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.

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.

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.

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

Walk 31: One Trouser is Better than No Walk - Frith Wood (1)

Today I'm resuming my valley walks after quite a gap.  I've been away, and the weather has been diabolical, with continuous rain and flooding all over the county including our lane, reminding me (for the third time in five years) that our little stream is not always the tame beast it seems to be.

I wasn't planning on a walk this morning, and I have somewhere else to be in an hour and a half, but currently we have sunshine, and you take that when and where you find it at the moment.  So I'm off to see how much of Frith Wood I can explore in an hour and a half.

Frith Wood, aka Morley-Penistan Nature Reserve, really deserves longer than that.  It's both a wood and an edge, being right on the ridge of the hill between the Slad and Painswick valleys and spilling down the slope on the Slad side.  At the entrance to the wood it really does feel like an edge, because through the network of branches you can see right down into Painswick village on one side and into the upper end of our valley on the other.  It has for a long time been one of my favourite views of Painswick and its church.

The approach to the woods is lovely; the ground is a brown-bronze carpet of wet beech leaves, and where the leaves are scuffed up, a very low sun shining through them turns their edges to glints of translucent gold.  I'm walking almost straight into the sun and half-blinded, which gives everything a mysterious, hyper-real feeling, including a tall stone, splendidly craggy with moss and lichen-covered, illuminated by a single shaft of sunlight.  If looks were all, it could be an ancient standing stone, but it isn't, of course.  Closer examination reveals it's probably an old gatepost.

Decision time - I'm now at the point where two main paths separate.  Frith wood is curiously shaped like a pair of trousers with a gap in the middle and one leg shorter than the other.  And like the famous Trousers of Time, once you've committed yourself to one trouser leg, you can't get across to the other one.  I decide to stay at the top of the ridge on what, according to the reserve leaflet, used to be the old drover's road, because that seems more 'edgy'.  As in 'along the edge', let me point out, not as in 'exciting' - I'm not expecting excitement this morning.

What with the weather and being away for a fortnight, I seem to have missed out on my dose of autumn colour this year.  I was hoping to catch the last of it today, but almost all the leaves have gone in the rains.  Still, there are marvellous things about the period after the leaves too.  It makes the few remaining leaves more vivid, and with the sun behind them, as now, you get the stark shapes of the trees, the whole structural sense of the wood. As I've said before, it's like the pillars of a cathedral or (I've just come back from Egypt) the columns in a great temple.  Your eyes are dragged inexorably upwards.  Not that I can see any trees with the circumference of the pillars at Karnak... This is supposed to be ancient woodland, which is why it's reserve, but like so much of the valley, most of the trees around here are quite small, with just a few large ones here and there.

Here's the thing about Frith Wood.  Every time I come here, I get slightly lost.  I don't know what it is about these paths, but they lead you astray.  I am no longer on the drover's road, and I'm not sure how it happened.  I rather think I'm on the next path down the hill, but I'll find out eventually.  Coming to another fork in the path I choose the right hand one for no better reason than that there's more sunshine in that direction.  It's very quiet and still.  A buzzard flaps heavily away from me from one of the trees ahead.  The occasional leaf flutters down.  Everything is wet and gleaming with networks of fine drops on strands of spiders web.  There's that lovely feeling you get after the rain finally stops and everything takes a deep breath.  The paths are ankle deep in mud but that's pretty normal, this being one of the more popular areas in the valley for walkers, especially dog walkers, and riders.  Can't you just tell that it's been a very wet year - late in the season though it is, everything is green and damp and covered in moss.

Sunlight edges the leaves and branches in a way which always makes me want to reach for the camera - the results are rarely what I hoped for but hope springs eternal.  It's so fascinating what light does.  As I walk along with the sun still almost head-on, flickering through the endless small trees on my left, I feel as though I'm inside a zoetrope (which is a thing the Victorians had, a sort of drum with slots in it and a series of images inside; rotate the drum and look through the slots and you get a flickering sense of movement, like a very old and battered film).  At another choice of paths I keep going uphill, hoping to rejoin the drover's road at some point.

