Monday 8 July 2013

Not Exactly a Walk: Slad from the air

This is not exactly a walk, but it does fit my criteria of trying to see the valley from different angles, as well as fulfilling an ambition I've had for some time, to see what it looks like from above.  And given that you can't walk in the air (unless you're Aled Jones), this is possibly close to it.

I was given a trial glider flight for my last birthday, which due to the variability of the weather last summer didn't actually happen until this May.  I was incredibly lucky (how lucky, I didn't realise at the time) to have a near-perfect day and to draw a very experienced and gung-ho instructor by the name of Simon Buckley.  We went up courtesy of the Cotswold Gliding Club from Aston Down airfield.  The flight was supposed to last about 15 minutes, but we found a series of thermals which Simon (a self-confessed fliding addict) was unable to resist, and were actually up for closer to 40 minutes, circling over Minchinhampton and peeking in on Gatcombe, among other things.  Near the end of the flight, we passed close to Stroud and I got a fleeting glimpse of what I suddenly realised was Our Valley - recognised it, curiously, by the three copper beeches in the village, which stood out like beacons.  This started a train of thought.  Would it be theoretically possible, I asked Simon when we landed, to glide as far as Slad Valley, near enough to take some photos?  "Yes," said Simon, "Look out for a good day and we'll do it."

Mission Control
All of which is to explain what I am doing at Aston Down today.  It's taken a while - not that there hasn't been any good weather up to now, but that, like mice in the undergrowth, it's been difficult to spot.  The forecast for this week was suddenly and startlingly like summer, so I e-mailed Simon in hope, to be told 'it has to be this afternoon'.  Swift panic, readying camera and dealing with unexpected flat tyre on the car, but I arrive at the airfield in time.  It's a stonkingly hot day, but this is not so good for gliding, apparently.  A couple of pilots waiting by the club's Battle Bus (mission control here is a double-decker) shake their heads.  Not much lift, they say, everyone else is giving up and going home.  Hmm.  The sky is uniformly blue, and this is the problem - no clouds to tell you where the thermals are.  'No buzzards either' says Simon.  Buzzards?  I hadn't thought of this, but of course buzzards use thermals too, so a circling buzzard is a good indicator of a thermal.

I think I've said several times that for me, the buzzard is symbolic of Slad Valley, so I would love to be able to say that we find one and it enables us to get there.  But we don't.  Life's like that - no sense of dramatic synergy.  Here's what actually happens.

I and a parachute are strapped into the front seat of a sleek, white and very small-looking dual-control glider.  I am shown how to get out of the straps, which lever to pull to jettison the clear perspex canopy and what to pull to unleash the parachute.  I hope very much I won't have to do all these things as I'm certain I will get them in the wrong order.  We are winched into the air - a mad, tugging rush, then a startlingly loud bang as the towline is detached.  Simon has warned me about this in advance, which is just as well, or I'd have the impression we were being shot down.  We circle the airfield for a while, looking for lift in places where it ought to be, but not finding it, finally run out of options and have to land.  Oh well, I think, it was worth a try.  But Simon is made of sterner stuff.  Am I game for another go?

I certainly am.  So we get a second launch, which takes us to 1000 feet, but of course we start sinking straight away unless we can find some lift.  We need 3000 feet to get to Slad Valley, apparently.

There is a gadget in the glider which makes a sound which tells Simon (who is doing all the flying, by the way, I am just a passenger with a camera) whether we're going up or down - high-pitched pips for up, low-toned wail for down.  There is a worrying amount of wail at first, but presently Simon finds a small bit of lift and starts doing tight circles, slowly clawing upwards by a few hundred feet.  He swings out towards the Chalford valley in hopes of finding some lift there, but to no avail, so it's back towards the airfield, and more tight circles.  This process, known as 'scratching' (as in 'scratching around for lift') goes on for a long time.  It's frustrating for Simon as well as me.  As he puts it, a glider pilot's main ambition is to go up, and then along.  Down and round in circles doesn't do it for him either.  There are thermals out there, but nothing to tell him where they are, so he has to go by instinct and experience.  There's a 15-knot breeze which is pushing us away from the airfield in the wrong direction, as well as scattering the thermals.  It's blisteringly hot in the glider and after an hour the circling motion is beginning to get to me.  Twice we come close to calling it a day again.  Then Simon suddenly finds a lift which he describes as being like a thermal four inches wide, and we circle in and out of it, alternately sinking and shooting upwards, sometimes so fast that the shrill pips become a shriek.

