Walk 35: A Wild Wood - Trantershill Plantation

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

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

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

Beech-roofed track

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

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

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

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

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

Ivy arch

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

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

Jelly-Ear fungus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google map of this walk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hurricane damage?

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

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

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

Wild Clematis

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

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

Wild Carrot seed head

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

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

Sunlight on tree trunks

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

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

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

Eye marks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walk 29: Duckling Dramas - Steanbridge Estate (revisit)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lone oak tree

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

A narrow escape for ducklings

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

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

Walk 28: Cow Parsley Cappucino - Steanbridge Mill and the duck pond (revisit)

We're well into the luxurious heart of spring, now, and I'm paying a second visit to the short section of stream which runs from the garden of Steanbridge Mill to the beginning of the Steanbridge Estate, via the duck pond. I can't really claim that this is anything but an indulgence, this walk, since I'm not doing it at a very different time of year from last time, but this little stretch was so lovely in late spring last year that I can't resist going to see it again.

I'm about a month earlier than last time, and the ground either side of the narrow path is almost waist-high in variations on the theme of cow parsley/wild carrot/Queen Anne's Lace - take your pick - plus nettles, goose-grass, wild garlic, ragged robin and all manner of other spring rampage.  If you crouch down on the path to take low-level photos, it feels like being in a miniature rain forest.  The variety of shapes, colours and patterns holds me spellbound for a while.  I'm particularly taken with a nettle-like plant with intricate yellow markings on the lower lip of its flower, which (with a bit of imagination) reminds me of a maharajah sitting under a ceremonial parasol. (Later I discover that this rejoices in the ethereal name of Yellow Archangel and is nothing to do with nettles.) The meandering line of the path stands out more clearly, cutting through the green shagginess around it.  Strong shadows tiger-stripe the ground and the trees stand up straight and dark like spoons in green coffee.  Must be a cappucino - there's a froth of cow parsley on top.

I remind myself to look up as well as down.  Above me, the canopy is a lacy, fresh spring green, that green which is as close to yellow as it can be and still be green, with the slender dark lines of branches scribbled against it.  And I can look out as well in; through the windows in the stream's cloak of trees, I can see white cattle grazing in the fields.  White cattle against spring-green grass, with a frame of dark branches, causes the camera to throw up its hands in horror and complain of too much contrast.

The stream itself is barely visible in the midst of all this richness, and it looks on the low side to me.  There is a good sized fringe of mud along most of its edge, attractively marked in some places with the prints of duck webs, like the scalloping on a pie crust.  I look for lampreys and find nothing but a determined-looking beetle dog-paddling in the shallows.  The duck pond, however, is satisfactorily full of ducks, including a party of newish ducklings.  While I'm wandering around its upper end, looking at the shapes and variety of the plantlife, one of them comes determinedly staggering up to me and almost runs over my foot, which appears to be in the way of somewhere he wants very much to go.

Maybe a murderer?

By the bridge that carries the footpath, someone has been throwing down grain, and mother duck and the rest of the brood are industriously hoovering it up, which makes them more amenable than usual to being photographed.  More ducklings are surging across the water to join them.  Just when the scene couldn't get more cuddly, I notice that one of the ducklings in the water is upside down and, on closer examination, clearly dead.  Not a heron or pike, presumably, since the body is still here.  Another duck?  A duckling is a very fragile thing to be, and according to nature, infinitely expendable.  Maybe it was the male mallard (I believe they are famously short-tempered) who is paddling around and flashing his irridescent green neck at me.

The ducklings aren't the only youngsters on the pond.  A trio of young moorhens, much shyer and less showy, are sticking close to their mother and hugging the island in the middle.

On my way back along the path, my eye is caught by an intriguing beetle, the same size and shape as a traditional ladybird, but bright orange with white spots.  Is this yet another example of the exciting but sinister harlequin ladybird, or something else entirely? Oh, the things I don't know would fill a library.  (And presumably do.)  There is so much to see here, even if you aren't actively looking for it, and so much to know.  Far more than anyone can feasibly discover in one lifetime.  You can't tell me that's right.

