Images

May 18th – After a rainy, hard, grim day, returning home from Shenstone Station into the wind was hard work. The weather had brightened, however, and the sun was coming out. On the way to Footherley, along Hollyhill Lane, this path through a ripening crop of oilseed rape caught my attention. Leading to Footherley itself, the path is well used by walkers and locals alike.

May 17th – Exploring a bit more of the Arrow Valley cycle route in Redditch on the way to work, I took a trundle round the central lake in Arrow Valley Park. Home to a boat club and an outdoor centre, it’s clearly a popular, well maintained amenity, teaming with wildlife. 

It’s easy to knock the town, and I often do, but this route and park are wonderful, and a credit to their designers.

May 17th – Shenstone Pumping Station, one of the earlier examples of the great South Staffordshire Waterworks tradition, is a dark red, victorian edifice, originally designed for a steam pump. Brought into use in 1892, it pumps water to this day from a 131 feet deep, 12 foot diameter well, with a 597 foot heading. The steam pump was retired in 1957, and now a 60 horsepower submersible well pump tops up a 10,000 gallon tank under the pumphouse.

After treatment there, water is pumped by 200 horsepower pumps up to Barr Beacon reservoir for distribution. These pumps can supply 1,500,000 gallons per day, and are backed up by emergency generators.

Shame about the hideous air intake grafted into the front doors.

May 16th – another popular crop this year seems to be potatoes. A few weeks ago, I photographed this field belonging to Home Farm at Sandhills, freshly ploughed with Brownhills Church in clear view. The church is still visible, but the neat rows of spuds will soon be growing tall. I love the way the regimented green tramlines highlight the undulating contour of the field.

May 15th -South Staffordshire is currently littered with oddly placed scaffold towers like this one, either side of the Birmingham Road at Shenstone Woodend. Their placement and purpose has caused some consternation, but there’s a simple explanation. Having upgraded the Ray Hall to Drakelow high voltage feeder line last year, Electricity Alliance are now upgrading the parallel one that also connects to a switching compound at the former Hams Hall station in Warwickshire. The towers – with nets suspended between them – prevent cables dropped from the transmission lines above from falling into roads and railway lines.

I’m wondering if this is a precursor to building the new gas combined cycle power station at Drakelow…

May 14th – Binary Wharf is an oddly named canalside housing development in Walsall Wood. Named after the former home of a computer software company it replaced – Binary House – it’s architecturally quite interesting, with a varied roofline and an odd mix of levels. I was terribly disappointed when it opened that the numbering system was decimal, the only correct numbers to use would should have been 000,001,010,011… Oh, to live at 101, Binary Wharf…

May 14th – A hop out to get some essentials saw me caught in a downpour. Mooching around the canal, I noticed that the remainder of the old railway bridge at the canalside on Clayhanger Common was slowly being reclaimed by nature. Nothing more than the steady hydraulic pressure of organic growth is splitting apart the brickwork and reminding us that nature is really in charge, and it’s got all the time in the world.

May 13th – the flowering of Vetch – the wildflower so common in meadows, in heath grasslands and verges is one of the signs of summer. There are several varieties in the UK, and the most familiar is the yellow and deep crimson variety that grows flat in lawns, often too low for the lawnmower to cut. As kids, we called this ‘Egg and Bacon’. 

This example, spurred on by the recent showers, was proliferating near the bypass bridge at Chasewater Heaths.