Walk 4 - Bridges and beasts: Snows Farm Nature Reserve

So far, I've done all my walks mid-morning, but I've been thinking that I should try to walk at different times of day, to see things in different lights.  So here I am at 7.30 am on a May morning of hazy sun, walking down the road towards the entrance to the Snows Farm Nature Reserve.  A black cat ambles across my path, which seems like a good omen.  As well as the normal paraphernalia - cameras, binoculars, sketchbook, sound recorder and mike - I have breakfast in my rucksack and feel rather pleased with myself for being this organised, this early in the morning.  I am not really an early morning person, you understand.

The easiest access to the Reserve is from the southern end, so the plan is to walk up through the Reserve from the bottom, along the higher part of the valley, then drop down to the stream when I reach the northern boundary, where I left off walking last time, then continue my walk back down the stream in the direction it flows.

View from stile by Snows Farmhouse

At Snow's Farmhouse I leave the road and the view from the stile holds me still for a few moments.  This is one of the valley's good viewpoints, looking one way into the hills and secret folds of the upper valley and the other way down towards Stroud.  As I cross the field towards the reserve, a bunch of reclining cows eye me askance, as if to say 'bit early for tourists, isn't it?'

The brook crosses the path just before the reserve and I become temporarily geographically challenged as I try to work out whether it's the Slad Brook here, or the Dillay. This end of the valley is confusing, with its various arms, not all of which can be seen from this angle.

The 'Roman Bridge'

Stepping down the bank to get close enough to record the stream burbling over stones, I find myself face to face with the Roman Bridge.  Until quite recently it was news to me that there was a bridge here, never mind a Roman one.  Well, obviously a bridge of some sort, since the path crosses the stream without getting its feet wet, but not a Bridge, with a stone structure and a pedigree and a place in the local history  books.  The fact is, the top of the bridge looks exactly like part of the track, so it's easy to miss the fact that underneath is a small but perfectly formed stone arch which looks like something a long-ago architect made for practice before going off to build the same thing larger, maybe somewhere like York.  It's known locally as the Roman Bridge.  Patricia M Hopf, my source of all wisdom on the upper Slad Valley ('The Turbulent History of a Cotswold Valley') is non-committal about its actual origins but notes that it was once wide enough to take a horse and cart.  Whatever its history, from this low angle the bridge looks as though it's auditioning for a Cotswold Countryside calendar, emerging as it does from drifts of cow parsley, ivy and fern.  Looking backwards from the bridge, I can now see that the path I've just walked on stands out from the rest of the field as a flattened ridge, so I can believe there was an old road here, maybe even a Roman road.

I walk up the bank towards the gate of the reserve under a canopy of alder and hazel trees.  This morning, before setting out, I looked up the difference between alder and hazel leaves because there have been a lot of them in my walks so far and the identification issue has been getting to me. Teeth, that's the point (ho ho).  Hazels have toothed leaves.

Through the gate, down the hill and across the brook into the reserve proper.  There is wild garlic still in bloom down by the brook, though it has long been over nearer to home, plus a tangle of ferns, nettles and tree roots.  Ivy has colonised the trunk of a fallen tree, the ivy still growing though the tree is not, and wildflowers have sprung up along the trunk in the spaces between the ivy stems.

Ivy is becoming one of the themes of these walks.  A little higher up the valley is a pair of ash trees held in a deep embrace by ivy stems as thick as a well-grown sapling. Looking at their sinuous lines, I can see why people of older times thought of ivy as feminine.

Ivy trees

This part of the valley feels very hidden from the outside world, a narrow strip of grassland sandwiched between the bulk of the Scrubs on one side and a steep wooded hillside (oolitic limestone, according to the reserve leaflet) on the other.   The sun is still relatively low in the sky, shining almost directly up the valley.  While I make abortive attempts to photograph buttercup petals from underneath, a kestrel dashes overhead. Rooks are swooping in and out of the trees on the hillside.  There are tractor noises somewhere, but definitely somewhere else.

On up the valley, in a little grove of (pause for study of leaves) hazel trees, I find signs of industrious digging into the roots of the trees, lots of scratched earth and a hole that looks too big for rabbits.  Fox, perhaps?  A little further on, a hank of dark hair caught on a hawthorn branch, low to the ground.  The strands are long and soft.  I fantasise about a mysterious Beast of Snows Farm (a cross between a jaguar and a persian cat).  Not here just now, obviously, or the deer I've just spotted grazing by the treeline wouldn't be hanging about.  The deer doesn't see me at first, and just for once, the wind is from him to me.  I cautiously reach for my binoculars and he raises his head, but doesn't actually move until I put them to my eyes, at which point he legs it smartly.  Which seems to support a pet theory of mine, which is that black binocs might just look a lot like a gun, from the viewpoint of a distant deer.