Walk 27: In the steps of the animals - Church Field (revisit)

Friday 13th, eh?  I shall have to watch my step.  It's a beautiful but chilly morning, after a frosty night.  A couple of weeks ago we had a really hot week and everyone got sunburned, followed by a very wet week, and now we seem to be back to winter.  I'm taking advantage of the fact that everything isn't yet growing like topsy to revisit Church Field.  My first walk here was in the early autumn, with a whole summer's growth to contend with.

As far as the birds are concerned, it's now well into spring.  There's a bluetit sitting on 8 eggs in my nestbox and home and plenty of birdsong here this morning, with a buzzing base line of flies and bees.  Last time I was here, the old grassy trackway which leads down into the field was flanked by battalions of nettles and summer flowers.  Today there are few flowers as yet, and the nettles are all still small and trying to be cute. Young leaves are rather like young animals - all neat and perfect and so much more charming than the grown-up version.  I remember a multiplicity of shapes of seed heads last time, and one or two of them are still here, because the field hasn't been cut. There are also quite a few ladybirds, the first cowslips, and a dusting of blue birdseye.  The sun is shining obliquely towards me from Swifts Hill, throwing deep shadows behind the hedgerows, breaking the landscape up into areas of heavy contrast. There are leaves on the smaller trees but not most of the larger ones, so I can still seeing strong shapes of individual trees in the general shadow. I pause to take photos - I'm working on an idea for what I think of as 'slices of landscape', narrow sections of the valley view with particular interest in terms of colour or shape.  There are plenty to choose from.

The grass here is springy and soft, and apart from the path, very tussocky, like an ancient feather mattress.  It's beginning to recover its spring green from underneath, but there's plenty of tall brown died-off stuff because it hasn't been grazed this winter.  Dandelions are starting to come into their own, and I also spot celandines, and a tiny, perfect spider sitting in one of them.  A butterfly goes by me in a flurry of movement, too fast to be identified.  I hope it isn't regretting its decision to emerge, given the chill today.

Garlic flowers

At the bottom of the remains of the track, where it dives into a wooded area, nettles and wild garlic are fighting it out for ground space and the wild garlic is winning.  A few garlic flowers are already out, delicate as old lace, and the garlic leaves make strong sculptural shapes on the ground.  A strong smell of garlicky greenery surrounds me and orange-bottomed bumble bees are bumbling round the old silk mill spring and its shrine of stones.  The mill ruins are much more visible than before; I can now see that the wall runs all the way along the bank, and I can also see, about 15 feet away, a small curved archway sunk deep in the ground.  Could this be the top end of the culvert which I saw the other end of, down by the stream?

This wooded bank is a lot more accessible now than it was in autumn and small animal paths are visible, criss-crossing through the garlic.  I follow one of them downwards until it peters out in a series of holes beneath the roots of a trio of beech trees growing on a sort of hummock.  The trees have all grown into one another, their roots entwined, and on one side the hummock seems to have fallen away beneath them, leaving a whole section of roots sitting on thin air.  To add to the weirdness, one of the trees has a rather  elegantly-stencilled number on its side.  By clambering precariously round and through a holly bush I can get round behind the trees and see that they appear to be growing on great hunks of stone.  Is this part of the old mill, or a natural stone outcrop? Impossible to tell.

Blackthorn blossom

Following another animal path leads me to another hole under the roots of a tall tree hung with thick and furry ropes of ivy, like cats' tails.  It's well dug around, so perhaps it's a badger sett, and I've been following a badger path.  The path continues on its meandering way around this sloping bit of scrubland.  Bits of stone appear through the undergrowth in many places, and here's a tree growing on what looks like the remains of a wall.  I wonder what you'd find if you dug down into all this - the remains of more of the mill, maybe?  The path runs on down into the field.  If the whole field is an L-shape, I'm in now the short section of the L, and last time this part was so covered in deep undergrowth and head-high nettles that it was almost impossible to navigate.  My animal path continues down to the stream through the thicket of blackthorn and trees and bushes fringing the water.  I could follow it to the water if I was prepared to bend double, but I'm not.  The blackthorn is covered in blossom and the sun right behind it turns it to flurry of pearl.

