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.

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.

Walk 19: Footprints in the Frost - Snows Farm Nature Reserve (revisit)

A new year, a new set of walks.  Although I've not yet been able to finish my first full traverse of the Slad Brook, because I haven't yet been able to get permission to walk the last part of the brook as it approaches Stroud, I've decided to get cracking on what I'm calling the 'second pass', revisiting selected parts of the valley to see them at a different season, under different conditions, from how I saw them the first time.

So here we are, at 7.30 am on a freezing January morning.  It's minus 5 degrees when I leave the house and everything is thick with frost.  Winter has finally arrived, if temporarily.  To look at it now, you wouldn't think that for most of this month it's been 10 degrees or more during the day and last week the birds were clearly thinking about nesting, to judge from the racket of birdsong in the garden. Clear skies arrived a couple of days ago, and with them sunshine and frost.

My aim today is to see the valley under frost, hence the early start.  I've decided to head to the Snows Hill nature reserve because I have a yen to see the long view of the valley you get from the north western side of the reserve. Within minutes of leaving the car, my fingers are frozen.  Photography is clearly going to be more of a challenge than usual.  I also intended to do some drawing.  Hmm.

Dawn from Snows Farm

As I climb over the stile by Snows Farm, the dawn is showing red above the hills ahead of me; away to my right, a crescent moon is paling into a duck-egg blue sky. There's a faint rumble of early-morning traffic and other human starting-the-day noises in the distance; otherwise it's very quiet - none of the bird-chatter that greeted me in my own garden.  The air is sharp but still.  The ground is hard and nubbly with frost.  The bones of the land are more than usually visible; the raised lines of the former track that leads down to the Roman Bridge stand out clearly in the field before me.

By the time I reach the entrance to the reserve, a great tit is trying out his voice in the trees by the stream.  I try to keep my own noise to a minimum, in hopes of seeing deer or similar, but it's extraordinarily difficult to walk quietly on frozen ground.  I crunch and clump my way forward like a herd of rhinos in a wrapping-paper factory. Pheasants whirr away from me, shrieking a warning to anyone who hasn't already heard my thunderous progress.

I'm walking northwards on the western side of the stream.  Here, the frost is light, but on the other side of the valley the sun has clearly not penetrated at all and three days of frost lie as thickly as a sprinkling of snow.

Long view from the nature reserve

My goal is the grassy bit from which the valley drops down to the stream so steeply that it's almost like a cliff.  Here I sit down on one of the strange grassy hummocks dotted about this area.  (Anthills, they are, I later discover.)  Anyway they make good (if chilly) seats.  The view I came for, the long view down the valley, is a symphony in black and brown and white, like a sepia photo with the contrast turned up.  My technology is complaining about the cold - camera batteries don't like minus 5, apparently. So it's back to manual methods of recording.  Out come the sketchbook and watercolour pencils.  Fingers don't like minus 5 much, either, but I talk them into it.  Just a quick sketch, OK?  

Actually, it's my kind of scene.  Few uncertainties in this landscape, lots of shape and no confusing colour; even the undergrowth has a clear form, and the frost follows lines which reveal the shape of the field.  Leafless trees stand out like punctuation marks.  In the frost-laden field opposite, the resident posse of ponies stand about looking more than usually solid in their winter rugs.  I have background music for my work from a song thrush (I think) in the trees down by the stream. One of his repeated phrases reminds me of my Spanish language homework - 'todavia, todavia, todavia' he seems to be saying.  A pheasant glides silently past me down the valley, unexpectedly graceful.  You don't often see pheasants just gliding, as opposed to the loud, clockwork-toy-whirring flight you get when you disturb them.

Winter sketch

There's no incentive to over-work this sketch; I stop when my fingers (and seat) go numb.  I'm hoping the sun will appear over the hill in the next half hour or so and light up the valley, but staying still is no longer an option, so I walk on into the reserve.  It looks very different from how I last saw it, back in the summer.  With no leaves on the trees and all the undergrowth dying back, the structure of the place is much clearer.  Even from up the hillside I can see the stream through its necklace of trees and I can see all its crossing-points.  Footpaths are stark lines on the frozen ground.  I wouldn't have got so lost if I'd done my first walk now, rather than in summer when everything is swathed in undergrowth.

