I was hoping to get out for a few modest jaunts around the West Country this summer, but no sooner did the holidays begin than life kicked off with an entirely different game plan, and it's looking like I'll be staying more local that I'd envisaged.
I did get to do a walk I'd been planning for years, which is the Leigh Woods veteran tree walk - in fact, I actually set out to do it some years back with my son, Samuel, and my oldest friend, Liz, but we chatted so much, we missed every waymark and ended up meandering around the middle of the wood, noticing very little. This time around, I found most of them, I think, although the instructions appear to have been written before a separate cycling trail was established in 2011, which makes them a bit confusing in places. But here they are:
veteran oak pollard
veteran yew
wild service trees, an indicator of ancient woodland
monolith beech, the branches having been removed because of a fungus called Ustulina
layering yew
a possibly veteran oak in a line of four, apparently, though all looking a lot younger than lots of other oaks we passed
this might have been another one in days of yore, when the walk was devised
veteran lime coppard on the rampart of Stokeleigh camp
re-pollarded veteran oak
There were quite a few trees we passed that seemed to me rather more interesting, by which I mean gnarly than some of the trees on this list.
birch, and below some oaks
Stokeleigh camp
remnant wood pasture
another recent tree victim, presumably of climate breakdown
The other ne-to-us walk Cwtch and I did was the stretch of the River Frome that runs from where we walk in Winterbourne to Frenchay Bridge, just above Snuff Mills - a sort of filling-in-the-gap type walk. One day I'd like to walk the Frome from its source near Little Sodbury to where it joins in the River Avon in central Bristol, but right now a piecemeal approach will have to do.
There were lots of stone stiles ...
and stone bridges, the first of which was Frenchay Bridge.
Almost immediately our route took us away from the river briefly, past a house once owned by Edward 'Squire' Higgins, a wealthy gentleman by day and a highwayman, horse thief, house-breaker and murderer by night. He was transported to America in 1754, where he promptly robbed a house and paid for his return passage within three months, settling in what was then called Great House in Frenchay in 1763. He was finally hanged for his crimes in Carmarthen in 1767.
Grove House, formerly Great House
We then cut back down to the Frome and walked in its company as far as Cleeve Bridge ...
... before then detouring away briefly.
An electricity substation masquerading as the earliest known branch of McDonalds. (It was actually a 19th century dovecote.)
Back down on the Frome we passed under the A4174 ...
... whereupon I encountered one of the Frome's tributaries, the Ham Brook, which gave its name to the nearby village of Hambrook ...
... and the 17th century packhorse bridge that crosses it (here partially obscured by a fallen tree).
The bridge by the former Hambrook Mill beyond the M4
plums
The bridge on Moorend Road
The last half a mile or so to our finish point, at the unnamed bridge near Mill Steps, was along road; once there, the gap was filled and it was a question of retracing our steps back to Frenchay Bridge, a lovely deep dive through the summer woods.