I find a less exciting way to the edge of the stream.  Here is the island effect I saw before, between the main stream and a dry ditch, and at one end of the ditch is a stone arch identical to the one up by the mill ruins.  QED, I reckon - this is the other end of that culvert.  The ditch meanders round the island and joins up with the main brook, so presumably was the run-off for the culvert.  My noisy footsteps on last year's leaves startle something large in the undergrowth, which blunders away unseen, and something small, a wren, which, being a wren, remains to shriek abuse at me.

Following animal paths has served me well so far, so when I find another one at the further end of the stream, by the boundary with the next field, I follow it down the bank and beside the small tributary stream which runs down from the bend in the road, frightening blackbirds into spiky song as I go.  I couldn't get down this far, last time, for the undergrowth.  The bank is dotted with ladies-smock and primroses and I can hear a chiff-chaff but not, of course, see him.  Here is a hollow tree decorated with attractively minimalist ivy.  I peer inside it, but because I'm not Gerald Durrell, it's empty.  I can see that the path continues right down to the water, but not get there, because a tree has fallen across it, creating an arch which is just the right height for, say, a badger to pass underneath but not a clod-hopping human.  Back up the bank, now, then, and diagonally across the slope to get back to the gate, just in time to see a buzzard spread his wings and float down from a tree, over my head and into the valley.

Walk 26: The Last of the Brook - Stroud end of Slad Road

New leaves by stream

Our early summer has worn off.  After a week of temperatures in the teens and 20s, it's now not much more than 10 degrees, with a cold wind, though there is sunshine among the clouds.  I'm setting out to see what I can of the very last part of the Slad Brook, from where I last saw it to where it finally disappears into a major culvert close to central Stroud.  This is not so easy, as the brook runs behind numbers of private houses and a series of factories and workshops, like a footpath through a shooting estate - tolerated, but not (I have the impression) particularly welcomed.  In fact there only a few places where I can go to see it.  The first is Little Mill Court, a newish development of red brick houses which run right up to the back of the industrial estate in Libby's Drive.  From the far end of this road, I can just see the back of the Rycote factory, and catch a glimpse of the point where I last saw the stream, leaving the Rycote grounds.

In this estate, the stream is well below road-level, with steep banks, and is firmly fenced off on the pavement side with railings and heavy-duty fencing.  On the other side, the gardens of the houses slope right down to the water and most are either open to it, or have gates in their fences suggesting that their owners at least go and look at it now and then.   The brook runs behind one set of houses and in front of another for 50 yards or so and then disappears into a square concrete culvert covered by an iron grille which carries it underneath the road and into a different part of the estate.

Even here in this patch of neat and regulated housing, the stream gathers the last remnants of the countryside around it.  By the bridge which carries the road over the culvert is a young chestnut tree growing right down on the stream bank, its sticky buds bursting beautifully into leaf at my eye level, and further back are a couple of big pollarded willows and smaller trees growing on the bank. The stream is flanked by brambles, the odd wild buddleia, nettles and similar.  A patch of daffodils makes a bright spot under the trees.  A tiny path runs erratically along part of the bank – possibly a badger path?  The fences are no doubt a health and safety measure, but they also suggest a concern to keep this wildness at bay.

Little Mill Court

Part way along this first section is a concreted outflow with a fair amount of water coming into the main stream from the uphill direction, which could be either a tamed tributary, or just a water run-off from the houses higher up the hill.  On the other side of the bridge, the stream reappears from a neat concreted hole into a narrow, vertical-sided, stone-faced channel in front of another set of new houses.  It's even further below me now, and the opposite bank is buttressed by blocks of stone in cages of wire mesh, and topped off with severe iron railings.  The houses, built within the last few years, still look very new, their sharp edges and stark colours not yet mellowed by time.  On this side, the wall also has a crown of railings.  20 feet below, the stream runs on almost silently beside a small fringe of bank overgrown with grass, the hardier sorts of weeds and several burgeoning buddleias.  Neater and more domesticated bushes planted in the gardens opposite are pushing through the railings as if trying to see their wilder cousins below.  There is a minute children’s play area on this side of the railings before the stream disappears into more concrete.

From Slad Mill

Now the water travels under the beginning of Lansdown Road, underneath the handsome brick buildings which were once Slad Mill and are now residential apartments, to emerge on the other side behind the gardens of houses on Slad Road. From the car park by Slad Mill, I get a glimpse of it running straight as a silver arrow into the distance, flanked by more concrete and iron, but also by white cherry blossom and the unrealistically luminous green of a newly-leafed weeping willow.

