Walk 21 - Where town and country meet: Slade House

It's a very warm afternoon, probably the warmest of the year so far.  It's only a week since it was freezing cold and definitely winter, but this feels like the first day of spring.  I'm on land belonging to Slade House in Summer Street, Stroud.  Slade House is a handsome Georgian manor house, reputedly built by the owner of the Vatch Mills, and most of the land along here was once part of its estate.   All that remains of the estate now, apart from the garden of the house, is a narrow slice of land sloping steeply from Summer Street right down to the Slad Brook, and adjoining the Wades Farm field where I stopped after my last walk.  The owner of Slade House has just given me a brief tour of the area and I'm about to start exploring on my own.

The Slade House land is part field, part scrub, with a bit of woodland by the brook.  The fields form a steep hump between two gullies which run down to the brook, even steeper than the humps and bumps of the Stroud Slad Farm fields.  From the top, almost level with Summer Street, there's another amazingly different view up and down the valley.  As we walked down the hump, the owner showed me a couple of big badger setts.  He also regularly sees deer here.

View from the top of the hump

I'm now down in the woodland by the brook, where I'm actually quite close to the road, which runs along the other side of the valley a little higher up.  As well as birds singing and the usual woodland noises, I can hear the road and dogs barking and human sounds.  From here on, the opposite bank is bordered by houses and gardens, and then industrial units, all the way to Stroud, although on this side the fields continue for quite a way.  I feel I am still very much in the countryside, here, but all the same I do have a sense of the brook rapidly approaching the town.

Green shoots

Judging by the amount of birdsong around me, the birds also think it's spring.  Down here by the brook, wild garlic is already pushing its way up through the litter of leaves and fallen wood, and I've just heard a woodpecker drumming, which is also supposed to be a harbinger of spring.  In fact, there seem to be two woodpeckers, one burst of drumming answering another, coming closer and closer.  After standing with the sound recorder poised for several minutes, I catch sight of them playing follow-my-leader from one tree to another, silhouetted against the afternoon sun.

The birds are determined to get in on the act.  While I'm trying to record the sound of the stream at this point, a burst of high-volume song from a robin in a nearby bush almost drowns out the water noise.  I can see the wall of the garden on the opposite side of the brook where I stopped my previous walk, and I can also see that the garden on the other side of it is a mass of snowdrops.  It's odd, looking into gardens from this angle, like looking into a dollshouse where the side opens up, or a stage set.  Or like peering into other people's gardens as you're rumbling past in a train and having a sense of getting a view you're not really supposed to see.

Good branch for kingfishers?

The stream has its usual cloak of trees on this side but they have no leaves yet, and there are no trees on the other side because of the gardens, so it seems lighter than usual down here.  Nor is it very overgrown as yet, though Ian says it will be chest-high in nettles come summer, and it's obviously going to be ankle-deep in wild garlic any minute now.  I'm here at the moment when everything is beginning to wake out of its winter sleep.  The banks of the stream are unusually steep and in places undercut, with interesting-looking holes in them.  I wonder about what might live in them.  There's a dead tree here with a sticking-out branch which looks like the perfect fishing-point for a kingfisher, and indeed the ground under the branch is covered in bird droppings so something has been perching here, but reluctantly I have to admit that it doesn't seem likely to be a kingfisher unless it's been extremely ill or is a genetically modified kingfisher which you wouldn't want to meet on a dark night.  There is altogether too much poo here.  And it continues further on, all over the ground and adjoining trees.  I have a Chris Packham moment and try to work out what it might have come from.  My best guess is that seagulls have been hanging out here - I have seen them flying up from the farmland at this end of the valley so maybe this is where they roost.

