Tuesday 27 March 2012

Walk 25: An unexpected walk - Rycote land

The factory by the stream
It's a warm, verging on hot afternoon, near the end of March.  The whole week has been warm, with blue skies and sunshine every day.  A drift of daffodils beside me, and the leafless trees, say spring, but the temperature says summer.  I'm standing in the car park of Rycote Microphone Windshields Ltd, in Libby's Drive, Stroud.

You'll recall that the Slad Brook was last seen disappearing into the back of this industrial estate.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get permission to access the stream from the northern section of the industrial estate, but the owners of Rycote have been more than kind in allowing me to follow it through the land beside their factory.  And after a brief session with an attentive salesgirl, I'm trying out one of their microphone windshields - there always seems to be a breeze in this valley and so far it's featured quite prominently in lots of my sound recordings.  The shield makes my little mic look as if it has aspirations to be a teddy bear and it no longer fits in my pocket, so I hope the extra furriness is worth it.

For most of its journey through the industrial estate, the stream is underground, so I don't think I've missed much.  From the corner of this car park, through thick bushes, I can just see it emerging from the culvert under a stone arch.  It's now in a very much deeper, partially-stone-faced channel, and what with the depth and the undergrowth it's impossible to get closer to it here.

I'm now very much in the outskirts of Stroud - on the hem of Uplands, to be more precise - and there's a certain amount of man-made noise around.  However, this is a surprisingly peaceful site, and I can still hear the stream and the bass humming of a large, fat bumblebee moseying about in the blackthorn blossom.  All the excitement of microphone-windshield-making goes on inside the long, low building in front of me, but none of it seems to spill into the outside.  The stream runs along the edge of the site, through the car park, past the factory, and alongside a largish area of grass at the back of the building, before disappearing into a housing estate.  By the look of things, no-one disturbs it much.  It's flowing in a channel some 6-8 ft below the car park level with steep banks on either side, lined with trees as usual, and I can find no easy way to get down to it until I get to the grassy bit at the back of the building.  Here, the brook is flanked by two huge willows, their furry buds just bursting, and there's a flattish area beside it.  With some caution, I clamber down the bank.  It's not difficult, if you don't count putting my hand on a baby nettle by accident (which I do).  Once down at stream level, I feel as if I'm in hiding.  This is a spot which just asks to be sat in, looked at and listened to, and here is a fallen tree across the stream, perfectly positioned for sitting.

So what can I see and hear?  There's now a section of field at the top of the bank on the opposite side of the stream, barely visible through trees and thickets of bramble.  A narrow animal path winds through it close to where I'm sitting, and leads to - a traffic cone.  A splash of incongruous colour amongst the brown undergrowth, and another intimation that we're not far from town here.  A surprising amount of birdsong spills out of the trees, much of it from a chiff-chaff.  I think of the chiff-chaff as a Bird of Mystery.  It was one of the first birdsongs I learned to be sure of, and I hear them all over the place in this valley, but never see them.  There are also stereo wood pigeons, one on each side of me, bass backing for the staccato chiff-chaff.  It's just in the last 2-3 weeks that I've begun to notice birds other than robins starting sing - robins seem to keep going all winter, but you know it's spring when everyone else starts to join in.

There are bits of broken stone lying in the stream here, and a couple of big slabs on the bank.  Not enough to be anything identifiable and too moss-covered to guess at their age, but there was another mill here, so they might be its very last remains, who knows?  The stream is not very efficiently fenced with barbed wire on this side and very efficiently fenced with brambles on the other side.  Barbed wire intrigues me for the intricacy of its shapes.  It's forbiddingly aggressive, but can be oddly beautiful, in amongst greenery like this.  A series of largish willow trees marches along the bank, each one wears a miltary-style metal dog-tag with a number, which is curious.  I wonder who keeps track of them, and why.  Is this some sort of Health and Safety thing?  Is each of these trees on file somewhere, its condition the subject of regular check-ups?

