Wednesday 21 December 2011

Walk 18 - The case of the disappearing stream: Hazel Mill

Hazel Mill
This walk covers a section of the Slad Brook which is flanked on one side by Stroud Slad Farm, and on the other side by the garden of the house called Hazel Mill.  It's called Hazel Mill for the very good reason that it used to be a mill, and its garden contains the remains of one of the mill buildings, an old leat, and a waterfall, all of which I got tantalising glimpses of when I walked this section of the brook from the opposite side, through Stroud Slad Farm.  By the kindness of the owners of the house, I'm now going to get a closer look.

Hazel Mill is a large and attractive old house on the western side of the valley, sitting between the stream and the main road.  I'm not clear (and neither is my reference book) whether any of the current house was actually used as a mill, but there is a second building in the garden which definitely was a mill used in the woollen industry during the 19th century.  The garden, like most in this valley, is on a steep slope.  I'm given the opportunity to explore on my own.  Well, I say on my own - in fact, I acquire a companion very early on in the proceedings, in the shape of a black-and-tan dog with a hopeful expression and a tennis ball in his mouth.  I harden my heart and resist his attempts to hypnotise me into throwing the ball, because we all know where that leads...

Hazel Mill owns another piece of secret stream, in the shape of the old leat, which runs at right angles to the buildings like a pointing finger, extending out into the fields beyond.  I start by walking to the far end of the leat, so that I can find out how and where it joins up with the stream.  I read a definition of 'leat' on Wikipedia recently (It's a southwestern word, apparently - these water channels are called other things elsewhere in the country) and this one would seem to be a textbook example.  It diverges from the stream in a Y-junction a hundred yards or so from the house, then runs along the contour towards the mill while the stream itself continues down the slope, so that by the time the leat water reaches the mill there's enough height differential to power the mill wheel.

So far, so good.  The leat diverges from the stream at the top end of a triangular piece of thick scrub which I remember noting on the Stroud Slad Farm walk, because it was firmly fenced off and I wasn't able to see the stream through the undergrowth.  At first, I can’t work out why I couldn’t see this very obvious junction from the other side of the fence, but walking across the apex of the triangle I see the problem – at the apex, the leat forms one side of the triangle and the main stream does appears to form the other, but within a few yards, it has vanished altogether.  A fierce combination of thick undergrowth and fences frustrate my attempts to see exactly what has happened to it, but I’m forced to the conclusion that it’s gone underground.  Remains of low brick walls on this bit of land which make me wonder if this was another holding pond or other mill stream structure.  As with so much of the stream, this area is such a mess of undergrowth and fallen wood, that it's hard to see exactly what’s happening to the ground, but there does appear to be a depression, or gully, where the line of the main stream ought to be.

View up the leat
Once again, there's this feeling of being enclosed - afloat in a capsule of stream-world bobbing in a sea of fields.  A substantial bank separates the leat from the stream, growing more substantial as the height difference increases.  The top of it is flat and grassy, reminding me of a canal towpath.  A thin coating of trees separates the further side of the leat from the open field beyond, and the bank side is wooded and well-scrub-ed, so to speak.  The leafless branches of ivy-hung trees meet overhead.   One, a large one, has collapsed comprehensively across the stream and been partially sawn up to allow passage, but large chunks of it remain locked in the arms of the other trees.

The leat is a good size, three feet wide or more and very busy with water.  It's fringed with reedy grasses and clumps of what might be irises (it’s December – no flowers!), ferns and patches of dead leaves.  The long view down its length, with the green path winding away from me and the filigree of tree branches, is very attractive.  Everything is soft shades of brown and green, gentle and quiet, like today's weather, which is unexpectedly mild and damp after a week of low temperatures and frosts .  There's no wind, which is unusual in the valley this year.

My canine friend decides that I’m not a ball person.  Maybe a stick will please me?  Or a stone?  Surely the stone?  It’s quite a large stone and after he has lovingly placed it on my foot a couple of times I give up and throw it purely to get him out from under my feet.  It falls into the leat, and the dog enthusiastically plunges in after it, drawing my attention to a pile of pale feathers spilling from the opposite bank into the stream.  Some bird, a pigeon by the look of it, met its end here recently, or, from another point of view, a fox got a meal which was probably much appreciated at this season.