Stream and skeletal willows

The shape and extent of the Old Shop ruins are also clear to see, as are a large number of small, scrabbled holes in the ground within the walls.  They are just scrapes, as if someone was trying to lay bare the roots of the plants growing there.  Rabbits?  Badgers?  No sign of the great tits who nested here earlier in the year, or of the foxes whose earth I spotted in the copse beyond.

I loop down to the stream which threads its way through a skeleton of willow and alder.  To me, it's more beautiful with its bones exposed like this than it was when the trees were all green.  Its banks are covered by a carpet consisting of equal parts dead leaves and live tiny plants, all their details picked out in frost crystals.  As the close-up camera seems to have pulled itself together now, I spend some time capturing these intricacies.  Detail, you see - I can't resist it.  The frost effect has the same appeal for me as glass engraving; it makes ordinary things look extraordinary, and hyper-real.

Across the stream on the south-eastern side of the valley the frost is even more extraordinary in close-up.  Three successive unthawed frosts have lengthened and thickened every ice crystal until twigs and grasses look as if they're wearing a very chilly fur coat.  The frost is thick enough to take impressions and the imprint of the ponies' hooves is everywhere, as are the slots of deer, or possibly sheep.  The small flock of black woolly sheep is rooting around by the stream, pausing to regard me with vague alarm, as do the various pheasants wandering around, very obvious with little or no undergrowth to give them cover.  That must give the foxes a head start.

Annoyingly, it's clouding up now, and the sun is obviously not going to make an appearance after all.  Oh well.  Time to head for home before my fingers and toes get frostbite.  As I walk back up the road from the farm, snowdrops are visible in small clumps on the verge.  A bit early, perhaps, but seasonable.  The daffodil clumps are also shooting up fast, and one of them even has an early bud, presumably a product of all the mild weather we had over Christmas.  So far, it looks like an early spring is on the cards, but who knows?  Personally, I'd like a bit more frost and cold, clear weather, maybe even a little snow, to make a proper winter before we get spring.  But nature has no sense of tradition, so I wouldn't count on it.

Walk 18 - The case of the disappearing stream: Hazel Mill

Hazel Mill

This walk covers a section of the Slad Brook which is flanked on one side by Stroud Slad Farm, and on the other side by the garden of the house called Hazel Mill.  It's called Hazel Mill for the very good reason that it used to be a mill, and its garden contains the remains of one of the mill buildings, an old leat, and a waterfall, all of which I got tantalising glimpses of when I walked this section of the brook from the opposite side, through Stroud Slad Farm.  By the kindness of the owners of the house, I'm now going to get a closer look.

Hazel Mill is a large and attractive old house on the western side of the valley, sitting between the stream and the main road.  I'm not clear (and neither is my reference book) whether any of the current house was actually used as a mill, but there is a second building in the garden which definitely was a mill used in the woollen industry during the 19th century.  The garden, like most in this valley, is on a steep slope.  I'm given the opportunity to explore on my own.  Well, I say on my own - in fact, I acquire a companion very early on in the proceedings, in the shape of a black-and-tan dog with a hopeful expression and a tennis ball in his mouth.  I harden my heart and resist his attempts to hypnotise me into throwing the ball, because we all know where that leads...

Hazel Mill owns another piece of secret stream, in the shape of the old leat, which runs at right angles to the buildings like a pointing finger, extending out into the fields beyond.  I start by walking to the far end of the leat, so that I can find out how and where it joins up with the stream.  I read a definition of 'leat' on Wikipedia recently (It's a southwestern word, apparently - these water channels are called other things elsewhere in the country) and this one would seem to be a textbook example.  It diverges from the stream in a Y-junction a hundred yards or so from the house, then runs along the contour towards the mill while the stream itself continues down the slope, so that by the time the leat water reaches the mill there's enough height differential to power the mill wheel.