I've now reached a point where the slope down to the stream below me is so steep that it's almost like standing on the edge of a cliff, and the view up and down the valley is stunning. Pause for breakfast (egg sandwiches) and to watch a group of horses, on the opposite slope, indulging in early-morning rolling in the grass.  The layout of the valley is clearer from up here and I'm able to disentangle my earlier geographical muddle; the hill on the other side is The Scrubs, the valley branching off from it must be Driftcombe.

Snows Farm anthills

According to the reserve leaflet, 300 species of wildflowers grow here in the reserve, but most of them seem to be lying low at the moment.  There's quite a lot of bird's-foot trefoil around, and some little blue things with white flashes which I've also seen growing on Swift's Hill (my wildflower skills are on a par with my tree identification) but not much else.  According to the leaflet, I could also be seeing dogwood, rock rose, columbine, milkwort, thyme, yellow wort, harebell and common and spotted orchids.  Think it's a bit early for orchids, though. What I do notice is that the ground here is covered in small, solid, grassy humps, as if the land has a bad case of grass acne.  What's that all about then?   The leaflet is silent on this point.  (Later on, I discover they are in fact anthills, which makes this field a veritable ant city.)

Onward and upward, I locate the ruins of 'the Old Shop' - four low, broken walls, one of which has a tree growing out of it.  The reserve leaflet says the old shop supplied bread and (coyly) ‘other, more colourful services’.  According to Patricia Hopf, it may also have been an aleshop and a brothel.  All essentials under one roof, then - forerunner of the Tesco Metro.  Only not quite.  Now, it is fast disappearing under the onslaught of tree roots, brambles and moss.  A couple of great tits have set up home in a hole in the back wall - I can see them nipping in and out with great regularity and a calm disregard of my presence, so it looks as though they have a brood to feed.

There are more dark hairs clinging to the stile outside the Old Shop, so the Snows Farm Beast was here too.  With strange beasts in my thoughts, I notice a truly HUGE triangular bird box in a nearby tree and wonder what it's designed to attract.  Owl?  Buzzard?  Vulture?

New ferns: jewellery designs?

While I'm taking photos of the unfurling fronds of new ferns, which make shapes reminiscent of Viking horns or bits of Celtic jewellery, another deer ambles past.  I tend to be a bit blase about seeing deer because they sometimes come into our garden so I have a vague feeling that they aren't Real Wild Animals.  But they are, of course.  This one trots smartly away as soon as I stand up and start taking an interest in him.  A wildlife artist friend of mine has a theory, based on the practice of Native American Indians, that animals can feel a direct gaze, that you are a much less threatening presence if you aren't using your central vision.  Apparently, if you want to see wildlife, the trick is to learn to use only your peripheral vision, to see out of the corners of your eyes.  Which takes some practice, if you don't want to trip over your own feet.

It certainly doesn't work too well while trying to navigate around this reserve.  Finding the way is not straightforward; there are unexpected fences and the path disappears regularly.  I find myself following sinuous little animal paths.  There are signs of animals to be seen - a large hole which must surely be a fox's earth under the roots of a beech tree, a series of molehills, a lot of deer prints in the mud down by a tiny tributary stream running down to the main brook.  The brook itself is fenced off here; I wonder what the local animals make of these fences which cut across their paths, even cutting across the brook in places.  I give up on trying to locate the human path and climb dangerously over barbed wire to get down to the brook.  From the other side, it's easier to see what's what and I can spot the fence marking the upper end of the Reserve, and the path and footbridge I should have taken.  I can also see a flock of interesting sheep with shaggy, dark brown fleeces and little horns.  Now I know where the mysterious dark hairs came from.  So much for the Snows Farm Beast.

