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October 21st – It’s going to be a hard week. The Monday morning commute saw me heading to Birmingham in a rainstorm. Visibility was bad, and I abandoned the Chester Road and headed for Shenstone, as I didn’t feel comfortable in the spray and slime of the main road. When I got to Shenstone, I realised just how heavily it was raining. It rained too, on my way home; another fraught journey where I rediscovered the lack of traction on wet road markings and the fact that my jacket waterproofing seems to be failing.

The weather forecast doesn’t seem to be predicting much of an improvement. Oh well, at least it’s warm…

October 20th – Also up on Chasewater Dam, I spotted the crack in the render of the back wall of the dam cottage. It’s obviously been there a while, and someone is monitoring it – that white plate, glued across the fracture with resin, was put there to gauge if the crack was growing. The plate has indeed fractured, and a portion is now missing.

I guess it’s a remnant of the dam works here. I never noticed it before.

October 20th – There’s some really great fungi growing at the moment on Chasewater Dam, where the trees were removed. I have no idea what they are, and initially, they looked like piles of horse manure. It was only when I got closer I realised what they were. it has just stopped raining, and they glistened wonderfully.

Still can’t find any decent fly agaric this year.

October 18th – Autumn colour abounds along the canal banks, hedgerows and open spaces. The leaves are really falling now, the nights are drawing in and we won’t see a post-6pm sunset for a few months. Amongst the crimsons, golds and yellows of the season, a lone honeysuckle flower, defiantly awaiting the first frost. 

It’s been a great summer, and like the Bullings Heath honeysuckle, I can’t quite accept it’s now passed.

October 18th – I’ve been in Darlaston all this week, and Kings Hill continues to pique my interest. As well as some great faded architecture, this characterful post-industrial borderland between Walsall and Sandwell contains a really great park. Recently refurbished Kings Hill Park – which I erroneously referred to as King George Park in an earlier post for some reason – is hilly, wooded and beautiful. There’s a wonderful new sculpture, and the whole place is wearing autumn beautifully. Emerging into Franchise Street, I admired the view of St. Matthews, Walsall over the rooftops. There are some fantastic old houses here.

Darlaston is full of surprises.

October 17th – The rose hips are beautiful right now. High in sugar, and great for wine, jam or just left for the birds, they add a welcome splash of orange-red to the scrubs, thickets and margins at this time of year.

These examples were growing in the Goscote Valley on the cycleway. Such shiny, crimson perfection.

October 17th – This all-consuming tree is still growing healthily at Victoria Park, Darlaston, just by the old railway walk. When I last featured it here – way back on May 23rd, 2011 – the trunk had only just started to reach the second bar of the fence it was slowly and surely consuming.

I pass this remarkable example of natural growth and triumph over the built environment quite a bit, so hadn’t noticed the sum of the incremental growth until today. Note that now, the whole railing is being distorted by gentle, persistent hydraulic pressure. The overgrowth has reached the other side of the wooden kerb too. 

There is no strength like the gentle, microscopic strength of nature. And she’s got all the time in the world to do it.

October 16th – It seemed a little previous, considering it’s two weeks to Halloween, but as I waited at the lights at the Pleck Road/Bridgman Street junction in Walsall on my way home I spied this real pumpkin on the parcel shelf of the car in front. Nicely carved, too; beats a nodding dog.

It certainly made me smile.

October 15th – Victoria Park, Darlaston is an embarrassment of fungal riches at the moment. I spun through on a misty, wet morning where the only colour I’d seen was the red of brake lights, and noticed several brightly coloured types of fungi in the freshly mown grass. The orange curly one I’ve never seen the like of before, and I love the little yellow button. There was a plentiful supply of shaggy manes, too, which the grass cutters had clearly mown round when attending to the rest of the park. I liked that – a nice touch.

Such welcome colour on a dull morning commute.

October 15th – I hadn’t been down Station Street in Darlaston – at least the James Bridge end of it – for a while. What greeted me today was quite a surprise, to say the least. 

Walsall has developed some odd traffic calming and management systems in the last few weeks; traffic engineers have gone mad with the Shellgrip at Rushall, and two streets in The Butts have become one way. Here, the stub end of Station Street – a short cut through to Heath Road – has been blocked to two way traffic at the Heath Road junction. 

This seems bizarre in itself, but they have left a cycling lane open for us two-wheelers, although it’s possibly the most peculiar such arrangement I’ve ever seen.

It’s like an ability-testing obstacle course. I bet whoever laid this out hasn’t ridden a bike for years.