Throw it?  Please?!
Branching off down the bank to investigate the depression where I think the main stream ought to run, I find that it's very boggy, which is suggestive.  And a little further on I come to a point where a tributary stream, running down one of the Stroud Slad Farm field boundaries, meets the line of this depression and does a dog-leg to join it.  By the time this gully reaches the main garden, it's clear that this has become the main stream again.  So what happened in between?  Is it that the leat takes off so much water that the main stream becomes just a bog until fed with more water from the tributary?  This doesn't quite add up because the main stream was visible for the first few yards after the leat water was taken off.  A mystery.

My friend the dog has found a new, and increasingly muddy, stone which he continues to lay beseechingly before me, but which I’m not going to throw.  Really, really not.

There is a point here where you can see a brick edging to the leat, submerged in moss now, but the individual bricks still visible in some places.  And here is a glass bottle which has the air of having been in the water for a long time.  It looks old, but once it’s in water, it doesn't take long for glass to start looking ancient, so who knows?  (I've discovered that a side-effect of the mood of intense looking that these walks generate is the risk of investing unexpected objects with spurious qualities of age and importance!)

Flounces of fungi
I've come to the stump of what was once quite a big tree, adorned with tendrils of ivy and frilly flounces of fungi.  I'm sure this has been a particularly good year for fungi – it can't just be that I'm noticing them more, can it?

The dog decides that perhaps his stone is too small to be a worthy offering.  He finds a much larger one which, when dropped on my foot repeatedly, does at least get my attention.  But it's much too big to throw, and really too big for him to carry around easily.  This confirms my opinion of the intelligence of dogs, viz, low, compared with cats.  A cat would have wasted no time in getting me to carry the stone.

I've arrived at stone slab in the path, which crosses a channel running out of the leat and down the bank.  The channel looks like an overflow, designed to take off surplus water if the level in the leat rises above a certain height.  It was presumably intended to flow into the stream, but appears to stop short of the gully where I think the stream should be.  So was the main stream originally wider, possibly covering the area where some of the trees are now growing?

Triple tree sentinel
I'm now entering what the owners obviously think of as the main garden.  Ahead of me are mown lawns and the crash of falling water.  Standing like a sentinel at the end of the wooded area is a very handsome triple-stemmed tree – three equal trunks soaring up out of the same root.  Multiple trees are a feature of this garden; a gleam of sunshine lights up another one down by the stream, with quintuple – or possibly sextuple – trunks grown to a considerable height.  It shows what these streamside trees are capable of when they've really got space to express themselves.

The dog has finally got the message that I don’t want the stone.  In desperation, he brings me a branch, and when I pick it up (to avoid falling over it) he runs so hilariously in tight circles that I can’t resist throwing it. Good move.  He dashes off before the branch has left my hand which means he misses seeing where it falls and ends up running all over the garden looking for it – giving me the chance to get down by the leat and make an undisturbed sound recording of the water running over a single large stone.  Otherwise, the leat itself has been very quiet, running smoothly and mostly unimpeded by debris.

I'm now joined by a second dog, larger, browner and more solid, but while apparently glad of my company, this one doesn't seem to require me to throw anything, thank goodness.

There are now grassy banks on both sides of the water and a board bridge carrying a path across it from higher up.  Halfway across the garden, I come to the main event.  The water from the leat turns left through a sluice gate, plunges rather spectacularly over a waterfall and flows back into the small stream below, which, augmented by the extra water, clearly becomes the main brook. The stern practicality of the sluice gates is rather undermined by a jauntily-castellated stone wall which makes the waterfall look more like a garden feature than a piece of industrial engineering.  Although the water now all goes down the fall, the leat is still visible as a grassy channel, running straight ahead to the old mill building and ending in a fenced-off drop into the mill wheel chamber.  Presumably the original idea was that the sluice gates would be closed to build up the water pressure to the mill wheel.



And that's the big surprise of today - when I follow the line of the leat to the old mill building, I'm astonished to find that the original mill wheel is still there, suspended under a brick arch and well below me.  Visible, but barely photographable, because it's well fenced off for safety.  The building itself is in pretty good shape and I'm told that more of the old mill machinery survives inside.  I scramble through bramble and nettles to the back of the building but find no windows into the working parts of the mill.