The stream looks a bit low, to me, showing an underskirt of mud below the greenery on the other bank.  The bank on this side deep in old leaf litter, clumps of reed-like plants which make a distinctive rustling sound, and patches of what seem likely to turn into yellow irises.  Oh, and bits of last year's fireworks.  I climb rather intrepidly round and over a big area of fallen wood and undergrowth to reach the next section of the bank.  Here, something has been digging.  Could be badgers, even though we're close to Stroud - I've heard stories of badgers wandering into people's houses along this outlying edge of the town.  And it seems likely that the stream bank here would be used as an animal highway, being so well-hidden and generally ignored.  In fact, I imagine this bit of stream having quite a life of its own.

The stream itself sparkles with rippled sunlight, fretted with long, pin-sharp tree-shadows.  I walk on to the furthest part of the bank I can actually reach.  Beyond here, the bank becomes too steep to navigate, turns a bit of a corner, and then disappears into the housing estate.  Through the leafless trees, I can see the silhouettes of houses, like distant mountains.  It's all surprisingly wild and lovely, a patch of rampant nature right in the arms of the town.  I make an extremely unsuccessful attempt to capture the scene in watercolour, dropping half of my new watercolour pans into the brook.  Decide watercolour is not my medium.

Bullfinches are whistling shyly from the trees above me.  I spot a parson-in-the-pulpit, aka lords-and-ladies or wild arum, a plant which fascinates me for its shape and slightly unsavoury reputation (traps flies overnight for the flower equivalent of kinky sex-games).  Scrambling back up the bank, I follow a little animal path along the back of the grass patch as far as Rycote's boundary fence, where the path proves it really is an animal path by disappearing under the fence, where I can't follow.  So there's nothing to do but retrace my steps to the car park, where a grey squirrel delights me by posing on the bank of the stream, rearing up on his hind legs to gape at me as if the human shape is altogether new to him.

This has been a most unexpected walk.  I'd assumed, from what I could see from outside the site, that I'd be making a quick stroll along concrete paths to peer at the stream from above.  I didn't anticipate finding yet another beautiful bit of secret stream.




Tuesday 20 March 2012

Walk 24: The Tree Building-Site - Dillay Farm South (revisit)

This is my fourth 'second pass' walk and this time I'm revisiting the lower part of Dillay Farm land, from below the farmhouse to the boundary with the Snows Farm nature reserve.  The last time I was here was in early summer, when everything was in leaf.  So now I want to see it without either leaves or undergrowth. This is a day of sunshine and cloud; there are few new leaves to be seen elsewhere in the valley, but not here.

Last year, this part of the valley was unusually dry, and I could walk right up to the stream below the farmhouse.  When I was here six weeks ago to revisit the upper part of the valley, the stream here was fast held in frost, and a large area around it was sparkling with frozen bog.  Now the stream is running free and the bog is quite definitely a properly boggy bog.  Good thing I brought the wellies.

Pursued by a cacophany of barking dogs and squawking geese at the farm, I walk down through the field, cross the stream and follow it south to where it enters the wood just below a track. The steep fields on my left hand are barred with long shadows from the woods above, where a patch of olive-green fir trees float amidst a sea of buff-coloured leafless beeches.  Down by the track, it's now possible to see exactly what happens to the water at this point, which I couldn't figure out last year.  The main part of the brook disappears into a pipe under the track, but a small tributary comes in from the right and another from the left at almost the same point, from the side valley past Rose's cottage, so that what we have here is a stream crossroads. The ground between the streams is covered in mini-plants, a pattern of many small new leaves, including the promise of nettles, but at present they are no more than a pretty pattern on the ground.

By walking a little way up the track going westward, I find some beehives, which I don't remember seeing last year, and surprise a small vole or mouse which goes leaping for cover underneath them.  Good move.  I'm not going closer to look for him there.  Just below the beehives another small stream seeps out of the hill and heads for the main brook.  The ground is boggy here, too, and a strong medicinal smell arises from the plants my wellies are crushing.