Definitely the right valley
At last, we have 3000 feet, just enough to make an attempt on the valley, despite the breeze.  We swing out across Nailsworth, over the edge of Stroud and head for the bottom of the Slad Valley.  On top of flying the glider, Simon is thinking of camera angles.  I'll be able to get a view up the valley at least, he suggests.  'We have got the right valley have we?' he asks, suddenly panicking.  But I know it's the right valley.  Even from up here, where everything looks weirdly flat, I recognise the characteristic line of the road, the pattern of the woods, the shape of the village.  After months of making Google maps of my walks, the shape of the valley has sunk into my consciousness.

3000 feet does give you a completely different perspective, though.  From up here, the woods are much more significant visually than they seem at ground level, where you're always looking up at them, compressing their width into a short eye-line.  Whereas Swifts Hill, which seems so dominant from anywhere in the southern half of the valley, from up here becomes just one more field.  The contours of the land are barely visible - it's the changes of colour and texture, from tree to meadow, from road to building, which give definition.    The Slad Brook isn't visible of course, except as a line of trees, but I can see the length of the lake below Steanbridge House.  It all looks a lot more like a map than you'd expect.  (I don't know why this surprises me, but it does.)  But it also looks close, as if I could reach out and touch it, not like looking out of a commercial aircraft, where it's like a film unrolling far below you.  For a few moments I feel part of the valley's airspace, and know that I'm subject to its winds and temperature variations.  This is the closest I'll ever get, I suspect, to a buzzard's view of things.

Buzzard's view of Slad
We fly along the south-eastern edge of the valley, staying on the side closest to the airfield, moving fast.  'Glide' doesn't really describe this, being too gentle a word for the sound of the air rushing over the plane and the sense of speed.  Simon dips the left wing vertiginously to give me the widest view of the valley, circling left, warning me that after this pass, we have to turn back.  From this angle I've a clear view of the lower end of the valley and the village, but the upper end is hard to see, the perspective too flat, and the Dillay valley is under the glider's nose.  For a frantic few seconds the valley is rushing beneath me and I'm trying to get photos clear of the obstructions of the glider's structure and then we're moving away and it's over.  I'm elated.  'Well done!' I shout to Simon.  'We're not home yet' he says, ominously.

We head straight back towards the airfield, accompanied by a continuous low wail from the up-down gadget.  I'm holding my breath, but as we approach the runway's reassuring cross-shape, Simon says we've enough height to do a proper approach, which means circling round to come in from the other end.  He sounds pleased. He says this is because it's safer that way, just in case any other gliders are coming in, but I suspect it's also because he's professionally-minded, preferring to do things properly even when he's pushing the glider to its limits.

Putting the glider away
We land decorously by the club hangar and clamber out, grateful for the cooler air.  We've been in the air for an hour and a half.  Almost everyone else has gone home, and there's a scramble to find someone to help put the glider away, and to ferry us back to the other end of the field and our cars.  But I don't care how long all this takes, because I've done it - seen the valley for myself from the air - and no amount of looking at Google Earth even comes close.  Simon, too, is quietly triumphant.  I suspect that I've been enormously lucky again, that without his considerable skill, experience and sheer tenacity we wouldn't have made it today.  Thank you, Simon, and Cotswold Gliding Club.


Tuesday 30 April 2013

Walk 39: Dawn Light and Daw's Lane

Frosted horse-apples, Swifts Hill
5.30 am and I'm standing on the road that runs by Swifts Hill trying to get my brain to take an interest in life.  As I may have mentioned before, I am not a morning person.  I am not in favour of there being two five o'clocks in one day.  But it seemed to me that my investigation of the valley wouldn't be complete without seeing it, or part of it, by dawn light.  So here I am, just making it to Swifts Hill by first light, dawn in ten minutes' time, in theory.  The Met Office promised me a cloudless day (I wasn't prepared to get up otherwise) and indeed the sky is clear, with a bulgy moon taking its last bow.  It's also lightly frosty - ice on the car windscreen, which was a nasty surprise - and my fingers are freezing.  For heaven's sake, it's going to be May tomorrow!

It may be a late, cold, spring, but the birds are getting on with it.  As I left the house, the blackbirds were doing warm-up 'spinks' and are now in full voice from Trantershill Wood as I walk up the track that runs between the wood and the hill.  Other birds begin to join the chorus; a green woodpecker contributes a hysterical cackle to the top line and I can also hear a spotted woodpecker drumming in the base.  It's not quite a full-scale dawn chorus, more of a rural church choir, but it's pretty impressive, even so.

By the time I get to the top of the hill, there's a rosy light warming the very tops of the trees at the rim of the far side of the valley.  Dawn is a rather drawn-out affair in this valley because the sun is coming up behind Bisley and even after it's technically risen, it still has to climb up over the hill.  This is helpful, as I stand trying to engage my brain with the camera in order to get all the photographic ducks in a row.  I am getting to grips with my (newish) SLR but before six in the morning I struggle with putting one foot in front of the other, never mind the whole aperture-shutter-speed-ISO-white-balance thing.

