Author: BrownhillsBob

I told the truth - but told it bent. Wandering around bemused and ranty since 2007.

#365daysofbiking Overnight mooring

Sunday, September 20th 2020 – The closing in of the evenings means that there will be more night shots here as the season advances, and there are a few favourites I return to, for no other reason than I love the images they make.

At the top end of Brownhills, on the border between there and Walsall Wood, the Anchor Bridge is lovely at night. I adore this view.

The colours and light of a night shot can, counteiintuitly, be gorgeously vivid.

Quiet, contemplative scenes like this moor me through the winter until the light returns. Therapy, I think.

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#365daysofbiking Full of beans

Saturday, September 19th 2020 – My riding partner for the day was groggy and finally decided to venture out if we could ‘see some lovely villages’ in late afternoon – there was nothing for it. We piled it down the old A5 to Atherstone, and explored the country northwards in Leicestershire – Radcliffe Culey, Shenton, Market Bosworth, Barton in the Beans, Congerstone, Bilstone, and back over Orton on the Hill, Clifton and Whittington.

A lovely 70 mile sunset from near Sutton Cheney, the gorgeousness of Shenton I remember from exploring ten years ago, and the glorious run from there into Bosworth.

Leicestershire still has the best place names.

Half the ride was in the blackest of nights, and a real buzz – but a reminder that summer is now well and truly over.

Autumn so far hasn’t been so bad, though.

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#365daysofbiking Berry colourful

Friday, September 18th 2020 – One of the joys of late summer/autumn fruiting is pyrocanthus, colloquially known as firethorn.

This colourful member of the apple family – it’s fruit are not really berries but pomes, i.e. apples – is insipid to humans with mildly poisonous seeds within, but very valuable for wild birds as a long lasting food source into the cold months.

For bystanders, though, if means beautifully vivid boughs laden with glistening fruit in shades from nearly white to deep, deep read, a real autumn treat.

These bushes near Darlaston entertain me every year.

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#365daysofbiking That’s hall

Thursday, September 17th 2020 – I used to work around Tyseley a lot, and got to know it well – but when the company I work for stopped renting space out there, I rarely had cause to return.

I had business near the Warwick Road so passed through on a sunny day, rekindling memories – one in particular was the remarkable spectacle of Hay Hall, still buried unexpectedly between factories in the middle of an unremarkable industrial estate.

This 15th century, once moated hall is a historic, grade II listed building and in very good condition. Last time I was here around 2015 it was still in use as offices.

You can find out more about it by clicking here.

From signage outside, it seems to be currently vacant, sadly, but this lovely building is one of the reasons I love Brum – you find wonderfully unexpected things in the most mundane of places.

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#365daysofbiking Inhaling green:

Wednesday, September 16th 2020 – While I’ve been away the canals have continued as they ever were, with small changes. They got very busy with pedestrians and cyclists for a while, a product of fair weather and lockdown, so the towpaths were well worn, and the cessation in mowing gave my beloved orchids a sporting chance this year. But the waterfowl, plants and colours were broadly as ever.

Reassuringly, beautifully, peacefully as ever.

The one change that’s been interesting is the azolla bloom that dominated the water surface in 2019 has largely faded, and in its death left sporadic patches of more traditional clumping algae, which must be a pain for waterfowl and boaters alike.

There are still traces of azolla, which was a surface invasive surviving a mild winter, but it was non-stringy and readily parted for birds and watercraft, but it’s mostly gone.

On a dull, grey autumn afternoon, the green and peace here were so welcome, I felt like I was inhaling them.

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#365daysofbiking Maybe it’s the breath of Autumn on my shoulder…

Tuesday, September 15th 2020 – First of all, thanks for all your positive words and encouragement over the last few days. I had no idea so many of you were reading this rambling pile of cobblers. Thanks so much, it has meant a lot.

I’ve started going to Telford again as the pandemic eases, but now, instead of going the longer way around by train, I tend to ride to Wolverhampton and hop on the train there, to minimise my use of public transport. It works better, if I’m honest and the ride to and from Wolverhampton is nicer than I would have expected.

Actually in Telford, the cycleway I love – up from the station to the Priorslee crossing – is showing a beautiful lack of hedge maintenance as my favourite green tunnel starts to turn for autumn.

Boughs brush my head. Squirrels and rabbits dart out of my path. Hips, haws and berries glow colourfully in the dark green.

Not all effects of the pandemic have been bad. I’ll be a bit sad when they get around to trimming this back… And the gentle feeling of autumn is not so grim this year. I’m quite enjoying it.

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#365daysofbiking Consumption

Today, a tentative restart.
Firstly, an apology:

  • I have been rather ill, tired and on my knees.
  • Work was about all I could do for weeks. A period of working from home drove me very low indeed. I love to be out with people in my niche, the isolation was very bad for me.
  • I am recovering physically and mentally, and my distance cycling is back, and now commute both ways to work again. For a period I drove one way, rode home and back, drove home and back etc.
  • Like all of us, the pandemic has been strange.
  • What’s been stopping me updating is I have all the photos for the missing days, but I’m just so far behind, catching up is daunting. *I will fill the gap but have to work out a system to do it*

I’ll be honest. I’ve cycled every day even though I’ve not been posting, even if only up the road and back on very ill days.