So far, so good.  The leat diverges from the stream at the top end of a triangular piece of thick scrub which I remember noting on the Stroud Slad Farm walk, because it was firmly fenced off and I wasn't able to see the stream through the undergrowth.  At first, I can’t work out why I couldn’t see this very obvious junction from the other side of the fence, but walking across the apex of the triangle I see the problem – at the apex, the leat forms one side of the triangle and the main stream does appears to form the other, but within a few yards, it has vanished altogether.  A fierce combination of thick undergrowth and fences frustrate my attempts to see exactly what has happened to it, but I’m forced to the conclusion that it’s gone underground.  Remains of low brick walls on this bit of land which make me wonder if this was another holding pond or other mill stream structure.  As with so much of the stream, this area is such a mess of undergrowth and fallen wood, that it's hard to see exactly what’s happening to the ground, but there does appear to be a depression, or gully, where the line of the main stream ought to be.

View up the leat

Once again, there's this feeling of being enclosed - afloat in a capsule of stream-world bobbing in a sea of fields.  A substantial bank separates the leat from the stream, growing more substantial as the height difference increases.  The top of it is flat and grassy, reminding me of a canal towpath.  A thin coating of trees separates the further side of the leat from the open field beyond, and the bank side is wooded and well-scrub-ed, so to speak.  The leafless branches of ivy-hung trees meet overhead.   One, a large one, has collapsed comprehensively across the stream and been partially sawn up to allow passage, but large chunks of it remain locked in the arms of the other trees.

The leat is a good size, three feet wide or more and very busy with water.  It's fringed with reedy grasses and clumps of what might be irises (it’s December – no flowers!), ferns and patches of dead leaves.  The long view down its length, with the green path winding away from me and the filigree of tree branches, is very attractive.  Everything is soft shades of brown and green, gentle and quiet, like today's weather, which is unexpectedly mild and damp after a week of low temperatures and frosts .  There's no wind, which is unusual in the valley this year.

My canine friend decides that I’m not a ball person.  Maybe a stick will please me?  Or a stone?  Surely the stone?  It’s quite a large stone and after he has lovingly placed it on my foot a couple of times I give up and throw it purely to get him out from under my feet.  It falls into the leat, and the dog enthusiastically plunges in after it, drawing my attention to a pile of pale feathers spilling from the opposite bank into the stream.  Some bird, a pigeon by the look of it, met its end here recently, or, from another point of view, a fox got a meal which was probably much appreciated at this season.

Throw it?  Please?!

Branching off down the bank to investigate the depression where I think the main stream ought to run, I find that it's very boggy, which is suggestive.  And a little further on I come to a point where a tributary stream, running down one of the Stroud Slad Farm field boundaries, meets the line of this depression and does a dog-leg to join it.  By the time this gully reaches the main garden, it's clear that this has become the main stream again.  So what happened in between?  Is it that the leat takes off so much water that the main stream becomes just a bog until fed with more water from the tributary?  This doesn't quite add up because the main stream was visible for the first few yards after the leat water was taken off.  A mystery.

My friend the dog has found a new, and increasingly muddy, stone which he continues to lay beseechingly before me, but which I’m not going to throw.  Really, really not.

There is a point here where you can see a brick edging to the leat, submerged in moss now, but the individual bricks still visible in some places.  And here is a glass bottle which has the air of having been in the water for a long time.  It looks old, but once it’s in water, it doesn't take long for glass to start looking ancient, so who knows?  (I've discovered that a side-effect of the mood of intense looking that these walks generate is the risk of investing unexpected objects with spurious qualities of age and importance!)

Flounces of fungi

I've come to the stump of what was once quite a big tree, adorned with tendrils of ivy and frilly flounces of fungi.  I'm sure this has been a particularly good year for fungi – it can't just be that I'm noticing them more, can it?