Dawn light over Slad
While I'm faffing about, the rosy light slowly creeps down into the valley, taking first the woods and then the houses of Slad into its warm embrace.  It paints the leafless trees a colour which is almost like autumn, but a little more girly.  Below the sun-line, the shadows are blue, the fields sea-green.  A pink mist floats over the Severn Vale and puddles of gold lie in Stroud.  At my feet, the frost picks out new leaves springing out of the short turf and some brave cowslips and celandines.  Even a patch of horse apples becomes interesting under frost.  (Either that, or I'm channelling Chris Packham.)

I now walk along the side of the hill and cross the stile into the field above, where I spend a chilly few minutes trying to photograph the pink edges of closed daisies and the dew-lapped seed-heads of something smaller and neater than dandelions while the light behind the skyline grows.

Golden light in beech tree
As well as seeing the dawn, the aim of this morning is to walk along part of the eastern edge of the valley, via a track from the Bisley Road known as Daw's Lane.  So when my fingers get too cold to press the shutter, I retrace my steps over the stile and follow the footpath south-east towards the Bisley Road.  At the head of the combe by Swifts Hill I pass my most favourite tree in the valley, a huge and beautiful beech with widespread roots and a crown that fills the whole sky.  It's inside the Swifts Hill nature reserve, thank goodness, so safe, I trust, from felling.  Just now, its uppermost branches are gilded with sunlight, as if it had leaned down and stuck its head in a bucket of gold paint, while its lower branches have a sprinkling of brand-new green leaves.  The path takes me up into the field above the beginning of Abbey Wood.  Small birds are flipping to and fro in the trees and singing loudly.  One green woodpecker is answered by another, a few trees away.  The first row of trees in Abbey Wood have pink heads now.  There are drifts of wild garlic everywhere, with green buds but no flowers yet.  I'm following a narrow path through the garlic and along the very edge of the wood, looking down into the combe below.  It turns out to be an animal path which disappears underneath a barbed-wire fence and clearly continues downwards into the garlic-coated combe. There are strands of animal hair caught in the fence but too high up to belong to any animal which shimmied underneath it.  The arms of the big trees make odd-shaped frames for sunlit glimpses of the opposite side of the valley.

Leaving the wood behind, I rejoin the footpath and cross the dew-drenched field through an area which the map calls 'Purgatory'.  Why, I wonder?  And is it connected with the 'Paradise' valley near Painswick, and the fact that Elcombe was originally 'Hell Combe'?  It isn't at all purgatorial today, though I imagine in winter wind and weather it could be a bit grim up here.  The footpath skirts an attractive stone house on two sides, then up a short flight of steps past a tiny stone building with oriel windows like a miniature chapel or the housing for a sacred well.  (As far as I can see, it's neither.)  In the garden of the house, a horse chestnut tree has brand-new leaves hanging limp, like recently-hatched butterflies waiting for their wings to dry.

Green shoot patterns, Fennell's Farm
Now up onto Bisley Road via a path past Fennell's Farm, one of the farms on the edge of the valley which you can only see from other edges.  There's a long view out over the southern end of the valley to a straggle of housing which might be Uplands or might even be the other side of the Painswick Valley - I can't tell - and beyond that to the Severn.  The Fennell's Farm buildings really are right on the edge, and the land behind them is pancake-flat and definitely part of the plain that looks towards Bisley.  The low sunlight catches the new green shoots of some crop planted in the fields and makes stark patterns of the gaps between the planted rows.

Bisley Road is busy with the beginning of rush hour traffic but I don't have to walk far along it before turning left into Daw's Lane, which is a green track flanked by gnarled sort of trees which give it an ancient air.  I suspect it is old, since its name appears on the OS map.  Like the stream, its trees provide windows onto the outside world - views of the valley on my left and planted fields on my right.  As the track turns towards the north, the views begin to include Slad village.  There are few birds up here - possibly because there's a shotgun birdscarer somewhere nearby which goes off startlingly at regular intervals.

Daw's Lane
Abruptly, Daw's Lane dwindles from a broad track to a winding path and the trees overhanging become lower and more bent as though auditioning for roles in Macbeth.  Beyond a gate, it has definitely become a footpath, though still lined by trees.  From here it continues on to the Catswood road, but I'm late for a rendezvous with my puppy and her Alpha Dog, so I step through the trees and into the field at my left, which I judge to be level with the top of Trantershill Plantation, and pick up the lower footpath going back towards Swifts Hill.

Unexpectedly, I come across a small but determined stream running across the path and over the edge of the hill down into the wood.  I don't remember seeing it last time I was here, but that was a year or so ago - I'm wondering if it's part of the water source that becomes the stream which runs down the crease of the valley at Elcombe.  After last summer and winter, all such springs and streams are running at full pitch, I would think.