I came here with Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust earlier in the year on a volunteer day hunting for wintergreen, a plant which according to the Nature Reserve leaflet is supposed to live here but hasn't been seen for some years.  We didn't see it, either, so the leaflet will have to be revised.  The theory is that the deer may have eaten it to extinction, but who knows?  It was a privilege to wander around with experts, though, and be shown tiny spiders on the trunks of the trees, and unexpected fungi.  I am reminded of this now, spotting tiny white fungi on one of the trees, which I haven't seen before.  Not that that's anything to get excited about - the list of fungi I haven't seen before would fill a field or two.  Still, it's good to be reminded to change perspective, to look up close, and to look up high, rather than sticking at my normal human five foot up and ten yards ahead sort of vision.

I've come to the gusset of the trousers now, where the two legs are separated by a field, and follow the upper, and shorter leg.  The other thing I learned from GWT was that Frith Wood suffered badly in the hurricane winds of 1987, which is one reason why there are so few big trees in the wood.  That's particularly obvious here, where the wood slopes steeply away from me down towards Painswick.  The path dips downwards, becoming a mere shelf in the hill, and there are great humps and bumps all over the place which, on closer inspection, could well be the remains of the rootballs of big fallen trees. These are old, but here's a big fallen tree, still intact, which looks as though it came down more recently.  Not last night, though, despite us having exciting winds, possibly the tail end of Hurricane Sandy, because it's covered in a drift of beech leaves.

Hurricane damage?

Apart from that, the leaflet doesn't have much to say about this leg of the trousers, as though not much goes on here, and it does have a slightly abandoned air. But I bet it's full of non-human activity - looks like it could be a good corridor for animals, and just as I'm thinking this, here's a big hole underneath one of the ex-tree-humps which looks large enough for rabbits or even foxes.  I like the thought that areas we can't find much to say about because humans touch them only lightly are likely to be buzzing with other life.
The path is rapidly dwindling in size and confidence and I suspect I'm coming to the end of the reserve.  Suddenly the way is half barred by holly bushes and undergrowth; the path seems to continue, which suggests it's an animal path at this point, so I push through, and come upon a stand of very big and singularly impressive beech trees, which makes me glad I braved the holly prickles.  Imagine the whole wood being full of such trees.  They cling to the edge of hill, as do I, the path having lost even its shelf now.  Not having massive roots, I go more carefully from now on, slipping in drifts of beech leaves.  A remnant of iron fence on the ground suggests a possible boundary, so I turn parallel with it and make my way downhill.  Suddenly I find myself on a real edge, the edge of a huge bowl-shaped quarry, long abandoned and overgrown, but still essentially a great big hole in the landscape.  The bit I'm standing on is quite scarily undercut and there are trees growing right on the edge, roots clinging on for dear life.  Lots of ferns are growing in the bowl, but I'm really not going close to the edge to look over.  I had no idea this was here, and wonder if I'm still in the reserve, though there's been no obvious boundary.

My particular trouser of time is more of a pair of shorts this morning so I have to retrace my steps now, and save the other trouser for another dry day (assuming there is one, which seems doubtful at the moment).  Still, it's been good to get out, and to wander in a part of the wood which doesn't feel as though it has that many human visitors.  The sun is now behind me and lighting up the path ahead of me, catching the edges of turned-up beech leaves, so that they glow like the lights on the floor of a plane, guiding my feet to the exit.  And here is a lone beech sapling with lots of leaves still clinging to its branches and the sun shining through them - my own small fix of late autumn colour.

Walk 30: A Wood of Puzzles - the Wood of Remembrance

Wild Clematis

It's a glorious sunny morning of early autumn, with the first light frost of this end of the year still melting off the leaves.  I'm in the Wood of Remembrance, a little plot of woodland off the northern end of the Slad Road, nestling under the eaves of Frith Wood, and this is the first of what I'm thinking of as my 'edges, woods and settlements' walks, branching away from the two brooks into the rest of the valley. I've always been vaguely aware of this little wood, but thought it was just a Woodland Trust area.  That's true, in the sense, that the Woodland Trust own and care for it, but according to the notice outside the stile which gives access from the road, it's more than that.  It was planted in spring 1981 'on behalf of readers of 'This England', in memory of their loved ones.'  I've tried to find out what the back story is for this, but so far without success.  Whose idea was it, and why?  Who are those remembered?  Were they local, and if not, then why here?

Beside the stile is a goodly display of hawthorn covered in bright red haws, and lots of wild clematis covered in its furry-spider fruits.  There's also red clover, cow parsley or one of its analogues, and wild marjoram.  Suddenly, everything is beginning to look quite autumnal.