The dog decides that perhaps his stone is too small to be a worthy offering.  He finds a much larger one which, when dropped on my foot repeatedly, does at least get my attention.  But it's much too big to throw, and really too big for him to carry around easily.  This confirms my opinion of the intelligence of dogs, viz, low, compared with cats.  A cat would have wasted no time in getting me to carry the stone.

I've arrived at stone slab in the path, which crosses a channel running out of the leat and down the bank.  The channel looks like an overflow, designed to take off surplus water if the level in the leat rises above a certain height.  It was presumably intended to flow into the stream, but appears to stop short of the gully where I think the stream should be.  So was the main stream originally wider, possibly covering the area where some of the trees are now growing?

Triple tree sentinel

I'm now entering what the owners obviously think of as the main garden.  Ahead of me are mown lawns and the crash of falling water.  Standing like a sentinel at the end of the wooded area is a very handsome triple-stemmed tree – three equal trunks soaring up out of the same root.  Multiple trees are a feature of this garden; a gleam of sunshine lights up another one down by the stream, with quintuple – or possibly sextuple – trunks grown to a considerable height.  It shows what these streamside trees are capable of when they've really got space to express themselves.

The dog has finally got the message that I don’t want the stone.  In desperation, he brings me a branch, and when I pick it up (to avoid falling over it) he runs so hilariously in tight circles that I can’t resist throwing it. Good move.  He dashes off before the branch has left my hand which means he misses seeing where it falls and ends up running all over the garden looking for it – giving me the chance to get down by the leat and make an undisturbed sound recording of the water running over a single large stone.  Otherwise, the leat itself has been very quiet, running smoothly and mostly unimpeded by debris.

I'm now joined by a second dog, larger, browner and more solid, but while apparently glad of my company, this one doesn't seem to require me to throw anything, thank goodness.

There are now grassy banks on both sides of the water and a board bridge carrying a path across it from higher up.  Halfway across the garden, I come to the main event.  The water from the leat turns left through a sluice gate, plunges rather spectacularly over a waterfall and flows back into the small stream below, which, augmented by the extra water, clearly becomes the main brook. The stern practicality of the sluice gates is rather undermined by a jauntily-castellated stone wall which makes the waterfall look more like a garden feature than a piece of industrial engineering.  Although the water now all goes down the fall, the leat is still visible as a grassy channel, running straight ahead to the old mill building and ending in a fenced-off drop into the mill wheel chamber.  Presumably the original idea was that the sluice gates would be closed to build up the water pressure to the mill wheel.

And that's the big surprise of today - when I follow the line of the leat to the old mill building, I'm astonished to find that the original mill wheel is still there, suspended under a brick arch and well below me.  Visible, but barely photographable, because it's well fenced off for safety.  The building itself is in pretty good shape and I'm told that more of the old mill machinery survives inside.  I scramble through bramble and nettles to the back of the building but find no windows into the working parts of the mill.

The main brook is now in a deep, walled channel flowing alongside the end of the mill building.  By the corner of the building is an old pumping mechanism labelled ‘Blake’s Hydram’, the work of ‘John Blake Ltd engineers, Accrington, Lancashire’.  The dog and I examine it carefully.  After that, the stream plunges into a mess of undergrowth and out of my ken for today.  Not wanting to outstay my welcome, I leave the world of leat and mill behind and walk up past the house where a prominently-displayed Christmas tree reminds me how close we are to The Big Day now – it doesn’t feel like it, in fact it feels more like spring today.

This is another walk that turned out more interesting than expected - the length of the leat, the view of the mill buildings and the mill wheel were all great discoveries.  Plus the dog.  I definitely hadn’t expected him.  My indefatigable friend makes one final attempt to delay my departure by bringing me the very dead remains of a football which I am not at all tempted to throw.  I leave him disconsolately punting it around with his nose.