It's surprisingly hard to tell exactly where I am as I skirt the top of the woods - this is an edge, all right, but it's impossible to see into the valley from here to judge how far along I've come.  I'm slightly relieved to recognise the field above Swifts where I was trying to photograph daisies earlier.  Some of them have opened their eyes now, but not many - it's still perishing cold.  Now as I walk back along the side of the hill, the sun is picking up the tops of all the trees in Abbey Wood and the one or two which have already turned green stand out starkly.  Below, the valley has already filled up with sunshine.  From there it's but a hop, skip and jump (not literally) to the hill, where I'm just in time to disrupt a puppy training session.



Thursday 14 March 2013

Walk 36: From rim to rim - the drovers' road from Bulls Cross to Stroud

This is one of those 'grab the sunshine while you can' days - a little sunny blip in an expanse of damp, cold grey.  An intimation of a somewhat delayed spring.  I'm at Bull's Cross,aiming to walk as much of the north-western edge of the valley as feasible, following part of what was once the old drovers' road from Birdlip to Stroud, before the main B4070 was opened in the 18th century. It starts at the top of the ridge in Frith Wood, runs parallel to the brook and clings to the contour for most of its length before diving down into Stroud via Uplands.  That makes it as near to a straight edge as you'll find anywhere in this valley, and my best chance to get a perspective from a higher angle.  Gosh, a walk full of long views rather than close-up detail.  How Will I manage?

Bull's Cross has changed in significant ways since I was last here to walk in Frith Wood.  For one thing, it has acquired a bull.  Also a cow and some calves.  There is a small scrub-clogged triangle of land between the end of Wick Street and the lane which runs to Sheepscombe which I think is owned or managed by Natural England.  It's recently been fenced off and a lot of the scrub shifted and this nuclear herd of cattle introduced to knock it into shape by grazing. This is of course an approved conservation method for encouraging wild flowers and whatnot, so jolly good show, I guess.  It also gives word-obsessed freaks like me great satisfaction.  A bull at Bull's Cross.  Yes!

On a more serious note, Bull's Cross has lost the family who lived here for many months in a caravan.  They were controversially evicted from the scrubby square of land just before the entrance to the GWT reserve - controversially, because in many people's minds they weren't doing any harm.  The ground has now been partly cleared and a new iron bench sits where the caravan used to be.  In a tree by the GWT gate I find a blown hen's egg tied to a scrap of bright red wool, and wonder if it's a last reminder of the former residents.

In Frith Wood, at the dividing of the paths, I take the main and highest track, which is the old road.  We're in that time of year when the birds seem to be taking it in turns to sing; a green woodpecker gives way to a great tit, and somewhere in the background a greater spotted woodpecker is drumming.  The colours of the wood are still the brown and buff of winter, until I veer off the path and come upon a patch of bright green unidentified ground cover and some clumps of short, rather hesitant daffodils.  The ground underfoot is so padded with accumulation of beech leaves that it's like walking on a mattress.  The track, on the other hand, is like trudging through treacle; being a bridle path, it's deep in churned-up mud as usual.

Here's the thing about edges and views: it's almost impossible to predict in advance where you're going to get views from and what you're going to be able to see, even with the aid of a map.  In practice, very small changes in the landscape - the positioning of a tree, a fold in the ground - can make all the difference.  Frith Wood sits high above Slad, but because of the roll of the ground and the depth of the wood, there are almost no views into Slad Valley to be had, except from the bottom edge of the wood.  What you do get are occasional tiny windows - portholes, more like - onto the Painswick Valley.

An outburst of small-bird fussing draws my attention to one of the wood's bigger trees and I spot a small, pretty, brownish-and-white, speckle-spotted bird trotting up and down the tree trunk.  Tree creeper, I think. He's clearly visible against the trunk in my binoculars but manages to become a silhouette against the sky by the time I've got the camera in position.  Ho hum.

Arriving at a quarry throws me into a temporary panic, assuming that I've missed the division of the paths and ended up in the Wrong Trouser (see previous blogs on the trouser-shaped nature of Frith Wood). Frith Wood always has this disorientating effect on me, no matter how hard I try to keep a grip on where I am.  I'm off the path and forging through the wood in an attempt to rectify the situation before it occurs to me that there is more than one quarry along here.  Going off the path is always a good thing, though, because I discover new things, such as a tree studded with tiny green buds, just about to burst into leaf, and several interesting holes.  I tear myself away from these with difficulty: this is supposed to be an Edges walk, not an Interesting Holes walk.  Arriving at a field edge causes a another spasm of navigational uncertainty until I decide, because it slopes uphill, that it must be the Crotch Field (i.e. the one between the two trousers) which is effectively the top of the hill.  Some milk-white cattle eye me dubiously across the boundary.  This may be the top of the hill, but all I can actually see is wood and field.