Lower down, yet another small stream seeps out of the ground close to the track and runs parallel with the main brook, turning an area of ground into an almost-island.  The ground here is covered in baby nettles and was pretty much impassable when I was here last, which may be why I missed this extra stream, or perhaps it wasn't even here in the drier weather.

Walking by the water rather than on the footpath is looking like a possibility at the moment, so I decide to continue at this level, on the western side of the smaller stream.  It all looks quite different from before, with very little undergrowth.  This area belongs to the trees just now and the stream winds around and through them.  I'm guessing the ground is honeycombed with  springs because there seems to be a lot of bog and bog plants, especially whatever makes the medicinal smell.  The further I go, the swampier it gets, and the deeper and steeper the channel in which the stream flows.

This time of year is definitely about shape rather than colour; what colours I can see are shades of green, buff and brown, with the odd patch of brighter, more saturated colour on the exposed innards of broken tree stumps, a deep coppery colour, or patches of bright green new moss.  There are an awful lot of tree stumps, in amazing shapes and colours.  Last May, I saw this as a tree cathedral,  but this time it's more like a building site.  An image which is assisted by some serious mechanical noises from the farm behind me.

It really is tree-stump-ville here; I count one stump for every three trees, all naturally fallen-over rather than cut down, as far as I can see.  Some of the smaller ones are like bits of broken eggshell, completely hollowed out, and ringed about with teeth of shattered bark. Seeing four particularly bits of tortured-looking wood in a row reminds me of a petrified forest I saw last year on the island of Lesbos.  I pause to try and draw some of their details.  The farm noise has now stopped and its so quiet, even the birdsong seeming muted, just the small trickly sounds of the stream finding its way around fallen wood and tree roots.  The sound of the stream is the sound of obstacles - I suppose that if there weren't any, it would make no sound at all.  It's quiet enough for me to catch the distant sound of a tawny owl hoot - you do hear them sometimes in the daytime, and the last time I heard one was also in this part of the valley.

Following up the remains of an old track, partly blocked by a fallen tree, I discover a lone clump of primroses, and a tiny patch of the first bluebells of the year, just five of them.  There's an enormous amount of fallen wood.  The stream itself is so crossed and re-crossed by branches that it seems to be wearing a wooden hairnet.  Does it matter if the stream is not looked after, if no-one clears it of dead wood and fallen trees?  Humans have a great urge to manage things; a friend of mine in the village who was formerly a head forester for the National Trust subscribes firmly to the 'let it be' school of forestry.  While I'm pondering this, a buzzard takes off from a tree close by, sailing by on absolutely silent wings.

I find what looks like the shoulderbone of a pheasant, well picked clean.  And there was me thinking I might get along the Dillay this time without finding anything dead.

Another smaller stream runs off the hill here, and abruptly the main stream arrives at a very definite fence, running right across the water.  Is this the boundary with the nature reserve?  The only way to check is to walk up the fence to the footpath above.  I attempt to cross stream by standing on what looks like a solid log, which promptly tips up at the same moment that the branch I'm holding onto breaks, causing a sudden scramble through mud and water.  The fence goes round a few corners in its path up the hillside, and in one of them there is a curious little door, not more than a foot high, at the base of the fence.  For rabbits? Small dogs?  Hedgehogs?  A squawk in the undergrowth gives me a clue; it's for pheasants, of course.

The fence comes joins the footpath some distance into the nature reserve.  I remember thinking before that it's surprisingly difficult to work out where you are in this bit of the valley.  At least I now know I've pretty thoroughly explored this part of the brook all the way from the farm to the nature reserve.

Walking back along the footpath I notice a lot of deer slots - they obviously find it easier to follow the paths sometimes too.  There is a serried row of willows, all leaning over the path at the same angle, like a sideways arch, their structural shapes particularly noticeable at moment without their leaves.  There is a chunk of old farm machinery pushed up against their trunks, and now the same colour as their bark, so almost disappearing amongt them.  Ahead of me, I hear the daytime owl again, and an explosion of jackdaws.