The main brook is now in a deep, walled channel flowing alongside the end of the mill building.  By the corner of the building is an old pumping mechanism labelled ‘Blake’s Hydram’, the work of ‘John Blake Ltd engineers, Accrington, Lancashire’.  The dog and I examine it carefully.  After that, the stream plunges into a mess of undergrowth and out of my ken for today.  Not wanting to outstay my welcome, I leave the world of leat and mill behind and walk up past the house where a prominently-displayed Christmas tree reminds me how close we are to The Big Day now – it doesn’t feel like it, in fact it feels more like spring today.

This is another walk that turned out more interesting than expected - the length of the leat, the view of the mill buildings and the mill wheel were all great discoveries.  Plus the dog.  I definitely hadn’t expected him.  My indefatigable friend makes one final attempt to delay my departure by bringing me the very dead remains of a football which I am not at all tempted to throw.  I leave him disconsolately punting it around with his nose.


The view from the main road is one of the best of this end of the valley.  It strikes me once again that trees are one of the beauties of this time of year, whether close up or in distant view.  Close up, they are individual, calligraphic scribbles against a pale winter sky.  At a distance, woods and tree-lined field boundaries are now strong, angular shapes, no longer fuzzy-edged with leaf,  emphasising the swell and fall of the fields.   Every winter I vow to use the opportunity to get to know the different tree species by their shapes so that I can recognise them without reference to their leaves. (And do I do it?  Not so far.  Still, it’s a good ambition.)

Enough fun for one day - time to go home and wrap Christmas presents.

Google map of the water structure for this walk

Thursday 15 December 2011

Walk 17 - Sluice gates and secret stream: Upper Vatch Mill

Two and a bit weeks to Christmas, and in the midst of days of rain, sleet and even the occasional snow flurry, we have a morning of bright blue skies, fluffy clouds and sunny intervals.  Oh, and a side helping of icy wind, but you can't have everything at this time of year.  I'm catching up on a bit of brook that got missed out earlier on, due to inefficient scheduling.  I'm in the garden of Upper Vatch Mill, courtesy of the owners, walking their section of the brook, which lies between the Painswick Slad Farm field and the garden of Vatch House.

From the field side, I was able look down and see (and hear) the weir which tumbles the brook into a culvert through this garden – now I’ve come to look at it from in front.  The first, and unexpected, thing I discover is that Upper Vatch Mill has a bit of secret stream. I hadn’t realised, looking at it from the field, that their garden includes a short section of the brook before it falls over the weir.  I’ve rather over-used the word ‘secret’ in relation to the Slad Brook, because of the way it is largely shrouded in trees, but this little bit really does feel secret because it's fenced off on three sides as well.

Secret stream
As so often by this stream,  I'm standing in the deep green shade of trees looking out at sunny fields, like a traveller at dusk looking at lighted windows.  Specifically, I'm looking back into the Painswick Slad Farm field, where the bullocks are looking back at me in some surprise.  But also, from the bit of bank I'm standing on, I can, most unusually, look straight up the middle of the stream.  The reason for this is that the stream does an odd wiggle here so that this section of bank is projecting into the main flow like an elbow. By standing on the point of the elbow, I can look back up a long, straight section flanked on both sides by tall trees.  The trees have all lost their leaves and look even more than usually architectural as a result.  It’s like looking up a watery corridor in some sort of palace with fan vaulting designed by an architect with a hangover.  Out comes the camera, but as usual I struggle to capture this cathedral-like quality.  It’s another area where the camera falls short compared with the eye.  By flicking my eyes up and down, I can see at almost the same moment the whole corridor of trees from the spreading filigree of branches overhead to the point where the roots reach into the stream.  The camera can’t, even on widest angle.  Why not draw it, I hear you say?  Do you know what the temperature is out here today?  Not much above freezing, and that's before the wind chill factor.  My hands are already frozen from taking my gloves off to operate the camera.  Instead, I try taking a short movie, panning up and down, which might give a better idea of it.  Judge for yourself how well I succeeded (not very!).



