I woke rather late this morning, and realised I was missing the start of the Toast on-line sale. In general I'm not a great fan of Sales. I did have a look at the John Lewis offering, since the edges of my bath towel have frayed so badly that strands of fabric hang loose, and I thought I might be able to get a nice soft fluffy Egyptian cotton replacement. When I investigated towels I discovered that most colours of Egyptian cotton were only available in face flannel size, and gave up in disgust. Toast are very organised with their sale, and sent me a paper flyer before Christmas listing what would be included, so I already knew which two jackets I wanted to buy, if they were available in my size. They are the same jackets I have been admiring since September while being too mean and too poor to pay full price for them. Happily, when I got downstairs and logged on I discovered that the Sale did not start until 9.00 am, so I had only missed the first twenty-five minutes of it. That seemed deeply civilised. I heard on Radio 4 about all those people who had spent Christmas Day night camping out ready to storm the shops when the doors opened on Boxing Day morning, and I really couldn't see the attraction. They had both jackets in my size, so waiting for the sale paid off this time. They have upgraded their website since the early days. I recall one infuriating sale when every page took minutes to load, and nothing I wanted was available in any size between 8 and 18.
It rained all morning. Absolutely poured. By lunchtime it had stopped, and become calm, the sort of slightly ominous calm you get when you are in the very centre of a low pressure weather system. We finally went for our Christmas walk. Setting out up the lane and then looping across the fields we felt the breeze on our right cheeks, telling us the wind had swung round to the north. It was a cold wind that made my eyes water as I walked.
The route took us through one of the local ancient woods, in private ownership, but actively coppiced. Fallen trunks of birch and sweet chestnut lay on a south-west, north-east axis, with strong vertical regrowth arising at intervals along their length. From the direction in which they were thrown, and the size of the new growth, we guessed they were relicts of the 1987 storm. Professional woodland managers I've met with the woodland charity now admit that they were far too quick to tidy up after the Great Storm. It made everyone feel better at the time, to think that they were restoring and making good the damage wrought by the wind, but they underestimated the power of recovery of wind-thrown broadleaf trees. The trunk topples, but half the root plate remains in contact with the soil, and in time the fallen bole will root where it touches. A row of three or four birch grow up, where there was one before. We saw the same thing happen with odd branches that had splayed out from the hazel coppice.
The brooks and field ditches were as full as the Systems Administrator had ever seen them, and it was strange walking through the north Essex countryside to the sound of babbling water, a noise I associate with Lake District walks in the Fells. We passed the farm where often a little dog rushes out of the cat flap, woofs once enthusiastically at the SA, and then rushes in again, but today he didn't come out to greet us. It began to rain, a solid drizzle that settled on my spectacles. My nose began to run from the cold as well.
Crossing over the main road we picked up Cockaynes Lane, which runs down to Cockaynes Wood. Oliver Rackham writes that if you reach a wood by going down Wood Lane, there is a high probability that there has been a wood there for a long time, and I think the same is true if the name of the wood is incorporated into the road name. At any rate, Cockaynes is an Ancient Wood, with a fine display of bluebells in spring. It is next to some large disused gravel workings, recently converted to a nature reserve, with the wood and gravel pits now held by a Trust, and managed with some input from the Essex Wildlife Trust. A large bank that could be a mediaeval wood bank runs through Cockaynes, but overall the wood is not very large, and I wonder whether it was bigger, and mostly lost to quarrying. We didn't see much bird life in the reserve, beyond a pair of swans and two moorhens, but I suppose the ecology will take time to build up.
The brook along the bottom of the wood was in spate, by Essex standards, though not covering the path, and I saw what I thought was opposite leaved golden saxifrage along the banks. That's not very rare nationally, but rare enough in Essex to be interesting. The Trust has been busy renewing the boardwalks through the wetter parts of the wood, using that reconstituted non-slip plastic imitation wood, which does look pretty convincing, and is presumably lower maintenance than timber. I was puzzled by the black stones in the bottom of a tributary carving its way down the hillside towards the brook, since we have nothing like them in our own garden, and took one with me, intending to quiz those of my friends and relatives who know anything about geology as to what it was, and why it was abundant in Cockaynes and absent from my garden only a couple of miles away.
There was a BT van in Cockaynes Lane, engine idling. The SA walked that way one time, and met a disconsolate BT engineer who had just realised that he'd left his bag with his mobile phone in it at the top of the extremely tall communications mast. There was another BT van the far side of Cockaynes, when we got back to the main road, this time with three engineers wandering about and peering into the bushes as if they had lost something. We began to suspect there must be a telephone fault in the area, and further on passed a third, and a fourth at the Alresford railway crossing, where we all waited for some time for two trains to pass. The driver kept his engine idling throughout. Alresford is faced with the expansion of the existing quarry, and there are posters protesting about the plans in quite a few windows. The church, at some distance apart from the village, is a ruin since burning down in the 1970s. A pity, since the nave was Norman. The war memorial, a Celtic cross, is tidily kept, with wreaths of poppies still left from last Remembrance Day. One of the surnames is the same name as the farm shop in the village, and I wondered whether it was the same family.
Passing from farm to farm, you get a picture of which farmers are signed up to countryside stewardship schemes and which aren't. You walk for a time between generous field margins and headlands left to grow rough grass, then suddenly hit a change of regime, with the plough coming to within a metre of the hedge line, and every last little corner ploughed, no matter how small and how tight the turns for the machinery.
Crossing one of the final fields before reaching the network of footpaths on the farm where we live, the path took us across the centre of the field. Notices at both entrances ask walkers to keep to the path, rather than use the margins, which are managed for wildlife. The trodden track across the lower half of the field was clearly visible in the crop, but almost none of the winter wheat or whatever it was had germinated in the upper part of the field. Water ran visibly over the surface of the soil, and had started to dig a small gully along the line of the path. The Tenpenny Brook at the bottom had swelled beyond its banks, so that the alder trees along the southern shore stood marooned in the fast flowing stream.
The rain did stop, about half way round. The loop is almost exactly six miles long, and I felt rather stiff by the end of it, a disturbing reminder that I am not so fit as I should be, after the idle days of rain and Christmas festivities. You can extend the walk by dropping right down to the banks of the Colne, which is pretty, but ambitious for an afternoon walk at this time of the year, when the days are so short, and we are full of sloth and turkey.
No comments:
Post a Comment