to be of the there-and-back variety.  I walk back along the tops of the fields to take in the views I've missed being down by the brook.  This is a great privilege of doing these walks - I get to see the valley from angles that I never otherwise would, in this case in a great sweep up to Knapp Farm and Swifts Hill.  The mist is fading, there's a gleam of sun, and patches of colour in the woodland fringes are coming into focus.  After a morning by the stream getting up close and personal with individual leaves, flowers and fungi, it's good to stretch my eyes.  (Not that I've called time on the fungi; in fact, now I'm officially on my way home and am supposed to be getting a move on, I can't seem to stop seeing them, in all varieties, from tiny, bright orange ones, to huge, squidgy rambling ones.) I'm also getting a new angle on our own Spring Cottages.  I've never actually seen them head-on like this before, and I now see why the southward-facing side, which I think of as the back, is actually the front - they look less rambly, and almost elegant, from this side.

One final flash of colour: the red underside of the tail of a greater spotted woodpecker, perched at the very top of a tree on one of the field boundaries.  I feel rather proud of myself for recognising his silhouette before getting that confirming red flash in the binoculars.

And a flash of black-and-white to end with.  As I climb back through Rod's garden, I'm passed by a fast-moving streak of black wing and white underbelly shooting up from the stream.  I'm almost certain it was the visiting dipper.  Almost.




Google map of second part of walk - Stroud Slad Farm