Beasts of Snows Farm

I walk back along the brook, crossing and re-crossing it to avoid inconvenient fences. The pattern is the same on this side: woodland at the top of the hill, grassland on the slopes, trees lining the stream. Hazel, alder and hawthorn, some of the hawthorn still just about in bloom.  At one point the stream goes into a steep gully so that I can hear it, but not see it.  There are buttercups in profusion here, as well as thistles and thyme.  Crossing the stream for the last time on a plank bridge, I realise with a shock that I'm back below the gate where I came in, having completely failed to recognise the place when seeing it from a different angle.  This rather sums up my feelings about the Reserve.  Despite the signs of previous human occupants, despite the sheep and the fences, it feels subtly wilder than the other parts of the valley that I know, and familiar things seem less familiar here. Although it isn't very big, and I've walked from one to the other and back, I don't feel as though I've got a handle on it at all.  A place which would stand quite a bit more exploring, I think, or even some sitting still and looking, which I don't seem to have done very much of, so far.  Maybe next time.

Google map of this walk

Walk 3 - The tree cathedral: lower section of Dillay Farm

I'm back at Dillay Farm on a breezy day of early May to walk the lower part of the valley, from the farm to the boundary with the Snow's Farm Nature Reserve.  This is partly because I wanted to spend more time with this part of the stream on my last walk and couldn't, and partly because I'm determined to find the Nature Reserve boundary this time so that I can be sure I've walked every inch of the stream on Dillay Farm land before moving on (do we detect a little obsessiveness creeping in here?).

Things have changed noticeably since I was last here.  Weirdly, we've had almost no rain in the last six weeks (the thunderstorm which chased me out of the valley last time turned out to be a flash in the pan) and it's been unusually warm.  Spring seems to be rushing headlong into summer at least a month early.   The field of dandelions I passed on the way here last time is now a field of something else entirely, though still spring-yellow.  I wonder if I will see the difference in the level of the Dillay.  Dillay Farm gets its water from springs in the valley, Mrs Barrington tells me, and if the dry period continues too long they could be badly affected.  I know that our own little stream, a very minor tributary of the Slad Brook, is much lower than usual.

Nearly all the trees are in leaf now, though some only just, and everything looks significantly more luxuriant.  Down by the footbridge, thistle flowers are coming into bloom, intriguing with their slightly surreal shapes.  Hawthorn blossom is new since last time.  The laid hedge which lines the stream at this point has a lot of hawthorn in it and looks quite lovely. There seem to be a lot of insects around today; I whip out my sketchbook to try to capture the intricacy of a filmy-winged fly sitting on the ivy-covered trunk of a tree, apparently basking in the hazy sun.  Naturally the fly moves as soon as I've got my pencil poised, but then settles on the knuckle of the hand I was about to draw with. Very cautiously, I trace the lines of its wings and it clings there just long enough.

As usual, I'm getting distracted by detail.  Further downstream, just before the track, the ground is boggy and already covered in a carpet of new plants. There are so many different shapes of leaves that it's mesmerising; I recognise only buttercup and birdseye but there are many others.  If you took a square foot of this bit of ground and worked out what all the different species in it were, it looks to me as though it would be dozens.  The odd flower is almost too much, too bright a splash of colour in amongst all this line and texture.  Must move on, because I am supposed to be focusing on the lower part of the valley.

In amongst all this richness is another death.  A pheasant met its end a few yards away from where I'm standing, fairly recently, I guess.  Two beautiful sections of wing remain, with even the smallest top covert feathers all intact, and a few bits of bone, absolutely picked clean.  Sitting on them are two bright bottle-green and blue-green flies.  A sight both beautiful and slightly ghoulish.  Their jewel-like bodies are exactly the colour and quality of dichroic glass, which gives me an idea I may follow up.  I'm very tempted to collect one of the wing sections because it's so complete, including the joint on which all feather structures swivel. You don't normally get to see a working wing up close (at least, I don't) and it would be marvellous reference material for drawing.

I cross the footbridge near Rose's cottage and pause to frown at the map.  What's on the ground here doesn't entirely seem to fit with the official version and I'm wondering if that's why I got confused last time.  I decide that the only thing to do is to follow the footpath running along the side of the valley which crosses into the Nature Reserve; that way I'm bound to find out where the Reserve is, and I can then drop down to the stream and walk back up it to the farm.  This looks easy on the map...