Rose's cottage looks ever more broken-down and sad; a patch of daffodils are blooming in what must once have been the front garden, now just a chaos of weeds and rubble.  And now I'm crossing the fields again below the farm, and being greeted by another volley of excited barking from above.  I notice for the first time how each staccato sound is answered by an echo from higher up the valley.  I must be standing in exactly the right place to hear it.  This walk seems to have been all about sounds and shapes.







Tuesday 6 March 2012

Walk 23: Fungi and Small Mammals - Detcombe Woods (revisit)

This is my second walk in Detcombe woods and my last opportunity for a while, because the requirements of pheasant rearing will put the woods out of bounds to casual visitors in the next few weeks.  Last time I was looking for the first appearance of the Slad Brook and following its course through the woods, but this time the walk is about the woods themselves as well as the stream.  It's a cold, sunny morning with a little frost.

Once again, as I walk down the steep track into the valley, I have the sense of stepping away from the 'real' world.  The noises of the road and the scrapyard above fall swiftly into the distance, to be replaced by birdsong. The valley is very steep here, and though it's already 9.30 am, the sun is only just reaching the eastern rim, lighting up the very tops of the trees and throwing long, high-contrast shadows.  Three deer, a stag and two hinds, erupt from somewhere nearby and dash across the path in front of me.  Further along the path, a tiny rustle in the leaf litter catches my attention just in time to see a vole, or possibly a woodmouse, zipping into a hole.  Funny how even my untutored ear can pick out unexpected animal noise from the general background noise.

The track follows the lowest point of the valley and trees sweep up the hill on either side of me.  To see the wood from a different angle, I veer off the main track following an animal path.  Most of the trees at this end of the wood are young, slim and straight, as if all planted at the same time, and not so long ago.  Mostly beech, some sycamore, and here in particular, a bunch of trees with small cones and lacy branches, of an evergreen sort of build but obviously not evergreen, since they haven't currently got any leaves.  My tree-knowledge, shaky at the best of times, throws up the word 'larch' as a possibility.

I love this time of year, when you can focus on single plants and hear the voices of individual leaves on trees, before it all melds into one huge summer shout of mixed greenery.  Mind you, a lot of the green around here is currently emerald-green moss, growing on trees, stumps and ground indiscriminately like green fur.  And talking of voices, I can hear a woodpecker in the background, and a squirrel scolding.

The path leads me to another track, the highest of a trio of tracks which radiate out from the sharp end of the valley.  Last time, I followed the middle one, which stays at the lowest point, tracking the stream.  This new one winds through the woods on the western side, keeping to a higher contour, and the topography of the valley is very visible from up here as a sharp v-shape cloaked in trees.

I'm glad I began thinking of the valley in terms of sounds as well as sights.  Just now, for instance, I'm aware of several things going on around me, none of which I can see.  Small scurrying-away sounds in the underbrush suggest small mammals, or maybe blackbirds.  A squirrel is 'chucking' quietly but persistently in a tree nearby.  A jay shrieks in the distance.  I can also hear bluetits, great tits and wood pigeons.  So I know that all these creatures are somewhere around, even though I can't actually see them.

Here are several clumps of curious green, bell-like flowers.  Stinking hellebores, I think - I know this, because someone from the Wildlife Trust told me they were one of the Iconic Plants of the Slad Valley so I went and looked them up. This is the first time I've actually seen them on the ground.  They look slightly strange, in their big, pale-green clumps, the flowers heavy-headed and extravagant, like something tropical that escaped,or a sci-fi plant with malign intentions.

The track climbs almost to the level of the road, and I can hear cars, but not see them, because the screen of trees remains intact.  The hillside is so steep here that I wouldn't want to go off the path without crampons, but with so little undergrowth that I can see all the way down to the middle path where the brook runs.  A pair of pale brown flies are scrapping - or possibly mating (don't know fly body language) - on the path in front of me, rolling over and over, with lots of buzzing.