It’s time to kick this thing back off. Thanks for your concern, and I’m sorry. I’m rebooting. It may take a while, specifically with the main blog. I am not young these days. I get tired. But I still love this place, my rides within in, and I still have the wide eyed wonder I always did.

Thanks for your care and patience.

Monday, September 14th 2020 – A summer like morning commute to Darlaston that was unnaturally warm and pleasant, but in the shadows and shade, the nip of autumn lurked, and the dew was heavy, a sure harbinger of Autumn.

At the far end of Victoria Park in Darlaston, a tree on the margin of the marsh and footpath continues to consume the fence that passed too closely.

I’ve watched this tree consume those steel bars for over a decade and the tree is still in rude health, despite my suspicion at one point that it was diseased.

I’ve always adored the almost pyroclastic flow over the footpath.

Trees like this are a constant to me, and as I return to this journal after too long away, it seems appropriate that since last mentioned here, the tree has grown, aged, but remained – a marker for me that probably very few notice.

Onwards, and into autumn. You coming with me?

 

The thrill of the Chase – reblogged from Dry Valleys

dry-valleys:

“
Words are ineffectually employed to describe the hateful, blighted
scene, but imagine a wide and dreary stretch of common land surrounded
by the scattered, dirty and decrepit cottages of the semi-savage
population of nail makers and pitmen, with here and there a school, a
woe-bygone chapel, a tin tabernacle, and a plentiful sprinkling of
public houses. Further imagine the grass of this wide spreading common
to be as brown, and innutritious as it is possible for grass to be, and
with an extra-ordinary wealth of scrap iron, tin clippings, broken
glass, and brick-bats deposited over every square yard, and all around
it the ghastly refuse heaps of long abandoned mines.”

Charles G. Harper. (1912) (8 is from around that time).

Followed the Trent and Mersey Canal then turned off near Shugborough, without sampling the delights of that place (please see my earlier essay on Shugborough), as I was rushing to make my first ever visit to Chasewater, a place outside my normal cycling range but which @brownhillsbob and other Staffordshire bloggers made me decide to visit.

As I took a ‘shortcut’ across Cannock Chase, I followed a time-honoured Staffordshire and Black Country tradition and got completely lost amidst the heath and plantation woodland, which in fairness is quite samey compared to landscapes I’m more used to, like the Staffordshire Moorlands.

On my way I visited places like (3) Tackeroo, a First World War railway which lasted between 1915 and 1919, then became a cycle track on which I happily set off in the wrong direction. In its day, Brocton training camp prepared men such as JRR Tolkien for the rigours of war, and this is commemorated in the war memorials and cemeteries which lie across the chase (please see my earlier essays and visit the Museum of Cannock Chase for more).

I did eventually end up at (4) Chasewater Country Park, which is the place to be in this area (I bumped into my girlfriend and her parents, who all live in Rugeley and had come here in their car, though we weren’t together for long as I had to leave in order to get home) and found a beautiful place just yielding to autumn.

Like Cannock Chase, this area has been heavily shaped by humans for centuries, and the reservoir was built as early as 1797, to provide water for the Wyrley and Essington Canal. The railway came in 1849 and mining in the area boomed, producing a way of life that fastidious men like Harper abhorred, perhaps out of shame that the backbreaking toil done there was the thing that enabled them to be ‘superior’.

In the second half of the 20th century, mining declined and the canal ended in 1954, as part of a general turn towards leisure at Chasewater. It was acquired by Brownhills Council in 1997 and transferred to Lichfield Council in 1994; they sculpted the country park in 1998 and did a fine job.

Mining finally disappeared from the area in 1993 and is commemorated by the statue at Burntwood (10), designed by local artist Peter Walker and unveiled in 2013. After this I had to belt back Castle Ring, Rugeley and Stone way as, due to the Cannock Chase farrago, I was late.

The railway I mentioned earlier? Unlike almost all other such lines, this one was never shut because as its industrial use came to an end, it was taken over in 1964 by the volunteers who still run it. Like the castle and other places, that was not taken in during my brief visit but will be something to look forward to next time, without being blighted!

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#365daysofbiking Canal dreams:

May 24th – A beautiful, much less changeable day than the one before saw me saunter into Wolverhamton on the canal, then into Birmingham on the old line via Oldbury, Tipton and Smethwick.

With nothing open to dawdle at, Birmingham was a fleeting visit and I headed out towards Tyburn and Castle Bromwich on the canal, transferring to the Plants Brook/New Hall Valley cycleway to Sutton, then through Sutton Park home.

As usual, nature, and it’s relationship with urbanity was the star. Even if one particular rarity at Birmingham was made entirely out of Lego…

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#365daysofbiking A break in the weather

May 23rd – Over to Lichfield for some essential shopping and the closed state of the city was expected, but dragged me down. There was only one thing to rectify the gloom: A return via the country lanes of Wall, Chesterfield and Hilton.

On Bullmoor Lane I was caught in the briefest of short, sharp and intense showers, and it passed as quickly as it arrived, leaving nothing but sightly damp lanes and a beautiful partial rainbow.

Summer is fantastic.

This journal is moving home. Find out more by clicking here.

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