I'm now walking on a beautiful, secret path which looks as if it's auditioning for the part of 'the Old Way' or 'the path to fairyland' in some story or other.  It runs uphill between trees close-hugged by thick cords of ivy and through a carpet of wild garlic flowers.  A good opportunity to try out a recent inspiration: my plan is to use my small camera to get ground-level views of plants from underneath, as a small animal, such as a bank vole, might see them. We always seem to be looking down on flowers, or at them from the side on occasion; how would it be to see a wild garlic bloom towering above you?  Difficult, is the answer.  The camera simply can't be persuaded to focus on the plant itself though it produces nice sharp pictures of the trees above.  The sort of view that only a profoundly long-sighted vole would get. Ho hum.  Back to the drawing board on that one.  However, getting down close to ground level for this exercise means I notice some small droppings and a hazelnut with a neat section gnawed out of it.  I pocket this to consult my mammals field guide with in case it should turn out to have been chewed by something more exciting than a squirrel, but without much hope.

Vole's-eye view of a bluebell

Must move on.  The footpath now runs quite close to the stream, shaded by a wall of low, leaning-over trees.  I quicken my pace and immediately pheasants and other birds explode out of the undergrowth ahead of me.  A wren, braver than the others, shoots up right beside my feet.  I've noticed this with 'my' birds in the garden at home - birds seem to be hard-wired to react to abrupt movement.  If you amble along gently they don't seem too bothered.  There are plenty of them in the trees here - I can hear numbers of great tits going 'teacher, teacher, teacher'.

Even down here near the stream and in the shade the path is very dry and has cracks in it.  Ahead of me an earthworm is crossing it, determined, but painfully slow.  The distance I am about to step over in one stride will take him several minutes at least to cover.

Now the path is climbing away from the stream through a handsome bit of woodland with a side order of scrub in the spaces between.  Here drifts of bluebells still blow although they've been over for a fortnight or more elsewhere.  Everything looks very sharp-edged and new and I'm having the same problem as before - the more I look, the more I see, and the slower I walk.  New ferns shooting up in exquisite curlicues; orange tip butterflies; pheasants in the scrub; a snail browsing on a nettle leaf.  How would one express a snail's eye view of things?

At last I come upon the entry to the Snow's Farm Nature Reserve.  There is a token bit of fence, into which someone has jauntily stuck a cock pheasant feather, an information board, and a mass of wild garlic flowers so that it really does look like a 'snow farm'.  Now that I know where I am, I try to find a way down to the stream, which is easier said than done thanks to the nettles colonising the shaded hillside.  I spot and follow a tiny animal path which leads straight to a shallow bit of the stream bank where it would be easy for animals to drink.  Whose regular path is this?  Slots in the earth bank opposite suggest deer.

I turn away from the nature reserve and walk back up the stream, which is flowing through a cathedral of taller trees here, their branches clad in new leaves forming a fresh green curving roof.  And down on the bank amongst the spring greenery is another kill - a small deer, this time, by the look of it.  There is fur everywhere, a section of backbone with pelvis and back leg bones still attached, and a tiny, perfect hoof.  I estimate from the length of the leg bones that this deer probably stood about 3ft high at the shoulder, and wonder what killed it.

Further on, I make a semi-successful attempt to record the sound of a fat bumblebee, striped yellow and orange, which is a new one on me.  Must remember to look him up. He's buzzing around by a small spring which is running out of the ground and down into a trickle of a tributary which flows into the main stream.  Looking at this I suspect I can thank this dry spell for being able to walk along here without wellies; the ground has the air of a natural bog. There are some very striking fern shapes growing up here, all new-minted and perfect.  It's frustrating trying to photograph them because as far as the camera's concerned it's all just green on green.  Not having a brain, as such, it can't focus on the shape the way I can.  Mind you, my brain has some trouble when I try to draw one of the ferns.  My eye can follow the strong shapes, such as the sweep of the stem, but when it gets to the areas of low contrast and high density of detail, such as where the different leaves fold over into each other, my brain kind of goes 'bler' and gives up the struggle to focus, and the resulting drawing is frankly crap.  It takes a couple of goes before I get a reasonable result, by which time my eye has sorted out where to look, as it were.  Now with my brain 'tuned in' to drawing, I could happily stay for hours trying to get it right, but time is going on and I have to drag myself away.

Harassed pheasant

The next part of the valley floor really is a bog and one which my walking boots can't cope with, so I have to move higher up the side of the hill following another animal path.  This leads me to yet another killing - a pile of pheasant feathers this time.  It's definitely nature red in tooth and claw around here.  Further on, I attempt to stalk a very handsome cock pheasant in order to take a photo of his beautiful red comb appearing over the undergrowth.  He bobs in and out of cover, uneasily aware of me but not ready to fly away, and I suspect that given what might happen to him if I was a real predator, what I'm doing probably constitutes harassment.

