June 22nd – Grange Farm at High Heath seems to operate a crop rotation system. Last year in this field near High Heath, there was a fine crop of oilseed rape. This year, it’s barley – and it seems to be ripening well.
It’s interesting to note just how uniform this crop is, and how dense the seed heads. Looks like it’s been a good season for it…
June 10th – Passing Goblins Wood (or Coppice Woods, for the hip modern kids out there), I noted how beautiful they looked. This mostly deciduous, well managed woodland is very old and suspect the only local remnant of the traditional English oak and holly copses that once dotted the area.
These woods, and the trees therein have seen many seasons, and every summer they look superb. Long may they remain (and they are protected by law now, too.)
June 8th – Green Lane, Shelfied; fly tipping in a field gateway, a spot sadly prone to this activity.
Yet again, fridges; people leave old appliances outside from scrap collectors, who strip the valuable metal and then dump the rest in lanes and quiet spots like this.
Please stop leaving stuff for these people – it may be out of sight, out of mind, but you’re complicit in flytipping and causing this problem.
May 11th – This evening when I passed Jockey Meadows, the cattle were obligingly close to the field gate – and what handsome fellows they are. I think there are ten in total, and it looks like they’e been having a paddle in the mud. The work they do is essential – cropping fast growing species, churning the ground up and spreading the poo love.
They are collected in the evening, and I wondered if they were waiting for their lift, which raises again my occasionally mused question that they must regard this as work, and knock off at a set time.
Coos are more intelligent than we give them credit for, I feel.
Meanwhile, at the far side of the meadow, a small group of deer were loafing in the reeds. This place really is alive right now.
May 2nd – I had the camera, this time – although the light was pretty terrible. Heading down Green Lane late afternoon in light rain, I noticed a group of red deer near the brook at the back of Jockey Meadows. I gently approached, and saw there were at least eleven animals, some in moult, some not. They seemed content and relaxed, and tolerated my approach.
That was, until a motorbike came down the lane and spooked them.
A great sight on a grim afternoon not best suited to photography.
April 27th – he was leaping after bugs in a field gateway in Green Lane, Shelfield. He was a bit peeved I spotted him, as he’s clearly a cat of some gravitas who doesn’t do that sort of thing.
He glared at me just long enough for me to take this quick picture, then shot off over the fields. He looks like an adorable chap.
February 6th – It’s been chilly now for a couple of weeks, and I now have my winter cycling skin on, and barely feel the cold. It gets you like that in the end; you become tempered, inured, used to the climate; so much so that you feel it when it warms up that much more acutely. I love being in this position. It means when spring comes, it’s even more joyous.
At Green Lane on another cold, icy commute, I was wrapped up and felt warm, and the barren beauty of the season really struck me.
I’d like spring to hurry up, of course: but I can live with this, for now.
January 29th – I love goats, and it seems we have a local herd now. In the field by Jockey Meadows in which I saw Mr. Fox in last week, I’ve been noticing the goats for a couple of weeks, but they’ve never been close enough for a good photo. Today, they were trying to get through the hedge at Green Lane. It seems there are seven adults and four or five kids, with a rather impressive ram.
I have no idea who owns them, and I think they go wandering of their own accord sometimes; but on a grey, cold January morning seeing those little kids frolicking, jumping and having high jinks was a joy to the soul.
January 19th – A cold commute on a sunny morning, and lots of little delights; the mist off the canal, wildlife and plumes of steam and smoke drifting in mercifully still air. On Green Lane, Walsall Wood, road spray from the pooling water there had coated the adjacent hawthorn hedge and encased it in ice.
Beautiful and haunting.
November 13th – A miserable, headache-coloured commute to work found me at work on a rush job until very late; I returned on wet tarmac in light drizzle through somnambulant suburbs. I was exhausted.
Green lane felt desolate, and matched what I felt, and by the time I got to the top of the Black Cock Bridge, I barely had the energy to push on into Brownhills.
I love cycling late at night, but I did this run very much on autopilot…
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