The view from the main road is one of the best of this end of the valley.  It strikes me once again that trees are one of the beauties of this time of year, whether close up or in distant view.  Close up, they are individual, calligraphic scribbles against a pale winter sky.  At a distance, woods and tree-lined field boundaries are now strong, angular shapes, no longer fuzzy-edged with leaf,  emphasising the swell and fall of the fields.   Every winter I vow to use the opportunity to get to know the different tree species by their shapes so that I can recognise them without reference to their leaves. (And do I do it?  Not so far.  Still, it’s a good ambition.)

Enough fun for one day - time to go home and wrap Christmas presents.

Google map of the water structure for this walk

Walk 17 - Sluice gates and secret stream: Upper Vatch Mill

Two and a bit weeks to Christmas, and in the midst of days of rain, sleet and even the occasional snow flurry, we have a morning of bright blue skies, fluffy clouds and sunny intervals.  Oh, and a side helping of icy wind, but you can't have everything at this time of year.  I'm catching up on a bit of brook that got missed out earlier on, due to inefficient scheduling.  I'm in the garden of Upper Vatch Mill, courtesy of the owners, walking their section of the brook, which lies between the Painswick Slad Farm field and the garden of Vatch House.

From the field side, I was able look down and see (and hear) the weir which tumbles the brook into a culvert through this garden – now I’ve come to look at it from in front.  The first, and unexpected, thing I discover is that Upper Vatch Mill has a bit of secret stream. I hadn’t realised, looking at it from the field, that their garden includes a short section of the brook before it falls over the weir.  I’ve rather over-used the word ‘secret’ in relation to the Slad Brook, because of the way it is largely shrouded in trees, but this little bit really does feel secret because it's fenced off on three sides as well.

Secret stream

As so often by this stream,  I'm standing in the deep green shade of trees looking out at sunny fields, like a traveller at dusk looking at lighted windows.  Specifically, I'm looking back into the Painswick Slad Farm field, where the bullocks are looking back at me in some surprise.  But also, from the bit of bank I'm standing on, I can, most unusually, look straight up the middle of the stream.  The reason for this is that the stream does an odd wiggle here so that this section of bank is projecting into the main flow like an elbow. By standing on the point of the elbow, I can look back up a long, straight section flanked on both sides by tall trees.  The trees have all lost their leaves and look even more than usually architectural as a result.  It’s like looking up a watery corridor in some sort of palace with fan vaulting designed by an architect with a hangover.  Out comes the camera, but as usual I struggle to capture this cathedral-like quality.  It’s another area where the camera falls short compared with the eye.  By flicking my eyes up and down, I can see at almost the same moment the whole corridor of trees from the spreading filigree of branches overhead to the point where the roots reach into the stream.  The camera can’t, even on widest angle.  Why not draw it, I hear you say?  Do you know what the temperature is out here today?  Not much above freezing, and that's before the wind chill factor.  My hands are already frozen from taking my gloves off to operate the camera.  Instead, I try taking a short movie, panning up and down, which might give a better idea of it.  Judge for yourself how well I succeeded (not very!).

This 'secret stream' is also unusual because while on the opposite side of the brook the banks slope down to the water in the normal way, on this side there is 10-15 feet of flat land beside the brook, and then a bank which slopes up into the field beyond.  For some reason the trees have chosen to grow on the bank, not by the stream in the usual way, so this little bit of flat land, covered in dead leaves, nettles and fallen wood, is like a tiny bit of no-man’s-land, neither brook nor field.  It's like a long narrow tray with a lip round the edge.  It's only after I've been walking up and down it for a while that the obvious conclusion occurs to me - this was probably once a section of a man-made channel, designed to be much wider than the stream itself, and part of the mill system.

There were indeed once mill buildings in the grounds of Upper Vatch Mill, though according to the owners the house itself was never part of the mill.  The mill buildings were somewhere in the garden, nearer to the weir – which makes sense.  Evidently it was all part of the Vatch Mills complex which included Vatch House and its leat.