The beeches hug the upper part of the valley; downhill of me is another patch of evergreens and larches (if that's what they are).  The beeches are mainly small saplings but a few big old trees, too, particularly along the edge of the track.  One of the things I love about beeches is the smoothness of their bark, and the way it wrinkles like skin around lumps and bumps and where branches emerge.  It gives the trees a sinuous, animal look, whereas on other varieties of tree the bark is more like a hard carapace.

Taking photos of the trees, I'm reminded again of the limitations of my five-foot-six viewpoint.  Most of the time, I pay attention only to the first four feet of the tree trunk, noticing interesting root shapes and bark patterns.  I pay much less attention to the canopy.  Even if I remember to look up, my perspective is compressed; if I get far enough away to see the whole tree, it no longer looks so impressive.  I think again about small animals and trees, wonder if a vole, like the one I saw earlier, is even aware of the tree having a canopy?

Returning to the intersection of the tracks and picking up the middle one, I'm surprised by how the temperature drops appreciably as I drop down and leave the sun behind.  I had forgotten that on a section of this middle path there is a whole grove of evergreens in straight lines, in the middle of which is now a pheasant pen, sporting a rash of little lean-to constructions. I guess they are shelters, but can't help thinking they look more like runways for teaching young pheasants to fly...

I've arrived at the small pond where the Slad Brook effectively makes its first appearance.  It's a lot less overgrown than when I last saw it, and the water is still and dark, carrying tremendous reflections of everything around it.  I pause to make a colour sketch.  As so often when I stop and concentrate on drawing, the bird activity around me increases.  There is a lot of fluttering of wings, and suddenly a little marsh (or possibly willow - can never tell the difference) tit alights on a branch almost beside me, apparently unaware of my presence.  Suddenly noticing me, he gives a stage start, utters a tiny squawk and takes off again in a hurry.  Or it may be the buzzard circling overhead that has spooked him.  Another buzzard comes swooping in, flying quite low.  I'm pleased to see, when I get up to go, that there is a big patch of frogspawn in one part of this pond.

The stream is there, but it's a small oozy ditch, though rather more visible than when I was here in summer.  I zigzag across it to investigate the evergreen grove.  More tall, slim trees, but these with needles and cones.  The ground is soft underfoot with accumulation of needles.  I don't know if it's the shape, but these slim trees don't half attract ivy.  They are green on top with their own needles, then green all the way down the trunk with newly-leafed ivy.  Ivy is also growing across the ground.  Given half a chance, I suspect that ivy could take over the world.

Here is a good reason for getting off the path now and then - I've come across some fallen branches with clusters of startlingly bright red and orange fungi growing on them.  I have never seen these before, and they are quite stunning.  And further on is a fallen silver birch on which are growing some tiny peach-coloured toadstools, smaller than my fingernail, and also some massively chunky bracket-style fungi, with pie-crust crimped edges, larger than my spread hand.  I never suspected the wonderful variety of colours and shapes of fungi until I started walking this valley.  While circling the fungi trees, I disturb another little vole-like animal, glimpsed as no more than a tail and a furry backside disappearing into the leaf litter.

What with all this zigzagging across the hillside, it's lunchtime by the time I reach the lake, so I stop to picnic. This feels like good place to be alone in, to listen to the quietness, without other human noise getting in the way of natural noises. While I'm sitting still and talking softly to the sound recorder, another little mouse/vole appears within a foot of me and trots off fast through a patch of baby nettles, apparently not particularly alarmed.  I sit tight, he reappears, scampers off again like a clockwork toy and vanishes into thicker undergrowth further down the bank.  I try to sketch what I remember of him - he's about 3 or 4 inches nose to tail, buff coloured on top and pale underneath, and moving too fast to get idea of what sort of tail he has.  That makes three small mammals I’ve seen in one morning, and I’ve not been particularly quiet.  I suppose it's easier to spot them at this time of year, when the undergrowth is all much thinner and lower, but it reinforces my impression of this as a place that people don't come too often.

