Tag: m6 toll

November 24th – Oh my word today was grim. It started early, with a dentist appointment, and by the time I or my mouth were feeling anything like going out, it was raining cats and dogs. I headed over to Burntwood to get some shopping in after dark. The wind was low, and I dressed for the rain, and the ride was really quite invigorating… but the photography, as you might expect, was lousy. Crossing the bridge over the M6 Toll at Pool Road, I stopped to watch the traffic. The road surface was swilling with water, and the spray was terrible. I was glad to be on my bike, in a deserted country park, in almost total darkness. Somewhere from the lowland below the dam, an owl was calling. There’s beauty anywhere, really, but sometimes it’s very hard to find.

September 2nd – I just knew all day it was going to be a good sunset. I had no idea why; sometimes you can just tell. At teatime, that cold, damp chill descended, of the kind you only get in autumn and spring, and the sky started to turn pink. I knew it was game on. I took my time and headed to Chasewater, which has to be the best place to catch a sunset in these parts. I was surprised and delighted by what I found: not just a great sunset, but a yellow moon rising the east, geese honked and chattered in the dusk as they came in to roost. Bats skittered about my head, and moths became iridescent in my bike lights. Behind this was the most delightful susurration – the continual lapping of water in the darkness. I realised how long it was since I’d heard that at Chasewater. A fine thing. It’s been grim times, old girl, but it’s nice to feel your recovery at last.

March 30th – As I came back up over Aldershawe that afternoon I was exhausted. The week had been emotionally, physically and mentally enervating, and I felt flat, tired and weak. There had been a chord-change in the weather, too; it was chillier, a little overcast and there was a real bastard of a headwind. It probably wasn’t that fierce, but on top of everything, it just felt like another battle I didn’t need. At Cranebrook Lane, not far from Muckley Corner, I stopped for a snack and a drink, and remembered this sad little stub of a road. Before the great folly of the M6 toll, this used to be Bullmoor Lane; to save building another bridge, the road engineers instead diverted the sleepy back lane southwest, to meet Cranebrook Lane on the south side of it’s own flyover. I loved the bit of Bullmoor lane that was lost; it was a little hilly, had a good view to Shenstone, and I spent hours exploring here as a lad. When they cut it off, a piece of me, just a tiny bit, died. The lost lane is now just a gated farm track. 35 years ago, you may well have found an exhausted lad here. He’d dig for sweets or an apple in his saddlebag on his well-loved Peugeot bike, before heading off into the wind like I was about to. It seems as distant now as my first day at school. The watering eye must have been the wind.

December 27th – Pritchard-tecture is a curse or a blessing in South Staffordshire, depending on your point of view. The Hednesford based developers have been responsible for much of the commercial redevelopment of brownfield sites around Cannock, Burntwood and Rugeley, often on former mining land. Such faith and confidence in the local economy is wonderful, but the buildings created are not to everyone’s taste. The curved, gaudy, glass and neon structures are certainly distinctive. Here at Great Wyrley, the futuristic buildings certainly improve on their background – the Poplars Landfill site. Give Mr. Pritchard a break, folks…

December 27th – I had some stuff to get from Maplin, on the Orbital Centre in Cannock. I hate cycling there – the ride is so very boring. I compensated myself by tearing up Brownhills Common first. After a run up the A5 to the Washbrook Lane junction, near the burnt-out Watermargin restaurant, I turned up the new road and over the M6 Toll flyover. They must have been having some kind of IT problem – the road wasn’t really that busy, yet there were queues at the toll gates. I’ve not seen that before. Good evening, lemmings…

December 3rd – A cold, windy afternoon. Busy all day, I managed to slip out at dusk, and took a spin up to Chasetown in order to photograph the town’s Christmas lights from the top of the hill, a plan cruelly thwarted by the ugly fact that the don’t have any. On the way, I stopped on the southern footbridge over the Chasetown bypass to photograph the new road system. Between this new road and the M6 toll, huge amounts of farmland, heath and scrub were destroyed and asphalted over. These junctions altered the local road system massively and I don’t think the local ecology ever really recovered.

June 18th – I don’t really want to think about what this valve does…

It opens and closes a drainage culvert from the M6 toll. Dotted along the motorway’s length are drainage settlement lagoons that catch surface water, and allow the pollutants (like road grit, rubber particles and debris) to sediment out before flowing into local streams and drains. In the event of a spill of serious pollutant, this valve would be closed to hopefully prevent the damage from extending to the local hydroecology.  Sadly, the culvert it closes has a tiny capacity, and in a rainstorm would overtop into the lagoon anyway.

Cheap engineering lip-service.

May 21st – Crossing the M6 Toll footbridge from Poole Crescent, Brownhills West onto Chasewater is always an odd sensory experience. The cage-like structure is disconcerting and the traffic noise from below, coupled with the visual flicker caused by light through the mesh in one’s peripheral vision disorientates. I always think that if there’s some kind of urban hell out there, it would be contstructed like this. Horrible.