A walk in the woods

Its not rained for 3 days so it was time it did. All the portents were there, yesterday it was nearly too hot to breath and high humidity has been an issue since last week when we were simply enveloped in fog. Summing up, so far summer has been mostly bad punctuated with the odd blistering hot day ensuring you dont know what the afternoon will be like and whatever it is like you will not be acclimatised to it.

That said, there are only so many hours a week you can stay indoors and I have more than filled my quota this week.

Time to get out, it stopped raining and wondering what the weather might be like in an hour or so is a pointless waste of energy, so up and out..

This meant things were going to be wet underfoot, and given the height at which most "undergrowth" has got to, underfoot was knee high and in some places waist high.

So no trailblazing today, a stroll along a pretty well known route with the chance of some variation taking in 19km of flat countryside.
Not the walk I wished to do, but its a Plan B walk, the reliable standby which will not throw up any surprises and as I have not walked it since late April, time to give it a whirl.

We live in a pretty overcrowded country but as its populated with considerable quantities of fat, unimaginative dullards it does not take long to leave them behind.

About 50 yards from a road or carpark shakes off most of this human spacefiller and get 300 yards away most of their yobbish voices have fallen by the wayside.

Soon I am confronted with the thicket of undergrowth that is oil seed rape
A growing eyesore on farm land, the massive fields of yellow seem so alien (although Van Gogh would probably have approved) and my daybag still has traces of the pollen stains of walking through one such field six weeks or so ago.

That is nothing to the next stage though when its just a brown tangled mass of crop with no visual appeal at all and a tendency to blot out legitimate footpaths.

Skirting around this blot the first wooded area is to be seen.

I am a believer that every living thing has a memory and that everything holds a record of time passing.

My two dogs are not on top form currently, the ever changing weather has made them cautious and like most things in a natural state energy expended for no particular gain seems slightly daft to them. They keep trotting along though, either to please me, or more likely coz without me they are going to get hungry and thirsty pretty quickly.

The odd flutter-by weaves what appears to be a random path in front of me, but they seem to know where they are going and will get there despite all appearances. This would seem to be prime bee season though and they are looking decidedly industrious. Its good to see them in such number, although there is always room for more I guess.

Along footpaths we stroll, through the wooded area and along open fields heading towards what is probably my favourite wood in the area.

Grown on a human scale its an old wood, ie a proper one with broad leaf trees. Ancient woodland in fact and a faded sign lets you know the local council consider they are looking after it as a nature reserve.

Well I suppose they might be in a very hands off manner, but as other woodland they manage does have tree-felling and obvious management going on, I will give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they too think of it as the perfect wood and nothing much needs doing.

A stream runs through it, it laughs all the way to a rather overgrown pond and a few months ago the area was carpeted with bluebells of which a few withered stragglers remain.

To the west of the wood is a maze of footpaths with no apparent reason as they criss-cross a relatively large field. Recently I found an overgrown gate at the edge of the wood, it had no reason to be there. This discovery finally made me try and solve this puzzle.

It was all very obvious with reference to the OS map of around 1880. This field had once been 8 seperate fields, the footpaths allowed access to each of them and the gate was part of that.

Its nice that the footpaths still exist, but it does seem overkill to have 4 or 5 footpaths criss-crossing a field which might just measure a kilometre long by half a kilometre wide at is maximum. No complaints though, its not like we have so many footpaths we can afford to just ignore the ones we have got.