Not until I reach the edge of the wood and step out into the open can I confirm that I'm where I thought I was - now one of my favourite paths in the valley.  In fact, it's two paths, running parallel for the length of one field, separated by about 6 feet of space, a stone wall and some trees. What the history behind this curious arrangement is, I don't know.  I choose the left-hand path, and a sweeping view begins to open out beside me. It's an unusual, even unfamiliar view of the valley, because it includes the whole upper rim of the top end of the valley, all the way up to the Bisley plain, the part which from lower perspectives is mostly hidden by the woods.  The more familiar parts of the valley are now obscured by the curve  of the hill, which bellies out before it slopes down.  So this is a view from one edge to another edge.  As I walk on, more and more of the northern end of the valley unfolds across my left shoulder.  I can see the houses in the Driftcombe side valley, including Sydenhams, a lovely old medieval house right at its apex, and farm buildings on the very top edge of the eastern slope, none of which are visible from my usual viewpoints lower down.

Northern rim panorama

Now I can just see Down Farm and the racing stables and Down Mound.  I'm used to thinking of these landmarks as high up in the valley, but from here it's obvious how much more valley there is above them.  Perspective is all.  The colours of the valley are all soft beiges and buffs and earths, the still-winter trees like patches of moth-eaten carpet from up here, ice-blue shadows drifting across the whole from pale clouds in a turquoise sky.

This path has good associations for me because I remember walking it one sunny day a few weeks before we actually moved into the valley, looking out across this view and thinking 'Soon this is going to be home'.  That felt good, and still does.

Intriguing bark
At the end of the field, the path I'm on does a dog-leg around a small plantation of beech and birch trees, evidently planted a-purpose because in straight lines.  Amongst them are some intriguing bark patterns so I'm distracted from distance back to detail for a while.  Beyond here is a path off to the left dropping sharply down towards the village and the war memorial, but the continuation of my path goes straight ahead, now a wide farm track with daffodils in the verges and a rough-cut hedge flanking it, from which a chaffinch is serenading me.  For a while, the view of the valley disappears behind a farm barn and I'm walking under a pair of magnificent and multi-trunked trees.

Beyond here, the path dips down and the leafless hedge on my left rises up so that I can only see the opposite hills as a wavering line through an intricate network of twigs. In the middle of the net is a knot, a last-year's nest, in front of a splash of colour which is a glimpse of a white cow and a brown cow in the field next door. How is it, I wonder, that my eyes can apparently focus on the cows, and the net of twigs, at the same time?  When asked to do the same, the camera throws up its hands in horror.  This hedgerow, by the way, is at least six feet deep, and I can hear animal-ish shifting sounds deep in its base.  It could be just a large bird, but it reminds me that hedgerows are said to be important as travel routes for wildlife.  So here am I on a human path walking beside a sort of pedestrian subway for non-humans.

Worgan's Farm looms up on my right hand, a substantial farmhouse and other buildings.  The valley view is lost behind Worgan's Wood, which I last saw in a snowstorm.  Now there are robins singing nearby and the querulous sounds of geese.  The farm stands at the head of Folly Lane, which is what the drovers' road has now become. Beyond the farm and the wood, the road is flanked by a single line of still-leafless trees on both sides, their branches forming a loose cat's-cradle through which the valley view is visible again, now with bright spring-green amongst the buffs and beiges as the sun lights up patches of pasture.  The earlier, unobscured view was breathtaking, but there's also something rather appealing about these partial, half-glimpsed views through winter trees, a sort of bonus feature only available at this season of the year.

Beyond Folly Acres, the trees fall away and with them their secret views.  A whole new view opens out quite dramatically.  I can now see the whole of the southern end of the valley, from Stroud Slad Farm to Parliament Street in Stroud.  And I can also see that quite a lot goes on above the woods which from my normal haunts look like the skyline.  Perspective again - the strata of woods which look so deep and dominant from below become narrow and compressed from up here, and a whole new top layer of fields and farm buildings with a fringe of quite different woods is revealed.  And beyond them, the edge of another valley altogether.

Very prominant in this new view are Baxter's Fields, the three fields below Summer Street on which someone is proposing to build 140 houses.  The developer argues that these fields are part of Stroud.  From up here, they are quite clearly part of the green 'finger' that the Slad Valley becomes as it grows narrower, and into which the grey tentacles of Stroud reach out - tentatively as yet, but this proposal could change that.  If they are built on, Stroud will suddenly be half of this view, not a relatively small part of it.

