going for a walk

We went for a walk after lunch, once the hailstorm had passed, to see the bluebells.  We can see two ancient woods from the sitting room windows, and a footpath lets you cut down between them, though there isn't public access into either of them.  Bluebells are an ancient woodland indicator in Essex (though not in all parts of the UK), and the woodland floor to either side of the path was thick with them.  In bright light they shine a vivid, luminous blue, while when the sun goes in they go dull, grey and half invisible.  We were lucky and as we got to that part of the walk the sun shone through, and the ground around us gleamed back at it.  The individual flowers of the native bluebell are narrow funnels, which hang down along one side of the stalk, whereas the Spanish bluebell is larger and coarser in all its parts, each flower is wider and more flared at the mouth, and they are carried all around the stalk.

The verges were thick with cow parsley, and a little white flowered thing I have known since childhood without ever learning its name.  It used to stud the hedges on the walk home from school at this time of year, back in the 1960s when infants were allowed to walk themselves a mile home from school.  At Cockaynes Wood, where what was until recently a working gravel pit has just been turned over to the Essex Wildlife Trust, we saw a lapwing.  The bluebells in Cockaynes seemed to be going over compared to those in Captains Wood and Fratinghall Wood, some already setting seed or partly obscured by the emerging bracken, though it may partly have been an optical effect because at that point the sun had gone in.  The Systems Administrator was slightly disappointed, having wanted to show them to me after tracking them as they came out, but I was quite happy, having already seen a generous display further back.

Many of the fallen trees still lie along the south-west, north-east axis, relics of the 1987 hurricane.  Some have successfully thrown up strong new trunks from the sides of their fallen original boles, the part of the root plate still in the soil being enough to support life, while the fallen trunk rooted where it touched.  Professional forestry managers will now admit that they were too quick to clean up the mess after 1987.  Wind-thrown broadleaf trees have a considerable ability to regenerate.

Skylarks were singing above the cornfields.  They seem to hold their own in this corner of Essex.  Whether the farmers clear patches for them to nest in the middle of the crop, which is a good place, relatively secluded from predators, or whether they manage in the field margins and headlands, I don't know.  We saw several hanging above the fields, and a couple dropped down into the middle of a field of some sort of grain.  We agreed that it was wonderful to see the larks, and that what we needed was an idiot's guide to the farmed countryside, since we couldn't tell wheat from barley, and don't know whether the stuff that looks like rye grass is a recently sown grain crop that just hasn't grown much yet, or whether it really is rye grass, and if so why.  It is a rather unbalanced state of knowledge to go for a walk, and be able to identify quite a few of the birds, flowers and trees, and recognise an old pollarded oak and understand why it looks like that now, without being able to identify the major economic crops growing on either side of you.

Outside Arlesford we turned a corner, and a view to the river Colne suddenly opened up.  It took me a couple of minutes to get my bearings, then the unfamiliar sights fell into place and became a landscape that I knew, with the barrier across the river at Wivenhoe, the quarry dock at Rowhedge, and the bulge of the Fingringhoe reserve.  The landscape around here is a patchwork of old quarry workings, with abrupt changes in level, and the grassed over bottoms of previous gravel pits providing thin grazing for horse paddocks.  The horses, wearing rugs in this weather, must all get supplementary feed, so the grazing is only to amuse them.  They are the lucky horses in this recession, the ones whose owners can still afford to keep them.

We met no other walkers until the home stretch, when we passed a cheerful spaniel and an old codger going in the opposite direction.  The SA and the codger exchanged courtesies about the weather, and the spaniel looked as if it would have liked to jump up at me, but its owner told it sternly that if it did he would bop it with his stick, and it desisted.  It was a nice walk, and I said that we should go again.  The SA often walks, and knows the paths around here far better than I do.  I have to be prised out of the garden, but I like it once I get going.