Wild Carrot seed head

I've never been in this wood, which is why I wanted to make it my first wood walk in this project, and I'm quite excited to be exploring it.  I start off along the a small grassy path to the left, following the marjoram-and-clematis-covered bank.  ('Small' is due to become an over-used word on this walk.)  To my right, the wood slopes steeply uphill. The planting is only 31 years old, so of course, none of the trees are very large.  Here, it seems to be mainly birches and hawthorn, standing in grass.  There's lots of wild carrot (which I now recognise, since seeing it in church field), both flowers and also the seedheads in various stages from open to completely folded up.  They are the most extraordinary structures, and probably the most beautiful seedheads I've yet seen.  I'm always drawn to seedheads, by what's left when the flower has gone, which often seems more interesting in terms of shape and construction than the flower itself.  Here's another complex seedhead, with a few purple flowerlets just hanging on (wild basil, I've since discovered), and scabious, a flower I love, which also has a distinctive seedhead.

The weather can be any old way at this time of year, but an infallible sign that autumn is on its way is a sudden increase in spiders' webs in the garden.  (Why is that?)  There are plenty of them here - the scabious seedhead I've just been photographing is anchored the ground on both sides by guyropes of spider silk, and there are enormous webs floating in the long grass, shining with melted frost, like fallen clouds.

Sunlight on tree trunks

The path leads me out of the sunshine into a quite different sort of woodland.  No grass here - I'm walking on last year's leaves and the trees are planted quite close together.  Bits of the stuff they use to wrap the trunks of saplings in to stop the deer eating them are scattered about the place, and someone has been collecting dead wood into a pile.  Low sun is shining into this bit from the side and lighting up some very beautiful, straight young trees planted on an approximate grid pattern.  Their slim trunks are tastefully decorated with pastel spots.  Some are beeches, and some are clearly not (see how my tree identification skills have improved!), but they all have spots, so super-sleuth Amanda concludes that the pretty spottiness is due to lichens or similar and not a characteristic of the bark. What are these other trees, though?  I feel I should know them, but can't put my finger on what they are, like meeting a vaguely familiar face out of context.

Here's another tree puzzle.  This is a young oak tree, but it's just a trunk, with no proper branches.  The leaves are growing straight out of the trunk on slender twiglets.  I don't think I've ever seen that before.

Thre's almost nothing growing on the floor here, where the sunlight is heavily filtered by the trees, but just a little further up, there's a glade with no trees, caused (it appears) by the removal of a big tree whose stump remains in the middle, and here there are nettles and all manner of other green things.  The dense stems of something undergrowth-ish are covered in snails.  The path leads me higher still into yet another different area of planting, ash and beech this time I think, though they look pretty similar at this age, both young, slim and smooth.  You have to get quite close to the bark to see a difference.

Eye marks

Many of these young trees have clear eye-shapes at various points on their trunks, where lower branches have come off.  They remind me of the birch forests I saw on a trip to Canada, where this is such a strong feature that it finds its way into Native American art.  Here, these trees have almost no lower branches, all their leaf and branch is at the top.  Some have no branches for 30 feet or so, which makes you very aware of their trunks, especially when decorated with lichens, or the occasional very handsome snail.

A large bird flits through the wood close by me on silent wings.  It could have been just a rook or crow because it went by too fast for me to see it properly, but that stealthy flight makes me think of a bird of prey.

I've now reached the upper part of the wood, under the eaves of Frith Wood, and it's different again.  The trees planted here mostly seem to branch at hip-height into 2 or 3 trunks, and have rugged bark, liberally sprinkled with snails.  No mixing these trees up with ash or beech saplings.  They are planted in strict lines, a practice I disapprove of in theory, but visually there's something rather lovely about it in this place.  It accentuates what I think of as the 'tree cathedral' effect, emphasising the structural nature of the trees, creating patterns and lines of sight for your eye to follow, corridors to walk along.  It doesn't work with conifers, though, because they are too dark and heavy.  And in fact, when the sun goes in, as it has just done, the effect disappears with the loss of light and shade.  Now the wood feels dark and slightly sinister.