Old ladies gossiping

The owner hasn't been able to spend much time down here, he tells me, so at the moment it's a bit of a wildlife haven, as the signs of birds roosting suggest.  The amount of birdsong may also be to do with it being pretty undisturbed, I guess.  Many of the trees are covered in some seriously chunky ivy, ivy that’s had plenty of time to grow and has ended up as thick as a woman’s wrist.  A couple of the trees lean together like elderly women gossiping.  Here’s a dead tree which has ivy growing all over it and serious holes in the trunk, 3 or 4 inches across; the top of the tree has broken off and is lying on the ground.  The inside of the trunk is riddled with something which has made it go bright orange and sponge-like – it's easy to see why it collapsed.

There are signs of a manmade structure in the stream here, the remains of a low wall sticking into the flow, and old bits of brickwork toppled into the stream nearby. Perhaps an old outflow?  Or it may be more evidence of the old mill workings.

Following the stream, I quickly come to the edge of the wood, and a wire fence.  This is not, in fact, the legal boundary, which according to Ian is somewhere else, closer into the wood, but this is the practical boundary, stopping animals in the fields from coming into the wood and down to the stream.  Interesting thought: a legal boundary is a line on a map, a practical boundary is where something has to happen, or stop happening.  Here is another part of the practical boundary, the further of the two gullies which define the hump.  This one is now the outflow of a storm drain which takes water away from Summer Street above.  From the end of the gully is a shallow channel running across the flat land by the stream and down to the water.  It's currently dry, but surrounded by a rash of crisp packets, sweet papers and other crud brought down from the street above, a reminder of how close 'civilisation' is.

Sunlight sketch

It's been cloudy while I've been mooching around looking at crisp packets and bird poo, but now the sun comes out again, the light changes dramatically and suddenly I'm surrounded by colour.  Dark brown tree-trunks shade into buff branches surmounted by the brilliant orange of new growth twigs, intermingled with the deep green of ivy and the pale green of uppermost branches.  All these colours almost luminous against a deep blue-grey sky.  I grab my sketchbook and spend three-quarters of an hour trying to make my watercolour pencils reproduce the effect.  Then, just as suddenly, the sun goes in and the colours vanish, leaving me in a monochrome world again.

Time to go home.  I walk back up the line of the storm drain, picking my way through the undergrowth.  The gully becomes quite deep in places, almost a miniature gorge, and higher up it has water in it, which somehow disappears lower down.  At the upper field boundary is the spot where it starts, with a big pipe projecting out of the ground.  But given the steep hump-shape of the ground, I'm betting there was a stream here long before the storm drain was needed for Summer Street.

Evening light on the valley

As I walk back up over tussocky grass to the top of the hill, birds flying away from me in all directions, the evening sun reappears behind me, setting the treelines all the way up the valley afire with even more amazing colours – deep purple, dark orange, russet, bright orange and bright yellow against a blue-grey stormy-looking sky.  As the sun moves between the clouds, it lights up first the trees at the rim of the valley, then the next line of woods, then the tops of the nearer trees, with stripes of blue-green shadow in between.  When it bursts fully through the clouds for a moment, the foreground trees light up brilliant gold and everything in the background goes dark.  I stand watching the changing lightshow while around me blackbirds are singing their spink-spink-spink evening song.

Grass patterns

The vivid light changes things on the ground, too, changing an area of dead grass stalks into an abstract sea of swirling patterns, white on dark green, and lighting up a network of narrow badger-paths criss-crossing the upper field, which houses the biggest sett.

From the top of the hump, pausing to take in the view of the valley again, I'm struck by the realisation that I'm standing on a different sort of boundary -  the precise line at which the valley stops being entirely countryside and starts to get involved with the town.  From this vantage point, it looks very stark - to my right, I see nothing but fields, to my left, houses creep out to meet them, and in front of me is the leading edge of Uplands, where they join.  It isn't quite like that in reality, because there are three or four more fields between here and Stroud on this side of the brook, currently out of my sightline, but from here on, the influence of the town is going to be felt.
Google map of this walk

Walk 20: The Silent Stream - Upper Dillay under ice (revisit)

Yesterday was Candlemas and someone in the village quoted the old Candlemas rhyme to me:

'If Candlemas day be dry and fair
The half o' winter's to come and mair
If Candlemas day be wet and foul
The half o' winter's gane at Yule.'