As I arrive back at the stile by Rose's cottage, I notice that the stream flows in a pipe under the track and scramble down the bank to get a recording of the resonant glopping noise it makes coming out of the pipe.  I pause to collect the pheasant wing and as I walk away, the wind riffles through the feathers and makes the whole thing vibrate and buzz weirdly, as if the ghost of the bird was trying to escape from my grasp.  While I've been in the woods the haze has cleared and it has turned into a blue and gold afternoon.  On the grassy hillside below the farm the ewes are calling their lambs (now appreciably fatter then when I last saw them) to them as I pass by.  I spot a spent cartridge on the ground, reminding me that man isn't necessarily just an observer of the whole predator-prey thing that goes on in this apparently peaceful valley.

Google map for this walk

Walk 2 - Life and death in the Dillay valley: Dillay Farm

Since my first walk to the rising of the Dillay Brook, I've been working on getting the permissions needed to enable me to walk the whole length of both Dillay and Slad brooks, since few of the footpaths in the Slad Valley follow the streams.  This has involved a certain amount of detective work, but with the help and good offices of friends in the village, I'm getting there.  I've been much encouraged by the responses I've received so far from local landowners - ranging from enthusiastic, to puzzled-but-positive.

Today's walk, down the upper part of the Dillay Brook, is courtesy of the owners of Dillay Farm, Mr and Mrs Barrington, who generously agreed to me walking their section of the brook but warned me that the lower part of the stream would become 'a bit intrepid' as the nettle season advanced. So it's a good thing I'm getting this walk in now, in the third week of April, and on a brilliantly sunny and almost summery afternoon.

From the spring down the valley

I start from Dillay Farm.  Up at this end, the valley is narrow and steep-sided, as witness the gradient on the approach to the farm, which causes my car to make a reproachful comment about its lack of four-wheel drive.  From the farm, I walk back up the track towards the head of the valley so that I can start from where I left off a couple of weeks ago, by the spring under its hawthorn canopy.

Last time there was only me and a loudly-singing bird at the spring.  Today a group of cows and young calves are making the most of the shade.  As I approach, they turn as one cow and look at me with expressions that suggest I'm seriously interrupting something.  One matronly beast cautiously approaches to give me the once-over; I imagine she's checking that I'm no threat to the calves. She comes close enough for me to record her huffing breaths on the dictaphone (must be careful to establish context for this recording, otherwise it could be mistaken for a heavy-breathing phone call), then she retreats, apparently satisfied. There's something very appealing about this peaceful scene, cows and calves reclining under the trees, so I halt at what I hope is a non-threatening distance and make some scribbly drawings in my sketchbook.  What a nice place for a calf to grow up in, I think, no traffic, few walkers, hardly any disturbances.

Before setting off down the stream, I also record an explosion of song from what I would like to think is the same bird in the hawthorn trees.

Up here the Dillay Valley feels very secret, very isolated.  On this sunny spring day, it's also very lovely. The stream is a narrow silver line wandering between banks of bright green boggy grass studded with dark clumps of rushes.  A tiny tributary joining it from the west side provides my first good recording of water noise.  The main stream gathers sound and size and ducks in under a roof of hazel trees, their multiple trunks making striking shapes against the bright sunlight.

Around the corner is a side valley which runs up to Nottingham Scrubs. The map shows a stream running down this valley to join the main stream.  On the ground, you can see the line of the stream as a sort of indentation, but at this end it's rather more bog than stream, punctuated by marsh marigolds and the odd lady's smock. I detour into the side valley because it looks even more idyllic than the main one. Sheep are grazing its grassy lower slopes; at sight of me, a ewe calls her straying twin lambs and they dash back to her, butting her udders from both sides at once, tails wriggling frantically.

Cue for more scribbly drawings.  Then, on my way back to the main stream, a shocking sight.  Lying in my path is what looks like the back leg of a lamb, surrounded by pathetic wisps of fleece.  I wonder what predator would take a lamb - fox maybe?  I remember my thought about the valley being a nice place for calves to grow up in and realise I've been guilty of gross humano-centrism.  It might look peaceful to me, but for the animals it can just as easily be a place of fear and violent death.