The path brings me to the western edge of the wood and suddenly I'm looking into gardens, bright with bean flowers and sweet peas.  There is a grassy ride here, running between this part of the wood and the next part, where the trees seem better grown though not much taller.  This may be because they all have lots of branches at a low level, despite being planted just as close as the others, if not more so.  So here's  mystery: why have these young trees kept their lower branches while the ash and beech saplings in the other part of the wood lost them?  The branches were pulled off or fell off, I think, because otherwise the eye shapes wouldn't be there, so - eaten by deer?  And why not these?  I think these may be hazels, with their straight, slim, multi-trunks branching out at angles like a fan.  Perhaps deer don't like hazel?  The trees flanking the ride have really long, sweeping branches on that side, where there's no competition from other trees, and I have to duck underneath them.

My eye is caught by a little bug on a trunk with a brightly-shining bronze back, and in pausing to examine him, I notice that some of these trees have had their bark eaten from the ground upwards for about a foot, which seems odd.  It's not exactly eye-height for a deer, and I don't see squirrels hanging about on the ground.  Another puzzle.  There is nothing much on the ground here, except small nettles, ground elder and last year's leaves.

The next section of trees are young ash trees and we're back to saplings with hardly any branches in the first 20 feet, and all the leaf at the top.  And they are growing in grass - possibly because there are more gaps in the canopy so more sun is reaching the ground. The path reaches a fence and a stile leading into what is clearly Frith Wood, mature trees dwarfing the ones I've been walking through, so this is the northern edge of this wood.

Everything in the Wood of Remembrance has a toytown feel about it - the trees are small, and the paths are small, like a wood made for hobbits.  I turn back to follow another hobbit-path towards the middle of the wood and out into an area of meadow.  On one side is a patch of trees whose leaves have started to turn amongst other trees that have not and the accidental colour combination is startlingly beautiful.  Young ash in pale green with a white trunk, then a single tree glowing orange-gold, a mid-green tree with a dark trunk, behind them the dark greens of the larger trees in Frith Wood, and all against a bright blue sky.  I spend a while trying to capture the colours on paper.

Now I'm walking back through the grassy glade, long grass closely covered in spider's webs at all sorts of heights, which (following the hobbit theme) makes me think of the part of the story where Bilbo is nearly trapped in a ring of giant spider's webs.  I've spoiled a morning's work for several spiders before I find a path between the webs.  Also in evidence here, attached to the long grass, are the cocoons of six-spot burnet moths, which I now recognise, having seen them hatching on Swifts Hill.

It comes to me as I pass out of the glade into a new area of trees that this wood is like a house, a bungalow, with several rooms, each one full of a different selection of trees. Now I'm going into a room of young beeches, planted close together, and bordering on the northern edge of the wood, with someone else's garden, and vociferous dogs, beyond.  Following the edge of the wood, I pass through a chequerboard effect of patches of grass and patches of tree planting, trees planted even closer together here, so that it's difficult to walk between them.  In parts, this place feels like a sort of tree storage facility rather than a proper woodland. The final 'room' is an area of really young trees, too small even for hobbits to walk happily under their branches.  And then I emerge quite unexpectedly behind the Woodland Trust sign on the bank where I started.  From here, I can look across the road and straight up one of the upper fingers of the valley - Driftcombe, I think. This doesn't quite qualify as 'edge', because Frith Wood is above me, but it has an 'edge' feel about it.

I'm not sure what I think about this little wood.  It has presented me with moments of great beauty this morning, but at the same time, I don't feel quite comfortable with it.  I'm not sure of its purpose and its design doesn't make immediate sense.  It's not entirely a man-made plantation, but nor is it a natural woodland.  A puzzle, all round.

Walk 29: Duckling Dramas - Steanbridge Estate (revisit)

After the rain and chill of the beginning of this month, this is more like May should be - a bright, sunny, soon-to-be-hot morning.  I'm revisiting the section of stream that runs through the grounds of Steanbridge House, first visited in July last year.

What's noticeable this morning is how after the earlier rain, everything has grown like topsy.  Everything below tree height is already looking lush, and summery, through some of the trees are not yet completely in leaf.  I'm here to see how different this stretch of brook looks in spring, rather than summer, but in fact I suspect it's going to look remarkably similar, because of this recent spurt of (under)growth.

What is different is the size of the ducklings on the pond.  Last year it was all teenage ducklings, beginning to assume duck-like shapes, this year we've got a mix of older ones and recent balls of fluff.  At first sight of me, the worldly-wise teenagers come dashing across the water, demanding to be fed.