Since yesterday was sparklingly sunny and bright, it looks like we're in for more winter.  Today's weather certainly suggests as much - another frosty morning after a bitterly cold night,-9 degrees C the minimum.  We've now had three nights of low temperatures in a row and 'my' birds have stopped pottering around in the woods and started queueing up at the feeders in earnest.  You know it's really cold when the robins call an uneasy truce instead of fighting each other beak and claw over the fat balls.  After that false spring in January, winter seems to have arrived in haste, rolling up its sleeves and stamping its feet to prove its keenness.

So here's another opportunity to see what the valley looks like under frost. The outside thermometer is still hovering around -6 when I leave The Vatch at about 10.30 a.m. and I have so many layers on that I feel like a polar bear. Possibly a polar bear pretending to be a Christmas tree as I am hung about with the usual techno-kit including extra batteries in case of camera sulks.

This time I'm going right back to the beginning of the Dillay valley, starting with the steep track down from the village of Camp.  It's not a morning for hanging about, or for the nice slow pace which doesn't alarm the local wildlife, and the mud beneath my feet crunches with ice as I stomp along.  A squirrel scolds from a tree close by, sounding like someone imitating a duck rather badly, and a posse of pheasants goes whirring across the path in noisy alarm.  Half way down the track I stop still to record the sounds around me.  The sudden quiet is loud in my ears after the noise of my own steps.  The icy air is very still, and the various woodland noises are isolated sounds, not the general background concert I remember from spring.  Among them I pick out the sound of a woodpecker, tapping rather apologetically, as if nervous of being heard. After a moment, I spot him, high up on a bare beech tree.  After a brief struggle to disentangle binoculars from camera I can see that he's what I think of as 'the red one', i.e. a Greater Spotted.  As I turn away, a rabbit dashes up the bank ahead of me and disappears into a hole underneath the stump of a felled tree.

It occurs to me, as I continue down the track, that I do have something in common with the birds.  They react to movement, especially fast movement, and so do I.  In all this wide vista of winter trees, my eye picked out the tiny but unusual movement of the woodpecker drumming, the rabbit running.  It helps that the trees have no leaves and the bank is bare of undergrowth, of course.

Puddle ice

Before it started freezing, there was a fair amount of rain, and there are plenty of puddles down here, now frozen like the mud.  The ice has obviously partly thawed, then re-frozen, more than once, forming swirling patterns like contour lines and dark, meandering cracks.  Some of the puddles look like sections from an OS map.

Once I've slowed down to photograph the puddles, I start to notice other details, leaves with all their ribs picked out in frost, the colours of flaking bark, intricate lichens, but the temperature keeps me from getting enmeshed in close-up stuff because in less than the time required to take one photo, my fingers are benumbed.

Over the stile at the end of the track and into the field and here is the grove of hawthorns where the stream rises.  The water from the spring is running, but fringed with fragments of ice, and only a little further on, where the fledgling stream emerges from the trees, the surface of the water is frozen.  I can see the water trying to find its way underneath, seeping in odd patterns through the ice.  I am trying to record this process as a video when a great racket erupts at the treeline which turns out to be a right royal squabble between two blackbirds.  I can see them flying at each other, and then literally scrapping on the ground, turning over and over in a flurry of wings and squawking. One loses his nerve and breaks away, and is chased off noisily by the winner.  As usual, I haven't managed to get my hand to the sound recorder in time.

When I did my first walk here, the trees were only just beginning to green up, but the atmosphere was quite different.  Then the valley felt active, life bubbling up everywhere.  Now it feels quiet, submerged, the hatches battened down.  It's now 11.30 am but the sun is only just struggling over the treetops at the valley rim.  The trees are stark, their structure darkly beautiful against the washed-out colours of winter sky and grass and the remnants of scrub.  Numbers of blackbirds are rootling in the leaf litter and appearing from between the roots of trees.  I wonder if they have been sheltering from the cold there, or if they are finding things to eat down by the roots.

