In my spiralling out from home, this was the first square that wasn’t covered with development of one sort or another. I’ve already had a share of semi-wild in parks and nature-friendly cemeteries, but today I got the first square that had fewer streets and much more blue and white. Blue is obviously for water, but white is important…white is the undefined colour.
If you’re looking for nature on the map, you might be looking for green – but green is parkland, woodland (usually managed woodland) – white is open space. Open, however, is open to interpretation. I know that as I head to the further reaches of the page, it will delineate farmland. I can see already that it includes a vast tract of space that I will not be able to explore at all, but we’ll get to that in due course. For now, for today, white is the open space that is the water edgelands, the marsh.
It takes up half of my map square, and the half that I spend most of my time in.
I start, however, in the other half, in a quarter taken up with suburban streets not old enough to be interesting and a tract of other white space. I love the idea that ‘public open space’ is shown as white space on the map. Unmarked. A snowfield. An unwritten page. A place for stories to be made.
On my way towards it, I find myself intimidated by children. A thirteen-year-old asks me if I will help his younger brother (not much younger) tie his shoe lace. I have visions of bending down to do so, and being clobbered on the head, phone and camera stolen, them running / cycling laughingly away. When did this become a thing, my thinking this way, and does it say more about me, or more about the world in which we live?
“I don’t think so. I’m sure you’re well capable of doing that for yourself by now,” I call from the other side of the street.
“He’s not, I’m not even able to do my own,” says the elder one, sitting on a bike with a trailer attached. Tyler, the younger one, isn’t saying anything. I’m not sure he’s in on the plan. I’m not sure he isn’t.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why not? Why wouldn’t you believe me…why are you calling me a liar…I’m only 13…”
Ah, well, maybe I wouldn’t believe you because I could do mine at four. Isn’t it one of the first things you’re taught? Making a bow, tying laces, along with telling the time and the ABC and counting to, well, thirteen? Is that not still pre-school stuff?
So, my heart-rate is up, and if not exactly frightened, I am unnerved by these children. Maybe they are just being children, taking the mickey, but I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. I stride off across the playing field, them calling names behind me. I stomp towards where there are people, and dogs, and laughter. I was going to come back and talk about this field. I remember writing about that, but today I just want to be across it, and down the cut and over the road, and do all of
that without looking back, just in case.
I feel pathetic.
Then I remember that it wasn’t very far from here that, a long time ago, I was groped by a stranger, when out on just such a walk as this. Some emotions take root in the place, and erupt like a sporing fungus, when conditions are ripe.
I head down a lane, and cross a ‘meadow’ towards the river. Meadow is a lose term at the moment. There has been so much rain, all the land is sodden. I follow a path for not very far, before the river wins and I retreat to the road. Along the way, though, I have time with the trees. Specifically with the willows and the alders. Words from childhood resurface: pussy willow and catkins. I suspect I’d always lumped these together and assumed that only the willow produced such things. I had never looked before. I had never wondered before.
It is to my shame that I have reached this age with so little knowledge, but then again we all grew up in a given environment and that set the boundaries of what we might learn. Or, maybe not the boundaries, more the nature of the invitations. We would learn about what was there, wherever there might be, and what was ‘not there’ would have to wait. Maybe it shouldn’t have waited this long, but there it is.
Pussy willow and Catkins. I remember them, from somewhere a long time ago. Walks in the woods maybe. Or trees in gardens. Or branches brought to the nature table at school. I remember them as themselves, not pictures in books, because I could tell you how they felt, their kitten-soft fur, whence they get their name.
I couldn’t have told you that they are flower spikes. Flowers without petals. Mostly wind-pollinated, so presumably not needing the pretty colours to entice the insects – although they are coloured…grey and green and deep purple in the catkin, the covering…and then they open, when hazel and alder alike seem to default to green and yellow. I took a quiet delight in seeing on a single branch the morphing from kitten tail to corn-on-the-cob to bold stamens waiting for the wind.
Or a passing bee.
I found my first bee of the year, busily doing its thing among the hazel flowers. Every little helps, I guess, on both sides of that equation. A tree evolved to not need insects and an insect out early in the year, getting a head start. The one snaffles a little unintended pollen; the other doesn’t have to rely entirely on our wayward weather. Maybe. Or not.
It’s been a day for learning. I’ve finally got something I can use more easily to tell the hawthorn and the blackthorn apart. I know that the blackthorn flowers earlier and gives flower before leaves, and that hawthorn is the later of the two and
leaves before flowers (or just as often, both at the same time) but that doesn’t help when both are in full flower. It turns out to be much simpler than that. The white petals of both, from a distance, hold a tinge of their anther colours. The pink-tinge is the hawthorn, pink for haws, the berries will be red. The blackthorn, with its black berries, will hold a yellow hew so pale that it may not register at all – the flowers may look snow-white.
In a hedgerow I find my first white nettle flower. Tempted to pick, but decide against –there’ll be an abundance in the garden soon enough and I’m still not sure if I dare risk nettle soup.
I continue to follow the river off my map-square in a half-remembered notion that the path will take me back to the road which will loop round. It does so, but rather than leading onto a road, it takes me onto Marriotts Way – a cycle track that runs along an old M&GM (muddle-&-go-nowhere) rail route from Norwich to Aylsham. I remember this from the days when walking the whole 26 mile length felt like a reasonable day out…not any more. I'm getting old.
Today, I’m happy with my little loop. With waterlogged fields. With robins and blackbirds and gulls and great tits and blue tits and wood pigeon. With 5 magpies: five for silver: beneath a silvery sky.
I am happy with the river and with trees: oak and hazel and alder. With reed mace and the scruffiness of the marsh after winter – all shades of ecru and beige and brown – all the tired, washed-out shades.
The path takes me along the upper edge of Sweetbriar Marsh, recently acquired by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. There are signs on gates reminding us, gently, that the marsh is not yet open to the public and talking about cattle that are not yet grazing there. There is talk of said cows wearing collars that will emit an audible signal to warn them when they are straying into undesired areas. The Trust are calling this ‘virtual fencing’. It concerns me. Training an animal to veer away from an audible signal…how are they doing that? And is it really 'audible' or is it an electric shock? More importantly, placing a wireless receiver around their necks? No, not happy with that. This is a system designed by people who think carrying their 5G mobile in their breast or bum pocket and sleeping with it by their head is a good idea. I do not.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think there is evil intent. But I do fear immature science and unintended consequences. Is it really too hard or too expensive to put in actual fences? Or too detrimental to give the cattle free run of the marsh?
From the embanked section overlooking the marsh we drop below it, into the secret life of the cutting where the birch grow slender and tall, and moss emeralds the banksides and the dark water of the runnel runs silent.
I pause by the chemical plant, just to wonder about what goes on in there, and who it even belongs to these days. All those cylinders and pipes and pools reminds me of where my Dad used to work. Dad is never very far from my thoughts when I'm walking. I think he'd have loved this spiral plan. In another life, he might even have walked it with me.
On which happy thought, I head under the ring-road and back towards town, at some point dropping off the other edge of my truncated map but finding my way back to the river for a last few minutes hundred yards and back to a road that will lead me home.