This 'secret stream' is also unusual because while on the opposite side of the brook the banks slope down to the water in the normal way, on this side there is 10-15 feet of flat land beside the brook, and then a bank which slopes up into the field beyond.  For some reason the trees have chosen to grow on the bank, not by the stream in the usual way, so this little bit of flat land, covered in dead leaves, nettles and fallen wood, is like a tiny bit of no-man’s-land, neither brook nor field.  It's like a long narrow tray with a lip round the edge.  It's only after I've been walking up and down it for a while that the obvious conclusion occurs to me - this was probably once a section of a man-made channel, designed to be much wider than the stream itself, and part of the mill system.

There were indeed once mill buildings in the grounds of Upper Vatch Mill, though according to the owners the house itself was never part of the mill.  The mill buildings were somewhere in the garden, nearer to the weir – which makes sense.  Evidently it was all part of the Vatch Mills complex which included Vatch House and its leat.

We've had a lot of rain in the last week and the stream is fuller than it was, and fast-flowing here.  Walking back down the 'secret stream' towards the house, I can hear the weir well before it comes into view.  It's good to be able to get close up to the stream - in the last few walks, it's been mostly fenced off - but it means clambering over a lot of dead wood, such as this hazel whose main trunk has completely collapsed. But it's still alive - a mass of slender new stems have sprung up from the roots, young turks taking advantage of the fall of the grand old man to make a bid for their place in the sun.  The main trunk is covered in rampant ivy.  Almost the only green around here comes from the jackets of ivy leaves on the trees, and the occasional fern, but even then it's an apologetic, knocked-back green.  Otherwise I'm surrounded by browns, buffs and greeny-browns.  No strong colour anywhere except in the (temporary) blue of the sky.  The winter sun is so low that its light bounces blindingly off the water straight into my eyes, turning the house to a Gothic silhouette.   The drama of winter light - I love it. The camera doesn't, apparently, since it keeps trying to compensate for the massive backlighting with flash.

Jelly fungus
Here is an intriguingly revolting sort of fungus growing on the side of a fallen tree, and it's a new one on me – like brown jelly with a bit of pale jelly on top, which I suppose is a new growth.  I've seen a lot of interesting fungi this autumn and I meant to find out more about them, but when I happened across a reference book on fungi it was so huge, and so complicated, that flicking through its pages I rapidly lost the will to live.

By the weir the stream turns sharply to the right and goes through what would once have been sluice gates.  Sections of wall remain on either side with a large tree growing out of one end of the wall.  The gates themselves are mostly gone but on one side the gatepost remains and you can see the channel cut in the stone where the gate would have run.  On the other side, the stone has fallen over, partly blocking the gap, and the whole thing is covered in swathes of ivy.  Nevertheless, the stream is finding its way through; water can always find a way.  I catch glimpses of small birds nipping in and out of the ivy and dodging under the undercuts in the stone and guess that it must be a pair of wrens.  I'm proved right when one of them appears right in front of me, shouting abuse. Size is no guide to chutzpah in birds - I'm always amazed by the boldness of wrens compared with the relative wimpishness of magpies.  I watched a magpie being seen off by a wagtail once, but that's by the by.

Remains of sluice gates
Beyond the sluice gates the water rushes through the gap, down the stone steps of the weir, and vanishes into the arched entrance of a stone culvert.  Above the culvert is an old terrace fenced with decorative stonework which is also somewhat battered and broken, and what with that, and the ivy, and the fallen blocks by the sluice gate, the area has the feel of the ruins of some sort of temple.

In my mind I try to reconstruct what all this might have looked like when it was a working mill.  It's hard to see exactly how the water was supposed to run.  There are three streams of water coming over the weir, only one of which comes through the main gap where the sluice would have been.  The other two come from a sort of tunnel on the further side of the weir and what looks like a deliberate gap in the wall beside the sluice.  On the far left of weir is what was obviously another run-off channel, with more moss-covered stonework at the top of it, so presumably some of the water could have been diverted down it.  From this angle, by the weir, I can see a sharp little bank at right angles to the sluice which could well have been the edge of a mill pond, if that's what that flat area by the stream was.  But if so, shouldn't the sluice gates have been higher up rather than at the level of the current stream?  I give up my speculation and concentrate on recording the sounds of the weir and of the stream running into the culvert with a satisfyingly hollow glopping.