Below the lake is anarchic country, no paths, lots of fallen wood, no stream for a while until it suddenly reappears in a steep little gully. Someone has removed great swathes of ivy from trees on the western side of the stream and left it lying, which adds to the general air of untidiness.  This west side of valley has more grass and moss and ferns growing under the trees than the other side, which I suspect is because this side gets more sun.  I progress crabwise up the hill like a herd of baby elephants (beech leaves do not make for quiet walking), finding little clumps of the wonderful scarlet fungi everywhere, including in the brook.  A pair of jays seem to be dogging my footsteps, to be replaced by a pair of woodpeckers as I return to the level of the stream.  Their staccato drumming is joined by the bass thump-thump of the two rams and the 'ching' of the ram pipework - the whole Detcombe percussion section.

One last foray into the woodland around me - this time up a sort of small side valley in which a grove of sapling beeches gives way to a patch of pines, then a patch of mixed trees, and a patch of very impressive molehills.  A track appears, leading up into an area of mixed beech and fir.  Many of these trees are large and elegant, and this has the air of being an older bit of woodland, longer established.  It's more like my picture of what woodland should be, with trees of various ages, sizes and species.  There's less lying wood, possibly because the hillside is so steep here that anything that isn't actively holding onto the ground probably rolls down to the bottom, as I will if I don't watch it.

A spring oozes out of the ground part way down this side valley and finds its way down to the main brook, which, with sunlight glinting off the water, is much more of a personality in this winter-minimalist landscape than I remember it being in summer.  Then this area was all shade and undergrowth so that the water almost disappeared.

At last, I've reached the end of the shooting consortium's land and have to head steeply back uphill to reach the beech-lined track which leads to Bulls Cross, stumbling across a big badger sett under the roots of a hazel tree as I go.  The leafless shapes of the big beeches along the track are even lovelier, I think, than the summer version. I imagined this walk would be mainly about trees, but what I will actually remember are three glimpses of small furry beasts and those amazing scarlet fungi.









Friday 2 March 2012

Walk 22: - Under the eaves of Stroud: Baxter's Fields


This morning's walk feels like a bit of a landmark.  This is partly because it's taken some time and effort to discover and make contact with the owner and tenant of the fields I'm about to go and walk through - at one point I thought the Slad Knowledge had finally failed me - but in the end I ran them both to earth and, like everyone else so far, once found they've been more than kind in allowing me to walk on their land.  These three fields are also the last rural section of the Slad Brook before it runs into the industrial edge of Stroud.

It's a misty, moisty morning with a hazy sun struggling to break through the early morning fog.  No wind to speak of - we've now had three very still, mild and sunny days in a row, which is giving the season a massive kick-start.  Buds are bursting, birds are nesting and I can't believe we're not now on the slippery slope to spring.

Access to these fields isn't straightforward, so I'm starting from where I left off, at the corner of the land belonging to Slade House.  This little patch of woodland is just as appealing the second time around.  The air smells soft and sweet, the wild garlic is two inches taller than when I saw it last week and everything is heavy with dew.  The trees resound with purposeful birdsong.  As I enter the wood, I disturb a deer who was couching in a patch of bracken and bramble not 8 feet away from me.  I'd have had no idea she was there if she hadn't lept up with a great flurry and legged it.

It's tempting to hang about here taking more photos and enjoying the ambience, particlarly as I'm mildly apprehensive about the forthcoming walk.  The fields in question are in use by polo ponies and I've been warned that they may be both inquisitive and jumpy.  I'm not at all scared of horses in the ordinary way, but I remember from my encounter with the racehorses on Tom George's land that a close inspection by a group of skittish horses can be a tad intimidating.  Aiming to be fairly inconspicuous, I've dressed in my darker coat, forgetting that I would be carrying a bright red rucksack.  But in any case, the ponies are in the first field, and have already spotted me, all heads turning in my direction as I walk  down the hill.  However, when I climb over the fence into their field and aim a camera in their direction, they sheer off like unwilling celebrities and head for the top of the hill, which is fine with me.