We've had a lot of rain in the last week and the stream is fuller than it was, and fast-flowing here.  Walking back down the 'secret stream' towards the house, I can hear the weir well before it comes into view.  It's good to be able to get close up to the stream - in the last few walks, it's been mostly fenced off - but it means clambering over a lot of dead wood, such as this hazel whose main trunk has completely collapsed. But it's still alive - a mass of slender new stems have sprung up from the roots, young turks taking advantage of the fall of the grand old man to make a bid for their place in the sun.  The main trunk is covered in rampant ivy.  Almost the only green around here comes from the jackets of ivy leaves on the trees, and the occasional fern, but even then it's an apologetic, knocked-back green.  Otherwise I'm surrounded by browns, buffs and greeny-browns.  No strong colour anywhere except in the (temporary) blue of the sky.  The winter sun is so low that its light bounces blindingly off the water straight into my eyes, turning the house to a Gothic silhouette.   The drama of winter light - I love it. The camera doesn't, apparently, since it keeps trying to compensate for the massive backlighting with flash.

Jelly fungus

Here is an intriguingly revolting sort of fungus growing on the side of a fallen tree, and it's a new one on me – like brown jelly with a bit of pale jelly on top, which I suppose is a new growth.  I've seen a lot of interesting fungi this autumn and I meant to find out more about them, but when I happened across a reference book on fungi it was so huge, and so complicated, that flicking through its pages I rapidly lost the will to live.

By the weir the stream turns sharply to the right and goes through what would once have been sluice gates.  Sections of wall remain on either side with a large tree growing out of one end of the wall.  The gates themselves are mostly gone but on one side the gatepost remains and you can see the channel cut in the stone where the gate would have run.  On the other side, the stone has fallen over, partly blocking the gap, and the whole thing is covered in swathes of ivy.  Nevertheless, the stream is finding its way through; water can always find a way.  I catch glimpses of small birds nipping in and out of the ivy and dodging under the undercuts in the stone and guess that it must be a pair of wrens.  I'm proved right when one of them appears right in front of me, shouting abuse. Size is no guide to chutzpah in birds - I'm always amazed by the boldness of wrens compared with the relative wimpishness of magpies.  I watched a magpie being seen off by a wagtail once, but that's by the by.

Remains of sluice gates

Beyond the sluice gates the water rushes through the gap, down the stone steps of the weir, and vanishes into the arched entrance of a stone culvert.  Above the culvert is an old terrace fenced with decorative stonework which is also somewhat battered and broken, and what with that, and the ivy, and the fallen blocks by the sluice gate, the area has the feel of the ruins of some sort of temple.

In my mind I try to reconstruct what all this might have looked like when it was a working mill.  It's hard to see exactly how the water was supposed to run.  There are three streams of water coming over the weir, only one of which comes through the main gap where the sluice would have been.  The other two come from a sort of tunnel on the further side of the weir and what looks like a deliberate gap in the wall beside the sluice.  On the far left of weir is what was obviously another run-off channel, with more moss-covered stonework at the top of it, so presumably some of the water could have been diverted down it.  From this angle, by the weir, I can see a sharp little bank at right angles to the sluice which could well have been the edge of a mill pond, if that's what that flat area by the stream was.  But if so, shouldn't the sluice gates have been higher up rather than at the level of the current stream?  I give up my speculation and concentrate on recording the sounds of the weir and of the stream running into the culvert with a satisfyingly hollow glopping.

Weir and terrace

Following the underground line of the culvert, I walk past the house and across the bottom of the garden to where the water reappears through another stone arch.  It pools in an impromptu pond in front of the arch before rushing over a lip and down into the garden of Vatch House, making a good deal of noise about it.  Standing on the boundary between the two gardens, I can see why.  The cause is the Great Flood of 2007.  Originally there was a wall – it's now hard to see where it ran - which was completely demolished by the flood water and its debris still lies in the stream, forcing the water into rapids and rivulets.  Looks like the flood also carried part of a fence away at the same time because there are bits of wire and whatnot all over the shop.