Weir and terrace
Following the underground line of the culvert, I walk past the house and across the bottom of the garden to where the water reappears through another stone arch.  It pools in an impromptu pond in front of the arch before rushing over a lip and down into the garden of Vatch House, making a good deal of noise about it.  Standing on the boundary between the two gardens, I can see why.  The cause is the Great Flood of 2007.  Originally there was a wall – it's now hard to see where it ran - which was completely demolished by the flood water and its debris still lies in the stream, forcing the water into rapids and rivulets.  Looks like the flood also carried part of a fence away at the same time because there are bits of wire and whatnot all over the shop.

Giant toadstools
Here's an interesting thing.  When I was walking this end of the Vatch House garden a couple of weeks ago, I photographed some tiny toadstools growing on a tree.  I can see them now - grown to four or five times their original size in a mere fortnight.

The owner of Upper Vatch Mill was talking about wanting to restore the sluice gates and the stonework if he ever had the money to do it, and that would be really interesting to see, but I’ve been very glad to see the stream and the remnants of the mill  as they are now, on this cold, bright winter morning, just as time has left them.  All low light, long shadows and gentle decay.

The sun is still out, so on my way home I detour up Swift’s Hill to get the last of it.  Over the apex of the hill, one of the local kestrels is being mobbed by a couple of rooks.  Much higher up, a buzzard floats undisturbed, sunning his wings.  On the way back, I spot a single spray of white flowers growing out of the hedge in the lane, and a rosebush in the garden of Knapp House is sporting two perfect red rosebuds.  Small intimations of spring in the depths of winter.  Odd,  but cheerful.

Google map of this walk



Wednesday 7 December 2011

Walk 16 - In winter dormancy: Wade's Farm field


 It's a cold Wednesday morning, but sunny - and this time of year one grabs sunshine whenever it shows up.  So I'm going out to walk the next section of the brook after Stroud Slad farm.  From here on, it looks like it's going to be lots of short walks, because as it gets closer to Stroud, ownership of the land the brook runs through gets more and more piecemeal and co-ordinating permissions gets more complicated.  Today, it's a single field's width belonging to Wade's Farm.

We are very much into winter now.  There has been frost this week, though not today, and the trees are almost bare, though some are still hanging onto their leaves in the face of the weather.

Oaks glowing in the sun
My walk begins along the main road in order to get access to the field in question.  Not so much fun, because of the traffic, but it has its compensations because of the views across the valley.  I don't actually walk along this part of the road much - I'm normally whizzing down to Stroud in the car, and though you can see the views from the car, you don't really get a sense of the size and 'presence' of the valley.  It's good to have a reason to walk this section and appreciate it.  The valley is now getting more concentrated, as it were.  As it gets narrower and steeper, the woods and fields and the road and the brook are all squeezed closer together like toothpaste forced out of a tube. (Stroud as the exit point of a toothpaste tube.  Is that a happy mental picture?)   The fields are increasingly lumpy and bumpy, and flat land is in ever shorter supply.  I can see most of the route I walked through Stroud Slad Farm's fields a few weeks ago - interesting to follow it from above.  A few trees still have leaves, in particular the oak trees which appear occasionally in Stroud Slad's hedgelines.  Today these few oaks are glowing in the winter sun, unexpected beacons of colour amidst the mass of grey, skeletal trees about them.

I enter the field close to a significant hairpin bend in the road.  It slopes steeply and is currently well soaked and squidgy with recent rain.  There is the occasional flower - small dandelion-relatives - still hiding in the grass, which says something about how warm this autumn has been, I guess.  As I squelch my way down to the stream, I disturb a deer lurking in the trees by the water and a squirrel or two.  The stream runs along the bottom in quite a steep little cleft.  The owner of the field reckons that it's only half as full as it used to be in earlier years.  He says he used to see water voles and other wildlife down here which he thinks have now disappeared because the water level has fallen.  Higher up the valley, some parts of the stream run in a much flatter bed and give the impression that it couldn't hold much more water than currently, but just here, it's obvious from the shape of the banks that it could be a lot deeper, and has been in the past.

Steep banks and low water
There's the inevitable barbed-wire fence along the stream and I spend a little time looking for a way through it.  There is a dip in the wire and a corresponding dip in the ground scraped by animals pushing their way under the fence but it's not a big enough dip for this animal to follow so I have to stay on this side of it.