Slice of valley
My mind's eye is caught by this image of the valley in layers, like a cake.  And what I get when I take photos of this vast view is slices of the cake. There's a particularly good slice in front of me; layers of emerald green fields, black spidery trees at the skyline, purple-buff woods and Stroud Slad Farm sitting like a pale fossil in the middle of the strata, giving it a tiny flash of turquoise where a tarpaulin covers one of the farm roofs. In the foreground is a tall and perfectly-shaped lone tree.  I perch uncomfortably on a stone to draw this slice of valley.

As I continue south, with my chin on my shoulder, more and more of the valley appears behind me.   Swifts Hill becomes increasingly prominent.  Below me on this side, the hill is becoming steeper, so I can now see more of the lower slopes on the far side. I'm approaching Wickridge Farm, and drawing level with the beginning of Summer Street.  There are horses in the fields next to the road, grazing against an incongruous background of houses; the foreground of my view is all countryside, the background all town.

The road begins to slope downhill sharply.  Is the widest view so far? I can now see from the furthest edge of Elcombe all the way to Stroud.  This walk is giving me an entirely different perspective on the valley.  My eye is drawn to different points, focusing on unexpected areas.  Even Swifts Hill looks different, no longer a hill, in fact, but just a promontory from the ridge, with more hills behind.  I'm seeing things I've never noticed before, like a bright yellow castellated house on the skyline opposite.  Where and what is that?

On my right, I'm now passing a patch of woodland which I recently discovered has been bought by a group of local families as a community woodland. A little detour into this wood reveals signs of the new management - new trees planted, fallen trees removed, or turned into groups of stump-stools and plank-benches for picnics and pow-wows. New attractively winding footpaths. Somewhere in the copse a woodpecker is drumming, and as I watch, a buzzard launches himself upward from one of the larger trees.  On the upper edge of the wood is a 'window' onto the valley in which town and country are beautifully blended.  Baxter's Fields are slap in the middle of the view - if they go, it will be mainly a view of town.

Back on the road again, the view just goes on and on.  I'm not sure there's anywhere else in the valley from which you can see Swifts Hill and Summer Street quite so clearly at one and the same time, because lower down, the bend of the valley gets in the way.

Southern rim below Swifts Hill


Then, quite suddenly, the road curves round, the view disappears, the town rises up to meet me, and I'm looking at gardens and backs of houses on the top level of Uplands.  And people are coming up to meet me too - the first I've seen since I left the village - in the shape of a couple of families with kids in multi-coloured wellies, possibly on their way to the community woodland.  Along with the houses there are house sparrows, another thing which tells me I'm in the town; we don't get many sparrows in the valley - I reckon the Great Tits push them out.  But here there is a big community of them, all chi-iking away in the hedge next to me.

I've reached the end of Folly Lane, at its junction with Peghouse Rise, and find myself looking right out of the valley altogether, southwards towards the Severn, a tiny silver thread between blue distant hills.

Peghouse Rise is definitely part of the town, but the country is its backdrop and frontdrop too.  The countryside is very close, looming up just across the valley, the view changing at every corner in the road.  Here, the houses still feel very new, plonked down upon the land, not yet part of it.  It will take a few tens of years before they bed down into the valley like the older settlements.

I've come to the end of my 'edge' walk, but the return walk back along the main road is unexpectedly interesting.  Walking along the road is quite different from travelling along it in the car.  I see things I don't normally notice.  Such as how at this point the fields and the town are like interlocking fingers, evenly balanced.  Such as how attractive Wade's Farmhouse is, with its mellow old stonework (you can't even see it from the car).  Such as the spring that tumbles off the fields below the farm, disappears under the road and becomes one of the tributaries that I recorded when I was walking along the stream.

I've been ignoring the main road up to now, because it's rather an obvious way to travel into the valley and I've been looking for the less obvious.  But it is an integral part of the valley, and, I now discover that if you are on foot, and can ignore the traffic, it is a surprisingly beautiful way to enter the valley.  Suddenly I realise why Uplanders enjoy walking along here to the pub.  As I leave the houses  behind, the road curving away in front of me like my own private balcony, the valley is laid out before my eyes, layer on layer, humps and hollows, fields and woods,  Swifts Hill rearing up before me, pale blue smoke drifting across from a distant bonfire.  This road too is an edge, in its way.



It's been a revelation, this walk, the first time I've walked the length of the drover's road.  I had not realised how different the valley would look from this high angle, how much there was to stretch the eyes.