Giant toadstools

Here's an interesting thing.  When I was walking this end of the Vatch House garden a couple of weeks ago, I photographed some tiny toadstools growing on a tree.  I can see them now - grown to four or five times their original size in a mere fortnight.

The owner of Upper Vatch Mill was talking about wanting to restore the sluice gates and the stonework if he ever had the money to do it, and that would be really interesting to see, but I’ve been very glad to see the stream and the remnants of the mill  as they are now, on this cold, bright winter morning, just as time has left them.  All low light, long shadows and gentle decay.

The sun is still out, so on my way home I detour up Swift’s Hill to get the last of it.  Over the apex of the hill, one of the local kestrels is being mobbed by a couple of rooks.  Much higher up, a buzzard floats undisturbed, sunning his wings.  On the way back, I spot a single spray of white flowers growing out of the hedge in the lane, and a rosebush in the garden of Knapp House is sporting two perfect red rosebuds.  Small intimations of spring in the depths of winter.  Odd,  but cheerful.

Google map of this walk

Walk 16 - In winter dormancy: Wade's Farm field

 It's a cold Wednesday morning, but sunny - and this time of year one grabs sunshine whenever it shows up.  So I'm going out to walk the next section of the brook after Stroud Slad farm.  From here on, it looks like it's going to be lots of short walks, because as it gets closer to Stroud, ownership of the land the brook runs through gets more and more piecemeal and co-ordinating permissions gets more complicated.  Today, it's a single field's width belonging to Wade's Farm.

We are very much into winter now.  There has been frost this week, though not today, and the trees are almost bare, though some are still hanging onto their leaves in the face of the weather.

Oaks glowing in the sun

My walk begins along the main road in order to get access to the field in question.  Not so much fun, because of the traffic, but it has its compensations because of the views across the valley.  I don't actually walk along this part of the road much - I'm normally whizzing down to Stroud in the car, and though you can see the views from the car, you don't really get a sense of the size and 'presence' of the valley.  It's good to have a reason to walk this section and appreciate it.  The valley is now getting more concentrated, as it were.  As it gets narrower and steeper, the woods and fields and the road and the brook are all squeezed closer together like toothpaste forced out of a tube. (Stroud as the exit point of a toothpaste tube.  Is that a happy mental picture?)   The fields are increasingly lumpy and bumpy, and flat land is in ever shorter supply.  I can see most of the route I walked through Stroud Slad Farm's fields a few weeks ago - interesting to follow it from above.  A few trees still have leaves, in particular the oak trees which appear occasionally in Stroud Slad's hedgelines.  Today these few oaks are glowing in the winter sun, unexpected beacons of colour amidst the mass of grey, skeletal trees about them.

I enter the field close to a significant hairpin bend in the road.  It slopes steeply and is currently well soaked and squidgy with recent rain.  There is the occasional flower - small dandelion-relatives - still hiding in the grass, which says something about how warm this autumn has been, I guess.  As I squelch my way down to the stream, I disturb a deer lurking in the trees by the water and a squirrel or two.  The stream runs along the bottom in quite a steep little cleft.  The owner of the field reckons that it's only half as full as it used to be in earlier years.  He says he used to see water voles and other wildlife down here which he thinks have now disappeared because the water level has fallen.  Higher up the valley, some parts of the stream run in a much flatter bed and give the impression that it couldn't hold much more water than currently, but just here, it's obvious from the shape of the banks that it could be a lot deeper, and has been in the past.

Steep banks and low water

There's the inevitable barbed-wire fence along the stream and I spend a little time looking for a way through it.  There is a dip in the wire and a corresponding dip in the ground scraped by animals pushing their way under the fence but it's not a big enough dip for this animal to follow so I have to stay on this side of it.