The air smells soft and sweet and the grass is heavy with dew. The sun now seems to be winning its battle with the mist.  The first field slopes gently down to the brook but the bank on the opposite side is steep and lined with modern houses at the top, well above me, and all well-fenced off from the bank.  On this side, the brook is fenced off from the field with barbed wire.  So once again, because the uses human beings are putting the land to don't include the brook, it's as if it's in no-mans-land, shut away from view, and when I climb over the barbed wire to get closer to the water, I feel that I've stepped into a different world.

No-man's-land sketch
I decide to try to put this thought into a sketch, and find a prominent tree root to sit on, a little below bank level.  I am right under the eaves of Stroud here, and from above me come many human sounds - voices, car engines and some sort of industrial noise.  I can also hear the ponies whinnying some distance away.  Yet I feel quite separate and hidden from both field and houses here, down in the world of the secret brook.  While I'm drawing, a bird (robin at a guess) starts singing apparently right in my ear, but remains frustratingly hidden.  I have a theory that birds can throw their voices because they never seem to be where the sound would suggest they are.

The brook runs quite smoothly and quietly through this field but as I approach the boundary the water noise increases and I come to what must once have been an old sluice.  The brook runs between solid stone walls which still show slots where the sluice gate would have been.  The water drops a short way but enough to sound like a small waterfall.  The opposite bank is faced with brick and further downstream, amongst the trees and hanging ivy, stands a massive piece of stonework, a single square column, which I suppose must be all that remains of an old mill building.  Must try and find out which mill.

I cross another fence into an area of trees, a small, steep and wooded coombe.  I've now got very steep banks on both sides and I feel like I'm at the bottom of a cup full of trees.  A movement at the treeline catches my eye and between the trees I spot a deer, silhouetted against the sky, its ears twitching.  Two more deer shapes, one large, one small, appear in silhouette.  We watch each other for about a minute and then the deer make a strategic withdrawal.  After giving them a chance to move on, I divert from the brook and climb the hill because this bit of wood looks enticingly explorable.  As I scramble over a fallen tree, a tiny wren shoots up from somewhere along the trunk, scolding loudly. Most of the trees here are hung with ivy, which gives the whole place a closed-in feel; this fallen tree also has grasses and mosses growing in amongst the ivy on its bark, so I can see why the wren fancied it as a hide-out.  Just before the crown of the hill I start another deer, which flashes me a glance of disbelief before high-tailing it into the field.

Following a small animal path, I cross under a hefty line of electricity wires and emerge on the top of this hill at the edge of the trees.  From here I can see that this is not a separate hill, but one finger of the handful of hilly spurs which makes this side of the valley. I'd love to see a topographical map of this area, which seems even lumpier and bumpier than the top end of the valley.  I'm now looking out through a window of tree branches towards the industrial edge of Stroud, the misty townscape punctuated by an old red factory chimney down in the Libby's Drive area and, in the distance, the tower of All Saints church. Above me is the line of houses which is Summer Street.  The air if full of chain-saw-and-digger noise from a construction site below Slade Brook on the Uplands side.  But in spite of that, I still have a sense of encapsulation, of this small bit of wild wood being a world entirely separate.

There are some splendid old oak trees here which seem to be growing in a line down the middle of the hill from Summer Street towards the brook.  In the field above me is another great tree trunk, now dead and truncated, which I guess to have been a similar oak in the same line, which makes me wonder if someone planted them deliberately.  A grand avenue perhaps - could they have been part of the Slade House grounds?

This is the perfect time of year to appreciate the monumental structure of these trees; no leaves yet, and the branches outlined against a misty-white sky.  I try to make a sketch but am distracted by the sound of small birds alarming, or perhaps quarrelling, raucously from inside a big holly bush beside me, accompanied by a repeated tapping sound like a thrush dealing with an oversized snail.  What's going on here?  Are the birds complaining about my presence, and is the tapping another form of alarm call?  Or is the tapping (whatever or whoever it is) a threat to them and the source of their alarm?  I mentally add this to my Unanswered Questions List (now longer than all my arms and legs) and try to record the sound in case I can find someone who knows the answer.

