Tag: IFTTT

#365daysofbiking Crowning glory


October 22nd – Tipton’s Coronation Gardens on a beautiful, sunny autumn day.

The Black Country is my home, the place I love: My past, present and hopefully, future.

William Perry the famous pugilist still takes on all comers here, but is continually humiliated by pigeons. His embarassment is quiet and dignified though,like this small but beautiful park.

When you mention Tipton to people who don’t know the place, they invariably imagine dirt, factories, bleak streets and deprivation.

Both I and William Perry know different. Although he’s still annoyed about the pigeons.

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#365daysofbiking Motortown

October 21st – Nipping over to Bilston mid afternoon on a gloomy, grey Monday, I crossed the Black Country Route near Moxley.

There’s no dobt these new roads of the late 80s and early 90s helped to revive the fortunes of areas like Moxley, suffering huge loss of manufacturing industry, but they did leave many of them feeling like isolated islands in a see of ebbing and flowing traffic.

Moxley church still looks imperious, as it always has done. But now, it lords over a dial carriageway and the frantic hubbub of the daily grind, which I find beautiful and sad.

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#365daysofbiking New forms

October 20th – Cannock Chase was full of really a interesting – it was the first time I’ve seen coral fungus since I was a kid, and there were a whole range of brackets, toadstools, slimes and balls to keep me interested.

Sadly the light was terrible, so few decent photos.

I’ve never known such a good season for fungus. I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before…

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#365daysofbiking Rainy Chase and Sundays…


October 20th – I set off mid afternoon for Castle Ring. It was spotting with rain, that wasn’t;t really forecast. By the time I got there feeling a bit sad, the rain had set in for the afternoon.

Something happened, though, and I found my happiness in the drizzle, getting wet and finding fungi at Stonepit Green and explored a boggy, muddy forest until darkness fell, visiting places around Beaudesert I haven’t been for years.

You can find peace and contentment on even the most horrid days if you stop looking for it and just get on with finding out what’s over the next hill.

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#365daysofbiking Garden ruin


October 19th – Originally featuring tennis courts, gardens and bowling greens, the original, once beautiful Oak Park has been pretty much abandoned and allowed to decay in recent years.

This is a crime, and a civic insult to the miners and citizens of Walsall Wood to whom this place was a gift.

Only the bowling club, with a well kept, securely fenced green still get the benefit of this sad, lost place.

I cannot countenance a world where there simply isn’t the money allowed to look after our civic amenities like this.

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#365daysofbiking Stumped

October 19th – Nipping over to Walsall Wood on an errand, I crossed the sadly fading old Oak Park – not the leisure centre of the same name, but the formerly ornamental park that gave the centres their name.

Near a bench by the old waterlogged bowling green, an amazingly vivid colony of what I think is honey fungus.

There was a fair collection of disparate fungus here, to be fair. About the only thing that seems to be doing well in this sad, lost park.

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#365daysofbiking Just nuts

October 19th – The sweet chestnuts have had a good year. In this country wild or urban trees rarely get the conditions to produce edible fruit, but on a journey to Tipton I found these near Brunswick Park, Wednesbury – still very thin but some of a size that contained a thin, edible nut.

I’ve not seen that before.

The boughs are laden and the windfallen fruit litters the footpath, the spiny husks looking like debris from some dinosaur shedding its skin. The nuts, however, are proving a delight for the squirrel population who are busily engaged in eating and planting the next generation of sweet chestnut saplings.

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#365daysofbiking Daisy, daisy

October 19th –  A puzzle. I found this flower growing from the brickwork at the canal edge in Walsall. It’s clearly day-like, but not a daisy. But it’s delicate and very, very lovely.

My curiosity was piqued by the colour. In the soft autumnal sunlight it appeared to be a very, very light purple or pink. But I can’t actually tell for sure.

Any ideas?

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#365daysofbiking Always restful

October 17th –  On the way to work, I stopped for a break in Victoria Park, Darlaston – the park curiously formed from a railway cutting abandoned in the 1930s.

It’s always beautiful here in Autumn and today, the trees were just shrugging on their seasonal jackets of gold.

Victoria park is a great example of how urban edge land with a peculiar topology can be repurposed into a beautiful and well loved place, that’s always restful and a real oasis in the heart of a busy town.

I’ll never tire of this place.

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#365daysofbiking Completing the circle

October 17th – One of the things that makes me happy in autumn is the parting of ways of that year’s cygnets and their parents. Gradually, as winter closes in, that year’s clutch are gradually pushed away by the parents who still keep a loose family group but won’t tolerate the young too close.

This gradual transition into adulthood is visible about now as you meet lone cygnets like this one, hustling for treats on the canal in walsall, a few hundred yards from its parents.

For once I had some corn and it ate like they always do, like tit had never had food before.

Soon, it’ll join the main local flocks and will spend a few years socialising before pairing off and the family cycle continuing.

Another successful year for the local swans.

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