Pathetic wisps of fleece

Beyond here, the stream briefly divides around a big patch of bog.  The valley is mainly close-nibbled grassland here, sloping up to the farmhouse, but a few big old trees grow by the stream, one of them thickly covered in ivy growing in a perfect herring-bone pattern.  Next to it is another big tree which has completely fallen over, roots in the air, but nevertheless has fresh green leaves and blossom.  How tenacious plants are.  (Except, apparently, when I plant them.)

It bothers me that I can't be sure what type of tree this is.  My knowledge of trees is basic - this looks like an old fruit tree of some description.  My inability to say which one nags at me.  But what is this obsession, I wonder, with being able to name things?  After all, it's only us humans who invented the names in the first place.  It doesn't make the tree less of a tree because I don't know what its name is.  Is it some sort of need for control, as if I can pin down the essence of the thing by naming it?  Or is it just another subtle form of one-up-manship - I can't be a real countrywoman until I know the name of every tree....

I'm now parallel with the farmhouse, higher up the side of the valley to my right, with its back to the trees which crown the top of the hill.  Sounds of chickens and children playing float down to me. In the shade of a tree,more sheep and young lambs are hunkered down, unwilling to move even to get away from the papparazza (me) and her camera.

Beyond the house, the valley closes in; woodland becomes the order of the day, tall trees reaching up to the light, nettles already working hard to justify their reputation. The stream becomes wider and I cross it on a slatted bridge with most of a sapling as a handrail.  Here a track runs across the stream and away up another side valley and just around the corner, nestling in a mess of living and dead trees, is 'Rose's cottage'.  Or what remains of it.

Rosie's cottage

According to 'The Turbulent History of a Cotswold Valley' by Patricia M Hopf, the cottage was lived in by Rosie Bannen until her death in 1991.  In the book there's a picture of Rosie in the sitting room of Timbercombe, as it was known, in about 1980.  There's also a picture of the cottage in 2003, without the slates on its roof, but otherwise in one piece. Now it's definitely a ruin.  Still recognisably a cottage,  but clearly not for much longer.  The centre of the house is completely collapsed. Nettles grow up through what was once a window.  Ivy has colonised the back wall and trees lean towards the ruin as if waiting their chance to move in.  I've said I won't get too deeply into the history of the valley (which would be a whole project in itself) but this is such recent history.  Plenty of people would still remember Rosie Bannen, and it's a little shocking how quickly her house is disappearing. Shocking, but also oddly reassuring, that given a following wind nature can take back the ground from under human feet so swiftly.

Another tributary of the main stream runs down the side valley past the cottage and joins up with the main stream.  Must come and walk the side valley at some point.  From here on, the Dillay becomes a much more grown-up stream, the sound of it changing like a boy's voice breaking.  With a hint of intrepidity, I clamber through nettles and and over dead wood and wade through drifts of cleavers in order to follow the stream while the footpath runs more sensibly higher up the valley.  Ahead of me struts a cock pheasant shining in his spring plumage and supremely unconcerned by my presence.  I feel I should warn him not to be so careless around humans.  I seem to remember hearing that despite appearances, pheasants are no dumber than most birds - it's just that, thanks to us, they don't live long enough to acquire the woodland version of street wisdom or to hand it on to their children.

Up where the footpath is, there's an open grassy hillside brightened by wildflowers and sunshine, but down here by the stream it's cathedral-gloomy under the reaching trees, the ground boggy and covered in dead wood and ferns.  It feels ancient, and not cosy.  I remind myself to look up, and marvel at the intricate tracery of branches above me, still only sparsely covered with leaves.  Following the stream, with no footpath as a guide and surrounded by tree cover, it's easy to lose track of where you are in relation to everywhere else in the valley.  I realise that I may already be out of the Barrington's land and into the nature reserve next door.  I also realise that a lot of time has passed without me noticing, and I should have been home half an hour ago.

Climbing up the hill a little to find my bearings, tall fences and other pheasant-keeping paraphernalia tell me I'm still on Barrington land.  I may well be close to the nature reserve boundary, but it's late and I've no time to make sure.  I head back up the stream to the farm, arriving at the same time as an unexpected thundery shower, the thudding of raindrops obliterating my last few remarks to myself on the tape recorder.

Google map of this walk

Walk 1 - A Spring and a promise: to where the Dillay rises

A sunny morning in early April; a morning of green and blue and gold, the light pale and clear, the air unexpectedly warm.    After a frustrating delay of two months due to a back injury, I am finally beginning my 'Valley under the Skin' project with a walk from the village of Camp to the point where the Dillay Brook rises.