After using this vantage point to work out where I am on the map, I return to the brook via the bottom of the combe.  Tiny primroses are coming into bloom on the sides of the hill and the ground is starred with the rosettes of new-born nettles - like many other babies, very cute now and a perishing nuisance when bigger.  I've chosen the right time to be here from the point of view of getting around; I predict this wood will be seriously overgrown come summer. There's some evidence that this combe is also a hang-out for humans, judging by the odd can, drink bottle and other bits of rubbish entwined in the undergrowth.

From the wood I cross into another field, a grassy dip between two humps.  On the far side of the stream I'm now looking into people's gardens.  Here, the stream mostly isn't fenced, and the gardens slope gently down to it. It's crossed by a massive sewage or water pipe, and someone has also laid a sort of grating across it, the purpose of which isn't clear, though it could serve as a precarious footbridge.  These gardens look as though they welcome the stream, or at least acknowledge its existence.  I imagine the inhabitants of the houses coming down to look at it, maybe even sit by it with a gin and tonic or similar.

A fat pigeon lumbers over my head, weighed down by an enormous chunk of nesting material, and vanishes into the ivy-hung crown of the largest willow tree I've seen on the stream so far.  Its roots are on the far side but its huge, craggy trunk leans right across the stream and half of its branches are on the ground.  Its bark makes me think of elephant hide and it is bearded with moss and ivy and other trailing plants.

Last of the stream before Stroud
Beyond here, the field runs into the little industrial estate at Libby's Drive and the stream vanishes behind the car park of one of the units.  I brave barbed wire and lean precariously round another willow, pushing aside curtains of ivy, to see the last of it before it plunges into the depths of Stroud.  My eye is also caught by a treeful of catkins and the first real new leaves I've seen this year.

Turning to retrace my steps, I'm startled to find the field now occupied by horses, which seem to have sprung out of nowhere.  They must have been hidden by a fold in the ground, or else this field has a corridor to the other one in some way I haven't quite figured.  The horses are equally startled to see me, and retreat rapidly to higher ground, where they line up to watch me nervously, as if I was an interesting but dangerous animal, which, now I come to think about it, I suppose I am, species-ally speaking.  Ironically, it's clear that they are a lot more worried by me than I am by them.

Interesting poo?
Skirting the wooded hill, my eye is caught by some attractive poo.  Now I realise this makes me sound worryingly like Chris Packham, but it really was.  About an inch across, round and wrinkled like a walnut, shining in the midday sun, and unlike anything I've noticed before.  What makes poo like that?  Add it to the UQL.

I often find I notice things on my way back from a walk that I missed on the way out, as if my eyes are more 'tuned in' after several hours of solid looking.  This one is no exception - here's a six-trunked hazel clump I missed before, and here, on the opposite side of the stream, I catch the sparkle of water in a hole in the bank. It's like one of those pixellated pictures you have to stare at for a while to realise what it is - at first it's a hole, and then after a while I see the contours of a pipe in the ground, shrouded in grass and ferns.  My guess is that it's a spring or small tributary which has been pushed into a pipe to take it away from the houses above.  The pipe has fractured close to the stream, and what I saw was the water glittering in the resulting hole.

I'm back in the Slade House field, with the sound recorder turned off and the cameras put away, when I happen upon three more deer, grazing the field and luckily turned away from me.  I manage to get several snaps before they notice my movement and run.  Dangerous animal, you see.  If we weren't such a self-confident species, the fact that almost every other species prefers to avoid us if possible might worry us more.

Google map of this walk

Afterword:  A year after I did this walk, this block of fields between the brook and Summer Street is under threat of development into a huge housing estate.  If this plan goes ahead, the area I walked would become a so-called 'Country Park' - a curious name for the blatant urbanisation of a bit of real countryside, and probably no more than a half-way house to building on it later on.  So my comments on my species being dangerous now seem remarkably apposite.