Where does it go from here?  Stern signs warning ‘Beware Steep Bank and Water’ suggest that it runs beside the car park of the Salvation Army housing at Streamside, still running parallel with the main road.   Further towards Stroud, I turn off the road, following a  footpath sign down a concrete path past a bank studded with the golden stars of celandines, to a concrete bridge where I’m suddenly overwhelmed by the noise of water.  On the left, the stream appears from behind houses and plunges down a three-step weir with great force.

When this weir was new, not so very many years ago, it must have looked very stark and stern, but now the concrete wall is softened by a bead curtain of trailing bramble, and various plants and small trees are growing into the stream at the top of the weir. A yellow-chested wagtail flits up from the water as I arrive, and settles on a branch above the water where he poses for a surprisingly long time, long enough for me to coax my recalcitrant camera into focusing on him.

The weir and the wagtail

On the other side of the bridge the stream calms down and disappears behind the concrete backs of several light industrial buildings. It’s possible to get down onto a small bit of overgrown bank beside the bridge which gives a view of the water under the bridge and a brief sense of having re-entered the world of the stream.  On the flanking wall, someone has abandoned, or possibly concealed, a bottle in a bright blue plastic bag.  There is a fair amount of general litter in the stream here, the penalty of being in such close proximity to lots of human beings.  There’s something joyful about the weir, though, with its multiple waterfalls flashing in the sun, its tresses of brambles, and the jaunty yellow wagtail.  What’s odd is that the noise of the weir vanishes utterly as soon as I return to the main road, so that if it hadn’t been for the footpath sign, I wouldn't have discovered it.  I've been travelling along this road regularly for five years, and up to now I had no idea of the existence of the weir.

The very final glimpse of the Slad Brook is less joyful.  After passing another block of buildings I turn down an unnamed and slightly gloomy alleyway which leads to a scrubby open area of backs of buildings and car parking, and also to another tiny bridge and a view of the stream running behind old workshops.  Here are big iron gates saying ‘Danger Keep Out’ and ‘No Unauthorised Access’, more heavy-duty railings. and an iron grid allowing access to a big box on the wall which announces itself as a ‘River Level Measurement Station’ provided by the Environment Agency.  This, I'm guessing, has been installed since the Great Flood of 2007 when this end of the Slad Road was deep under water and people were jet-skiing on it.  Hard to imagine that now, looking at the stream, so small and close-trammelled in its concrete channel.  On one side are the red brick backs of old workshop buildings and on the other, more concrete and fences.  There are no banks to speak of, but nevertheless the stream still keeps its fringe of greenery, plants growing between the bricks, ivy and brambles climbing up the walls, small saplings sprouting from the water itself.  Nature takes every space you give it, and in some strange way I find that reassuring.  Underneath this little bridge, the stream vanishes into an altogether more final culvert.

The last bridge

An odd walk this, with quite a different feel to it from all the others.  For one thing, it’s the shortest section of audio I’ve recorded so far.  I've got used to talking to my sound recorder as I walk alone through the countryside, but feel massively self-conscious about doing it in the town, and there’s no doubt that this is now the town.  As I stand taking photographs of the last view of the stream as it disappears into the culvert, a woman leans out of her car and asks suspiciously what I’m doing.  When I explain that I’m photographing the stream (to reassure her that I’m not some sort of industrial spy), she tells me that there’s another bridge (she means the one by the weir), in the sort of tone that suggests she’d rather I wasn’t on this bridge.  OK, that may be paranoia, but I’ve noticed that other people (not just me) get more paranoid in towns.  Someone with a camera is just a regular sight in Slad village, with its fine views, but a source of suspicion in an alleyway in Stroud.

After this, the stream is underneath the buildings - possibly, or possibly not, in its culvert.  I'm told that in some of these houses the stream runs in an open channel through their cellars, and a few months ago, when work was being done on this end of the Slad Road, it was possible to hear the stream gurgling sepulchrally below the hole in the road.  But in any case, this is its last public appearance before it flows into the river Frome somewhere below central Stroud.  And beyond this point I’m no longer in the Slad Valley, by any stretch of the imagination. So this is the last of the valley, and my last view of the brook.