Friday 15 February 2013

Walk 35: A Wild Wood - Trantershill Plantation

A day to remember, and not just because it's my husband's 50th birthday.  For one thing, it's a beautiful sunny morning with brilliantly blue skies - entirely different weather from last week when I was walking through Worgan's Wood in driving snow.  I'm walking up the lane past Swifts Hill towards Elcombe in order to visit a rather special piece of woodland.  Trantershill Plantation, as it's named on the map, belonged to our local famous author Laurie Lee, and I've been given permission to walk in it by his widow and daughter.  As well as exploring on my own account, I'm also documenting the present state of things in the wood for future comparison, because things are about to change for Trantershill Plantation. The Lee family have offered it to Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust as a way of preserving it for the future, and we recently heard that the money to buy it has been raised, very largely by public subscription, though the sale hasn't gone through yet.  GWT will join it up with the Elliot Nature Reserve on Swifts Hill and open it to the public, which is great.  They will also be managing it, which as it hasn't been actively managed for a long time, means it will start to look different.  So this is a good time for me to explore it and take photos of how it is now.

There's a robin singing at me from the hedge as I pass under Swifts Hill, and in fact there's quite a bit of birdsong around today, unlike last week when I could hear nothing but the odd rook or jackdaw and the swish of falling snow.  The birds sound as if they are hoping it's about to be spring.

Trantershill plantation is the bit of woodland that runs between Swifts Hill and Elcombe and borders on the Elcombe road.  My immediate problem is that there are currently no paths in this wood, and no official way in.  It's not fenced by the road, but the bank is steep and the hill the wood is on is steeper.  So I've decided to walk up the track which runs between the wood and the Swifts Hill quarry and see if I can get in at the top of the wood, then work my way back down the hill.

Beech-roofed track
Unlike Worgan's Wood, I've been aware of this bit of woodland for a long time because I walk up this track at least once a week, often peering into the wood to see if that rustling noise I heard was a squirrel or something more interesting, and I've occasionally spotted deer in there. Like so many areas in the valley, what you can mainly see as you look into the heart of the wood is a lot of smallish, slim, presumably young trees.  But there is a single row of beautiful old beeches along the boundary here which lean out over the track, roofing it with arches of branches. Only last week, I was photographing them outlined in snow.

Pausing to record the birdsong in the wood, my attention is caught by a flash of movement.  A little bird is flipping in and out of the small trees.  After a brief struggle with the binoculars I discover to my delight that it's a goldcrest, a stunning little bird whose like I've only seen once before.  That time it was a feisty little mite sitting in a fir tree in my garden objecting loudly to my presence so close to his or her nest.

The wood is fenced off from the track with both barbed wire and chicken wire and it takes some ingenuity to get in.  The boundary at the top of the hill is marked by the remains of an old Cotswold stone wall; at a point where there is more wall and less wire, I'm able to scramble over its tumbled stones.  The ground beneath my feet is soft and bronzed with long accumulation of leaf litter and punctuated by new shoots, turned a startling fluorescent green by low sunshine.  The stones of the old wall are covered in moss, which with the sun shining through it, gives each stone a bright green furry halo.  The wood itself is all shadow torn into sharp strips by bars of sunlight and heavily draped in ivy.  There is a clutch of small birds darting from tree to tree, but so reduced to silhouettes by the high-contrast light that I can only make a guess at them being long-tailed tits.

The slope is very steep here and I make my way somewhat crabwise along the contour, hugging the top edge of the wood, then cautiously begin to descend into its heart. This feels very much like an expedition of discovery, off all the beaten tracks.  I have to pick my way, avoiding contour-hugging tree roots and ducking under grasping branches, sliding in the leaf litter.

There are signs of other inhabitants - squashy grenades of droppings suggest deer; large and industriously excavated holes between tree roots suggest badger or fox or both.  In a perfectly round basin-shaped hollow I find a series of empty snail shells and one live but hibernating snail.  Above me on a beech tree are a pair of nuthatches, which stay in view long enough to be identified but vanish as soon as I produce the camera.  I really think there's something in this theory that as soon as you turn a direct gaze on a bird, even at a distance, it becomes aware of your interest and gets uncomfortable.

Ivy arch
The trees are the biggest source of interest.  They seem to be growing in clumps of different species, including some that I've not seen much of elsewhere in the valley.  Here a clump of multi-stemmed hazels, there a clump of young beech trees, over there a clutch of ash.  In the middle of the wood is a trio of what I'm pretty sure are yews, growing every which way and forming a veritable cats-cradle of branches.  And here's a type of sapling or shrub I remember seeing in Detcombe Wood, whose bark half peels off in thin, translucent wings which glow a fiery orange in the sunshine, almost like stained glass.  Ivy grows everywhere in shaggy masses or in intricate weaves.  One sapling catches my attention - its largest and lowest branch has broken off, but its jacket of woven ivy has not broken but only bent over, creating a perfect arch, with trailing ivy stems brushing the ground, so that the whole thing looks like a woman bending over to wash her hair.

