Yesterday left me physically (nearly 11,000 steps, and two train journeys) and emotionally exhausted.
After sorting the orchid patch at Green Mount, I went for what may be my last walk on the Common. A wild playground when I was a 7-year-old, with bracken towering above my head and almost never seeing anyone else using it, it’s been tamed over the last 63 years and now resembles a park, with well-used pathways and wooded areas replacing much of the bracken and gorse. So many memories … the concrete path, done in two stages 1966-67, with the half-completed stage leaving it abruptly terminating in a muddy puddle for many months. Orchids, fly agaric toadstools, the omnipresent gorse and bracken, the ponds with newts (maintained a couple of years ago by local wildlife interests), bluebells now in the cleared areas, birds too numerous to mention but memorably one year a nightingale nesting low in a gorse bush, cowslips, germander, primroses … the memories come tumbling out. Currently, its the time of the windflowers, great sheets of them dancing in the cleared areas.