Where the stream goes into Steanbridge House land, there is a bit of an obstruction and a bottleneck, creating a small, fast-flowing rill or race, heading in the direction of Steanbridge House.  As I approach, two of the ball-of-fluff variety of ducklings are swept over it.  Reaching the quieter water below, they immediately start paddling like crazy to get back to the pond, where their mum is calling frantically, but I wonder if they are going to make it, because they are very small and the race is very fast. They struggle in the rush of water, peeting desperately, and I consider trying to help, but can't reach them because of the undergrowth.  Eventually they make it, but now they have to get up the downflow of the stream on the other side of the bridge that carries the footpath, which is even harder work for small paddlers.  Sensibly, they head along the side of the stream where the current is less, and after a few anxious moments I catch a glimpse of them on the other side, heading back to mum (I hope).  So much drama, so early in the morning.

Relieved, I cross the stile and follow the stream into Steanbridge House land.  The grass in the field is knee-high, and on the banks of the stream the nettles are king, but there are also lots of buttercups, red campion, and Large White butterflies. I still feel this could be a place for watervoles, with its steeper banks and deeper, more managed stream. A buzzard is circling overhead, just where I saw one last year, so this is presumably a good buzzard hunting-ground.  No kingfishers today, though.  The stream looks cloudy, or perhaps it's only the angle of the sun that makes it hard to see into the water; something comes up to the surface with a big 'gloop', but I can't see what it is.

The field I'm walking along the edge has large contrasting patches of ordinary green grass and a rough, brown, reedy variety, giving it a piebald look, leavened with a sprinkling of buttercups.  The lake is busy with ducks of various kinds, though not, I think, as many as I saw last time, and there are ducks pottering around on the lawn in front of the house.  A coot is paddling purposefully across the lake towards me with a bit of reed in her beak, disappearing into the reeds by the edge, from which little quacky noises emerge, suggesting a nest. Swallows are swooping low across the water - they've been back for a couple of weeks now.

I see that the meadow on the other side of the house has already been cut, ready for the village Jubilee and Olympics event in 10 days' time.  Further along the lake, I'm hailed by Nigel, one of the ground workers on the estate, who claims to have thought I must be a poacher because I'm wearing a poacher's jacket, though I reckon poachers don't usually sport cameras and sketchbooks and wander in during daylight hours, do they?  Nigel says you'd be surprised, and they do get poachers regularly, though mainly teenage lads.  I straighten him out about my reason for being here and he waxes informative.  He remembers seeing watervoles on the lake when he was younger, though not recently, and kingfishers last year, but it's a bit early for them just now.  He comments on how fast the grass has grown this year, with all the wet - some of our local farmers are making hay already, which is unknown before June.  Apparently the meadow was cut yesterday, and afterwards Nigel saw the buzzards come swooping down, taking advantage of the short grass to catch field voles and other small mammals.  Now, there are ducks in the field, relaxing in the cut grass.  According to Nigel, there's a roe deer and her fawn who come down into the field, and he also tells me to look out for a massive rainbow trout which hangs out in the bit of stream below the outflow of the lake.

Further down the lake, the lack of ducks at the top is explained; most of the mallards are down this end today.  The glorious lone oak tree on the far bank is wearing a very fine dusting of spring green, last of the nearby trees to come into leaf.  Just here is a break in the reeds fringing the lake, a flattened section of grass with a sprinkling of white feathers, which must be where the lone swan (and he really is the only one, according to Nigel) hangs out.

Down by the outflow of the lake a few yellow iris are in bloom.  There's no sign of the monster trout, but there are a few bubbles rising by the edge, so maybe he's lurking under the concrete lip.

I leave the smart, esate-ish part and follow the stream down into the woodlands below, where the undergrowth closes in again and the air is full of dancing insects and an Orange Tip butterfly.  What is it that Orange Tip butterflies actually do?  This one is flitting around but never settling on any flowers, so either it's very picky or it's not looking for nectar.  Aha - here's another OTB, so maybe... I wait to see if they're going to hook up, but no.

