Tag: blight

August 14th – Another tree I keep an eye on is the odd pear tree growing near the top of the bank between the canal and new pond at Clayhanger. I have no idea how it came to b there and suspect it sprouted from a discarded fruit core.

This small but dense tree usually fruits copiously, but this year is suffering terribly from blight and bird attack. The fruit on this tree have never looked appetising at all, to be honest.

An interesting thing though, and I’ll keep watching as it grows and develops over the years and hope that one day the harvest prospers. 

July 30th – I see the horse chestnut leaf miners are back with a vengeance now. A moth lays eggs, whose larvae burrow through the large leaves, eating them and leaving huge brown scars, which suddenly appear around this time of year. A relatively new problem, it doesn’t seem to hurt the trees, but it causes premature leaf fall, and they look bad. 

Experts are assessing links between this and the canker also affecting many of these stately, arboreal giants.

It’s a great shame, I love these trees and hope this ugly affliction soon passes. I cycled a loop around Shenstone and Stonnall and I don’t think there’s an unaffected tree anywhere in the area.

January 1st – This is… extraordinary. I came upon it out of pure, unbridled nosiness.

As you travel down the Chester Road from Shire Oak towards Stonnall, just within the boundary of Fishpond Wood and the old quarry, there’s a gated track.  

As a kid, I was told there were cottages down there. Having seen a building on Google Earth, and occasionally seeing people pull out of the driveway, I paid it no mind.

But in recent weeks, there has been a pile of flytipped refuse in the track gateway, containing structural asbestos. I was wondering how the people here were accessing their house and if it was still lived in – I could vaguely remember seeing bins out for collection here, but not for a good while.

Passing the drive, I took a dive down there on my bike. It’s long, downhill, maybe ⅓ mile. With a large, derelict house at the end. A house once worth over half a million pounds.

It has clearly only been vacated in recent years, and is a rambling, oddly extended place with a wish-mash of extensions and levels, with one of the most bizarre fireplace arrangements i’ve ever seen. in it’s day it was clearly some place, but not now. Now, just vandalism, decay and eerie loneliness.

It turns out from subsequent research the place is owned by a developer, after the elderly couple who lived here vacated the place. Permission has been granted since 2013 to replace it with a large, new family home. 

You can read about this, and some of the backstory in this Design & Access statement from the Lichfield Planning Department here.

Right now, it’s clearly a vandal magnet, and a target for flytippers. 

A very curious thing indeed.

September 9th – Embarrassment yet again as the former Scott Arms pub in Darlaston is hit by flyposters advertising an event coincidentally featuring the same funfair as last time the blight occurred.

This must be terribly embarrassing for Pat Collins Fairs, who can’t possibly condone such advertising.

Wonder what Walsall Council’s position on this kind of thing is?

September 4th – And then, there are the oaks I was concerned were lost. All the galls and nasties seem to have appeared long before the acorn crop I thought would not appear – there is now a stunning crop of tiny acorns growing well all along the canal at Clayhanger.

It’s good to see, and when they start to fall, I’ll gather them and spread the acorn love.

Never lose faith.

September 4th – Apologies for the poor phone photos, I forgot the camera…

I’m still musing on the oaks, and their various blights and parasites. I asserted a few weeks ago that the oak seemed to suffer disproportionally with these afflictions, but I was forgetting the various leaf-miners, bugs and aphids that affect other species.

This sycamore in Pleck, Walsall for instance is suffering form various things, including leaf miners. I have no idea why, but only this tree out of several neighbours is affected.

I really ought to read up on this stuff.

August 25th – The land at the bottom of Bentley Mill Way, wedged in behind the houses on the Darlaston Road, the motorway and canal has been vacant and derelict a very long time, in fact as long as I can remember. Blighted by former shallow mining, and probably contaminated, this is scarred industrial wasteland that also has the River Tame flowing through it. 

Since last year, work has been taking place on upgrading the adjacent Bentley Mill Way for a new improved road system, loftily touted to ‘improve development potential’.

In all the regeneration-bullshit that’s ebbed and flowed, there has been talk of reclaiming this land and building on it, and architect’s drawings of a particularly odd building have been circulated.

Someone has clearly been enticed here, as fresh boreholes have been drilled in the last week; those coloured pipes with locked caps are sleeved bores for surveying purposes.

Whilst the wasteland green is pretty in the summer, it would be nice to see building here. Let’s hope something happens soon.

February 1st – Just on the rough side of Brownhills Common, a handful of yards from Coppice Lane, there’s a deep void in the land through the trees It may be the remnant of early surface mining, or the later evidence of hamfisted mineral exploration (the coal here was evident on the surface, so it was said; the grey clay also highly prized by potters), but it’s been here for decades; the spoil is piled up around it in mounds with fairly mature trees growing from them, which must date from around 1977, as the year previously, the whole of this side of the common had been flatted by a grassfire.

Every landscape tells a story This one tells of an industrial, blighted past, which we now sort of revere.

Brownhills holds some of it’s oldest secrets closest, but in plain sight.

February 10th – I came home in the early afternoon, just as the rain was clearing. I’d had to call in at Aldridge, so found myself in the hinterlands between Walsall Wood, Leighswood and Stubbers Green. This is a very scarred landscape, mainly from brick marl extraction. The geology of the former quarries here is perfect for landfill, and for decades, as a site is abandoned by the brickmakers, it is adopted by the refuse industry.

Now at the capping and landscaping stage, Vigo Utopia was a massive hole in the ground when I was a child, but now stands high above the surrounding area. Bulkheads tap off the methane and pipe it to a generator plant. Eventually, this mound will be a public open space, but that’s some way off yet.

Of course, the brickworks are still busy, and there’s still marl to be extracted, and there will therefore be further space for landfill. A vicious cycle of blight and nuisance, it renders this landscape hostile, ugly and barren, particularly on a dark, wet and blustery February Monday afternoon.