Iced leaves

The further down the stream I walk, the thicker grows the ice, and the more opaque, the shadows of imprisoned rushes and remnants of leaves underneath it.  All the beach leaves in the valley seem to have blown to the stream, lining the white ice with a coppery border. Some of the leaves are half-caught in the ice and are rimmed with long ice crystals like strange teeth.  It's odd to see the stream silenced like this.  A buzzard drifts overhead, its mournful cry puncturing the quiet air.

There's a tree growing by the stream here which I remember from my original walk - its handsome outline dominates the view from the head of the valley, and it looks even more striking without its leaves.  Climbing higher up the eastern slope of the valley to get a photo of the whole tree, my eye is caught by a white shape on the opposite bank.  It turns out to be a dead sheep.  Recently dead, at a guess, since nothing's had a go at it yet.  A victim of the frost, perhaps.  It's lying peacefully on its side, well away from where the rest of the flock is spread about the lower part of the valley in front of the farm, as if it wandered away to die.  Well, animals do that, they say.  Every time I've come to this beautiful part of the valley, there's been some vivid reminder of the precariousness of life. And just down the slope, by the stream, is another; a complete set of wings, spine and rib cage of a pheasant, still bloody, shockingly colourful against the drab ground.  I feel sorry for the pheasant, but find it difficult to be partisan; on the one hand, one dead pheasant, but on the other, one well-fed fox (presumably) who may therefore survive to spring and to breed.  OK, maybe a little partisan; I confess I quite like foxes.

Iced bog

I'm glad I climbed up the hill to check on the sheep - you get quite a different view of the valley from here, and with the sun now slanting straight into my eyes, all the contours are thrown into high contrast.  I can see where all the tributary streams are.  These are also held fast in ice, I discover, when I go to look.  Between the dark bars of the willow-skeletons which lean over it, slivers of icy stream shine in the sun like shards of broken mirror.  And where the side valley comes down from Nottingham Scrubs, a wide swathe of the valley floor sparkles silvery with iced-up bog. Even down by the footbridge, where the stream is wider, it's still covered in intricate ice-doilies, though the water can be seen trickling through underneath.

I make a quick foray across the shoulder of the hill and down to Rose's cottage to see what's happening where the stream goes into the deep woods.  Bereft of its softening cloak of greenery, Rose's cottage looks less picturesque and more disturbingly broken than when I last saw it. The spring is ice-free, and with less undergrowth I can see the whole length of the small tributary which runs past the cottage to the main stream, which is also ice-free here, where it's wider and deeper and running underneath trees.  That seems a good place to turn back, where the stream escapes from the ice.

On the way back, I notice how much of the floor of the farm end of the valley is boggy.  That reminds me that I first came here we were in the middle of an unusually dry spring, and all this was then dry ground.  Presumably it's now getting back to normal.  Then, I was quartering this ground marvelling at all the species growing in it, but now, if it wasn't frozen, I'd be sinking up to my ankles, by the look of it.

Up by the farm, I'm gawped at by sheep, fat and cuddly in their winter wool, and reluctantly squawked at by some unusually reticent geese, who clearly think I'm more dangerous than they are.  Further down the track is a lot of frozen mud, temporarily preserving sharp impressions of the feet of what looks like most of the valley's animal and human occupants.  Here a dog, there a sheep, and here something webbed that looks too small for a goose - a duck?  A seagull?

From the woods at the head of the valley, I catch what I'm sure is a single tawny owl call.  I've heard them in the daytime before, but never managed to record the sound to prove it.  This time is, of course, no exception.

Here's a funny thing.  When I was walking down the valley, I had the the sun in my eyes.  Seeing everything in high contrast and through a golden haze endowed the scene with magic.  Coming back up, with the sun behind me, it all looks pretty, but somehow prosaic.  The sun is up, the cold enchantment is gone.  A good time to go home for lunch.