By a tree stump covered in vivid emerald moss I discover a cluster of Jelly-Ear fungus on a fallen branch.  I know that's what is is because it was (satisfyingly) featured as Something to Look Out For in this month's BBC Wildlife magazine.  On the underside of the branch are more of them, a larger one looking quite worryingly like a human ear and two tiny ones looking like cute baby ears.  (Which shows how this project as changed me - two years ago, the idea of finding fungi in any way cute would have seemed bizarre.)  On one of the larger ash trees, I find a colony of another curious fungus which looks a little like a chunk of someone's brain and seems to be pinky-brown when it's new, turning shiny black as it grows older and larger.

Jelly-Ear fungus
I'm doing my usual thing of looking for the detail, getting caught up in the intricacies of fungi and deer poo.  Let's pull back for a moment, to the wider scale.  This is not only a wood, it's also an edge - from here, through the network of trees, I can also just see the other side of the valley, a distant, parallel skyline of woods and fields, and catch glimpses of the village of Slad.  All this won't be visible later in the year, of course, when the trees are in leaf.

'This place is basically a fascinating mess' I tell the sound recorder.  Fallen wood tangles with swathes of ivy and trails of creeper, some of them as thick as my wrist. Many of the trees appear to be wearing skirts of thick holly or flounces of bramble. The further into the wood I go, the more intrepid this adventure becomes.  The hillside seems to be growing steeper and at every step I'm in danger of starting an inexorable slide downhill in a welter of leaves. In places, I have to crouch down in order to move around safely.  Tree roots become more obvious, taking up more of the ground, spreading wider; even the trees are having to hold on more tightly. Under a spreading beech I find the first sign of human activity - a heap of multi-coloured plastic, so weathered as to be unidentifiable.  My first thought is that it's the remains of an airbed, but anyone trying to sleep here would (a) need a seatbelt and (b) would suffer an acute rush of blood to the feet.

I'm trying to move diagonally across the wood from one corner to the other, but it's pretty hit or miss.  About halfway down the slope, running along the contour, I find the first path I've seen - an animal path, this, since it ducks under branches and bushes that are definitely well below human height, but it offers some hope of easier walking.  As I approach the Elcombe end of the wood, it lightens up, and it's clear that some of the underbrush and trees have been removed.  So I may be on the boundary with the wood next door, which belongs to someone else, though there's no fence to indicate this.  Through the breaks in the trees, there are tantalising glimpses of the hamlet of Elcombe, round the corner of the hill.  Turning to scan the hillside above me, I catch sight of a deer, a young stag by the look of him, with small, unbranched antlers still covered in velvet, watching me from the shelter of the trees .  He hangs around long enough to be photographed before deciding I might be dangerous and dashing away up the hillside.  It's so much easier when you have four feet.

The animal path leads to a human path, which zigzags up the hill, and this leads to a stream, which seems to be running from the apex of the Elcombe side valley.  It may not be here all the time, since it isn't running in a bed but spread out over the ground. Ferns and other damp-loving plants are growing in and round it.  I think I may be trespassing now, but I can't resist going a little higher to see where the stream comes from.  It appears to be coming down right from the ridge above, but beyond here the hillside is just too steep to think of following it up.  There is a little waterfall where the stream leaps from the hill onto the path.  And there is a long view down between walls of trees, the stream a silvery arrowhead pointing to a distant glimpse of the sunny valley.

The stream has distracted me for too long.  I am about to be late for a 50th birthday lunch.  Time to go back.  I make my way rather excitingly as straight down the hill as obstacles and safety allow and the hillside ejects me smartly over the bank and onto the Elcombe road with rather more speed and less elegance than I was hoping for. As the noise of my exit dies away, I can hear a woodpecker somewhere in the distance.  Woodland drums, seeing me off the premises.

Now I'm walking back along the road, scanning the lower edge of the wood.  Here too, there is a single row of really large beeches marking the boundary, and counterparts on the other side of the road, along the edge of the fields.  They give the road a grandeur beyond its aspirations. This road is also an edge, with tree-windows giving views across green fields to Slad and the woods on the other side of the valley.


I have heard Trantershill Plantation described as 'ancient woodland' - I'm not sure how true that really is now, since it looks to me as if all but the few large trees are relatively new growth.  But in another sense, it does feel old, abandoned, a place which humans have ignored long enough for it to forget them.  A wild place, dark and untidy.  I could see the contrast with the far end of the wood which people are still managing, where undergrowth and fallen wood have been removed and gaps opened between the trees, letting in light.  Pleasanter to walk in, but less mysterious, less 'other'.  It will be interesting to see what Trantershill becomes in its new incarnation as a Wildlife Trust reserve.  I will come back in a few months, I think, to see.

Afterword:  Trantershill Plantation was officially opened to the public as Laurie Lee Wood, the newest Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust nature reserve, on 26 June 2013.

Google map of this walk