By the 'bridge to nowhere' (the iron hump bridge that crosses the stream only to run almost immediately into a fence) I pause to look and listen.  I can hear a buzzard calling overhead, and as I step onto the bridge, a large bird takes off from the top of a nearby tree.  Which gives me goose-bumps because exactly the same thing happened last time I was here, and very close to this spot.  So is this the same buzzard pair, returning to a regular nest site?  I  can also hear a chiffchaff, and I now know what they look like, having finally managed to spot one the other day at Furners Farm, except that what they look like is not very much, to be honest.  If ever there was an LBJ, the chiffchaff is it.  Well, Little Buff Job, maybe.  Are those bluetits alarming in the tree next door?  I play the bluetit alarm call from my phone bird app, which causes the real ones to alarm even more vigorously.  QED, I think, though maybe not very kind of me.  I take myself off in case they have a nest they want to get to.

Whose path is this, running in the narrow strip between fence and stream - badger?  Too overgrown here for deer, I think.  Why walk on this side at all, rather than on the nice open path on the other side?  Perhaps 'open' is the problem, for an animal.  The sound of a helicopter overhead reminds me that it's Olympic Torch Day in Stroud.  It strikes me how deeply irrelevant the Torch is to, for example, the bumble bee prospecting in the wild garlic in front of me, or indeed every other species on the planet except us.

Down here, amongst clumps of hazels, the stream meanders seriously, real snake-bends, and is very much clearer, though I can't spot anything in it.  Hovering over it, however, is one of those flies which looks like a small brown teddy bear with a very long proboscis, sword-like, and swept-back wings.  It looks remarkably dangerous but is (I think) quite harmless. I give it a wide berth in case I'm wrong about that.

Towards the end of the Steanbridge land, the track emerges from the woodlands, which retreat up onto the steep bank on my right, and the nettles close in, making access to the stream difficult.  By following an animal path (what would I do without them?) I come to the old leat, if that's what it is, the steep-banked channel that runs parallel with the stream and rejoins it close to the boundary.  This time, the banks of the leat are deep in wild garlic.  Beyond it is a chunk of wall and a trio of trees which, from my recent revisit to church field, I now recognise as being possibly part of the old silk mill.  And that would make sense, if this was all part of the mill water structure.

For interest, I follow another animal path away from the wall and into the woodland on the bank, above the leat.  It becomes quite a highway, and there are some different sorts of tres up here, including beech, a few evergreens and lots of holly, all of which are rare around the stream.  There are some very beautiful and large beech trees, striking in their spring green, so I wonder if this is another scrap of ancient woodland. Three deer spring up from the bank at my approach, and skitter away, pausing to look back at me as if they can't quite believe their eyes.

Lone oak tree

The woodland path leads me back in sight of the lake and I drop down to it again in order to spend some time trying to draw the big oak.  An excercise in simplifying complexity, which isn't my strong point.  Why, I wonder, when there are all these ducks on the lake, are there no ducklings?

A narrow escape for ducklings

The answer to this arrives rather dramatically.  As I pass the house, I hear Nigel calling; he's waving at something in the stream just above the lake, which turns out to be a duck with five or six very small ducklings.  As we admire them, the lone swan comes rushing up the lake in full battle order.  "Oh no!" cries Nigel, "It'll have them all" and grabbing a handy hoe, attempts to fend off the swan.  The swan sheers off, the ducklings scatter in all directions and the mother duck flaps up onto the bank.  Now she can't see her brood, or, apparently, hear their frantic peetings, perhaps because of the sound of the little waterfall. Meanwhile the swan returns to the attack and Nigel fends it off with the hoe.  Mother duck is now moving up the lake, heading for the swan, and Nigel worries that she's lost the ducklings.  But what she's actually doing is bravely trying to lead the swan away, succeeding in decoying it up to the further end.  She then flies back, but arrives too far away, well up the stream above the waterfall.  The ducklings are still below the fall, paddling to and fro and yelling for mum.  Nigel tries to shoo her back in the right direction, but the swan is coming back fast and he has to rush back to fend it off again.  The situation looks desperate, but at last mother duck spots the ducklings and succeeds in getting them up onto the bank.  But then she appears to be leading them back towards the lake...  The swan, it seems, is very territorial and goes for anything smallish on the lake.  So that's why there are no ducklings.  Who'd have thought this peaceful lake was actually an oppressed land under the heel (or web) of a violent despot?

Can't bear to see any further drama, so in cowardly fashion I take myself off home.