Camp (yes, they've heard all the jokes) is probably the highest village around here, right up on the plain at the north-east end of the valley, houses grouped around a crossroads.  This Monday morning it's distinctly quiet and devoid of other walkers, which adds to my pleasurable sense of playing truant while the rest of the world works.  By a bank of riotous daffodils I turn through a gateway onto a track running towards green fields where a couple of horses are kicking up their heels.  I feel like doing much the same thing myself, only my back wouldn't stand for it.

Good thing there's no-one else around.  I've decided that the easiest way to record immediate impressions of the walk is to talk to a small tape recorder as I go, and this takes a bit of getting used to.

The track now enters woodland and begins to head downwards in a business-like manner.  I am walking in a green tunnel of trees and hedgerows, bright with new leaves.  On the steep bank on my left, ferns are unrolling into improbable curled shapes and any amount of other plants are rolling up their sleeves and getting on with the spring race as fast as they can.  Wild garlic is winning (as usual).  My gardening friends hate this plant, but I love the filigree white flowers and it looks like I'll be seeing them again in a week or so.  Under the shading leaves, a lone wood violet peers out at me.  In the woods to my right, an ultraviolet haze announces the coming of bluebells.  The air is full of birdsong and the scrunchy sounds of squirrels being very busy in last year's leaves.

Why is the idea of the source of a stream exciting?  I suppose it has overtones of exploration and adventure, shades of 'Dr Livingstone I presume'.  There's a spring marked on the map, further down the valley, but I'm already looking out for any hint of the stream.  There's a deep cleft on the right of the track which looks like it could be caused by water run-off - in the past maybe, or at times of heavy rainfall?  No water here now, though.

The track veers off to the right into the woods and ahead of me is a fence, a stile and a long view down into the beautiful Dillay Valley, floored with grass, zebra-striped with sunshine and shadow from the ranks of trees above, splotched with bright green patches of new leaf and misty glimpses of may blossom.  Here at last I find the stream, welling up from the ground under a green dome of hawthorns, meandering around a little before gaining strength and heading off down the valley in a slender silver ribbon.

The hawthorns which guard the stream’s beginning have spectacularly gnarled and twisted trunks; I sit down for a while to draw them.  The bird which has been shouting alarm from the branches above gains confidence from my stillness and settles down to pour liquid song into my ears from surprisingly close quarters. Apparently a sketching human sends out a much less threatening vibe than a walking human.

One last job to do before retracing my steps.  One of my aims is to record the sounds of the valley and in particular, the sound of the stream at points all along its length. Narrative fitness demands that I should begin with the sound of the stream rising.  A problem, though – there isn’t one.  I’m  sure that this trickle of water must be making a trickle of sound, but the microphone is not convinced.  That's the trouble with technology - so literal-minded.  No romance in the soul of a digital sound recorder, apparently.  I have to make do with the sound of the bird (robin, I think) and the distant cry of a buzzard, a defining sound of the Slad Valley if ever there was one.

Must go, before my back notices how long I’ve been on my feet.  But all the way back up the track things are continually catching my eye.  I’m noticing far more than I did on the way down, when I had my head in the map.  Now there’s the flash of an orange-tip butterfly.  The end-grain of a felled tree wearing a woven wrapping of ivy.  The strata of the bank, where its stone bones emerge from the covering of plants.  The intricacies of lichens on treetrunks.
  
I’ve noticed before that drawing seems to ‘tune my eye in’, making me more aware of my surroundings for a limited period.  And what tends to catch my eye is detail.  I’m a detail sort of person.  Landscape pleases me, but it’s close-up detail that draws me in and gets me thinking.  Take this point here, for instance, where the bank is so high that new plants growing out of the top of it are above my head and I can look up at the undersides of their leaves.  It occurs to me that this as close as I’m likely to get to a mouse’s eye view of things, a world where most of your surroundings are above you.  We humans tend to assume we can look most of our world in the eye.  I try to imagine how a mouse’s perspective might feel.  (Wouldn’t anyone, who read ‘The Borrowers’ in childhood?)
  
Maybe there’s a germ of inspiration in there.  By the time I get back to the road, I’ve mentally designed a pair of glass screens, taller than head-height, engraved with a massive pair of dandelions, viewed from underneath.  That would make a good entrance for an exhibition, I think.  Hmm.  I may need a bigger kiln.  And a sponsor.  Still, it’s a beginning.

Google map of this walk