Half way along the field and by the stream is an old stone building -  a barn, I think, though round here there's always the possibility that it's a bit of ex-mill.  It does have some curious winding gear sticking out of one side of it and there is old machinery lost in a clump of brambles behind it.  On the other side of the barn the fence has moved and it's possible to get down to the stream.  The opposite bank is steep, sandy and sharply cut-in, like a miniature cliff.  Most of the stream doesn't really have the kind of bank you can imagine water voles living in, but just here it does seem possible.  And indeed, there is a small hole down by the water, though I very much doubt it belongs to a water vole.  No 'lawn', for a start.  What else makes holes by the stream?  Rats?  Kingfishers?  My list of UQs (Unanswered Questions) grows longer.

Lover's knot in hazel

Growing right into the middle of the stream at this point is a massive multi-stemmed hazel clump, elbowing everything else out of its way, including the fence.  One of its trunks has managed to grow through and round a fork in one of the other trunks, creating a curious lovers' knot in the middle of the tree.  The shapes of trees feature heavily in memories of the stream so far - mine and the camera's - so I have a feeling they are going to find their way into my work.  As will the ivy that so often covers them.  There's a splendid specimen here, clothing the tortuous trunks of a willow like a coat of chain-mail.  Up to this point, the stream has been flowing quite quietly with little interest for my sound recorder, but the obstruction of the hazel's roots and their load of trapped debris creates some good trickling noises.

From here on, trees grow only on one side of the stream, allowing more greenery to spring up on this side, including something which looks a lot like watercress but probably isn't, and the occasional clump of irises.  The stream is bridged by a fallen branch from a willow which is so straight that at first glimpse I assume it's a pipe of some sort.  The illusion is helped by the hollow noise the stream makes running over and under it.  Noises are actually in rather short supply this morning - pausing to take in the general atmosphere of this field, it seems to me that 'quiet' about sums it up.  Not much noise, not much activity, unless you count the traffic.  I've heard very few birds and seen very few insects.  No spiders, slugs, snails or anything.  Even the squirrels seem to have gone to ground.  Winter dormancy reigns - even the plants by the stream give the impression of having battened down the hatches until spring.

The end of the field is marked by a very definite red brick edifice, the wall of someone's garden.  Beyond here, the stream is flanked on this side by houses - the first tendrils of Stroud reaching up into the valley.  The wall looks old and extremely solid, topped by a massive ruff of ivy (well, better than barbed wire) but down at its base is a small hole.  I like the thought of some little animal industriously setting out to undermine this great barrier for its own purposes.  There's been evidence all up and down the stream of how unimpressed the rest of the mammal kingdom is by our human boundaries.  They just patiently set about finding a way over, under or through them.

I start to make my way back along the field to the barn and I'm pausing to contemplate the view back up the field and around the curve of the road - another perspective on the valley that I've never seen before - when a movement catches my eye.  It's a grey heron landing in the field with a flurry of big wings.  He then proceeds to stalk slowly towards the stream with a stiff, old-gentleman gait, pausing every few steps with head and neck thrust forward, the better to watch and listen.  So intent is he on the stream that he doesn't notice me and continues his stately stalk for some minutes before disappearing into the undergrowth.

Elated by my heron encounter, I get brave enough to shimmy under the barbed wire for a closer look at the stream in the earlier part of the field.  Down here, throwing up multiple stems seems to be the order of the day for trees - they are all at it, even the hawthorns.   I remind myself to look up - it's so easy to go around seeing only the bottom halves of trees, failing to appreciate their full height and the complexity of the canopy - and am rewarded by a spark of brilliant colour as a jay flashes away from a branch above me.

I'm glad I persisted with the fence, because from this side of it, I can now see that there's a small tributary stream running into the brook.  From the other side, it was very thoroughly hidden by a group of sagging and half-collapsed willows, their limbs gnarled and rheumaticky-looking.  They have no leaves, but I'm pretty confident that they are willows because of their fantastically heavy-duty bark, like flock wallpaper writ large.  This small stream winds down the field crossing and re-crossing the field boundary with blithe disregard for human fences.  I trace it back to a tiny trickle of water not far below the road.  By now the afternoon is getting short on light and warmth, so I decide to call it a day and go home for tea.

Google map of this walk