Half way along the field and by the stream is an old stone building -  a barn, I think, though round here there's always the possibility that it's a bit of ex-mill.  It does have some curious winding gear sticking out of one side of it and there is old machinery lost in a clump of brambles behind it.  On the other side of the barn the fence has moved and it's possible to get down to the stream.  The opposite bank is steep, sandy and sharply cut-in, like a miniature cliff.  Most of the stream doesn't really have the kind of bank you can imagine water voles living in, but just here it does seem possible.  And indeed, there is a small hole down by the water, though I very much doubt it belongs to a water vole.  No 'lawn', for a start.  What else makes holes by the stream?  Rats?  Kingfishers?  My list of UQs (Unanswered Questions) grows longer.

Lover's knot in hazel
Growing right into the middle of the stream at this point is a massive multi-stemmed hazel clump, elbowing everything else out of its way, including the fence.  One of its trunks has managed to grow through and round a fork in one of the other trunks, creating a curious lovers' knot in the middle of the tree.  The shapes of trees feature heavily in memories of the stream so far - mine and the camera's - so I have a feeling they are going to find their way into my work.  As will the ivy that so often covers them.  There's a splendid specimen here, clothing the tortuous trunks of a willow like a coat of chain-mail.  Up to this point, the stream has been flowing quite quietly with little interest for my sound recorder, but the obstruction of the hazel's roots and their load of trapped debris creates some good trickling noises.

From here on, trees grow only on one side of the stream, allowing more greenery to spring up on this side, including something which looks a lot like watercress but probably isn't, and the occasional clump of irises.  The stream is bridged by a fallen branch from a willow which is so straight that at first glimpse I assume it's a pipe of some sort.  The illusion is helped by the hollow noise the stream makes running over and under it.  Noises are actually in rather short supply this morning - pausing to take in the general atmosphere of this field, it seems to me that 'quiet' about sums it up.  Not much noise, not much activity, unless you count the traffic.  I've heard very few birds and seen very few insects.  No spiders, slugs, snails or anything.  Even the squirrels seem to have gone to ground.  Winter dormancy reigns - even the plants by the stream give the impression of having battened down the hatches until spring.

The end of the field is marked by a very definite red brick edifice, the wall of someone's garden.  Beyond here, the stream is flanked on this side by houses - the first tendrils of Stroud reaching up into the valley.  The wall looks old and extremely solid, topped by a massive ruff of ivy (well, better than barbed wire) but down at its base is a small hole.  I like the thought of some little animal industriously setting out to undermine this great barrier for its own purposes.  There's been evidence all up and down the stream of how unimpressed the rest of the mammal kingdom is by our human boundaries.  They just patiently set about finding a way over, under or through them.

I start to make my way back along the field to the barn and I'm pausing to contemplate the view back up the field and around the curve of the road - another perspective on the valley that I've never seen before - when a movement catches my eye.  It's a grey heron landing in the field with a flurry of big wings.  He then proceeds to stalk slowly towards the stream with a stiff, old-gentleman gait, pausing every few steps with head and neck thrust forward, the better to watch and listen.  So intent is he on the stream that he doesn't notice me and continues his stately stalk for some minutes before disappearing into the undergrowth.

Elated by my heron encounter, I get brave enough to shimmy under the barbed wire for a closer look at the stream in the earlier part of the field.  Down here, throwing up multiple stems seems to be the order of the day for trees - they are all at it, even the hawthorns.   I remind myself to look up - it's so easy to go around seeing only the bottom halves of trees, failing to appreciate their full height and the complexity of the canopy - and am rewarded by a spark of brilliant colour as a jay flashes away from a branch above me.

I'm glad I persisted with the fence, because from this side of it, I can now see that there's a small tributary stream running into the brook.  From the other side, it was very thoroughly hidden by a group of sagging and half-collapsed willows, their limbs gnarled and rheumaticky-looking.  They have no leaves, but I'm pretty confident that they are willows because of their fantastically heavy-duty bark, like flock wallpaper writ large.  This small stream winds down the field crossing and re-crossing the field boundary with blithe disregard for human fences.  I trace it back to a tiny trickle of water not far below the road.  By now the afternoon is getting short on light and warmth, so I decide to call it a day and go home for tea.

Google map of this walk