THE VALLEY OF STONES

Imagine you are walking through the country on a route you've never taken before and you see a wooden signpost pointing to 'The Valley of Stones'. Well you have to follow the path don't you?

Exactly. So over I went and through the kissing gate and along by mountains of gorse. Plants and trees seem a bit all over the place this year. Last weekend I watched the London Marathon on television. I have no idea why I find this interesting. It's a whole load of people I don't know hurrying along through emptied city streets for hours on end - thousands of them! It's a bit like horse racing. I sometimes watch that on the television too. Perhaps it's the predictability of it. Everyone starts at A and tries to get to B as fast as they can. Then un-threatenting people who didn't do the hurrying talk to those who did - and that's it. When the news is otherwise full of bombs and earthquakes, things which burst terrifyingly out of the blue, perhaps I like to be reassured by events with no surprises. But the thing which stood out specially with the Marathon this year was how green were the trees in London compared with the trees in Dorset. A week later and everything here is lushing up. Some places are almost unrecognisable because the rain-inspired green-ness is so sudden - and tall.

Hang on - I think I've got lost. Why am I talking about horse racing and marathons and the trees in London? - oh yes - it's about gorse. Our trees may seem a tad slow in comparison this year and the blackthorn blossom may not be as impressive as usual - but the gorse? Oh the gorse! Roads are lined with it in brilliant yellow. It's all over the place and on the hills there's so much in flower it looks as if great billows of golden clouds have come to land in the grass. And there it was on my way to The Valley of Stones.

And a pond too; murky and mysterious. Brilliant! Sometimes it's like living in a children's story book.

Think England and you think thatched cottages. Maybe you think of crumpets and UKIP too. Maybe football in cities and cricket on village greens. Red buses? Late trains? We don't have red buses round here but I've seen quite a few UKIP signs in the last few weeks. They come - and will hopefully go. But thatched cottages are abundantly present - and comfortingly old. Why am I going on about cottages now? Um . . . oh yes. The cottages are tucked in valleys and folds between great big green hills. I mean really big. They aren't mountains. They don't go sheer up and sheer down. They go in great waves through the land. There are villages (and thatched, stone cottages) hidden in some of their folds but in other places there are no dwellings - just gorse and trees and cattle or sheep . . .

In the picture, we are part way down the hill. We will walk a bit to our right, then down, then left again behind the tree and continue further down still. It's not hard walking - just a bit steep in places.

Until we reach this place - The Valley of Stones.

Scale is hard to convey in photographs. I don't want to exaggerate how high are the hills on either side of this valley - but they are higher than they appear in the photo; so the presence of boulders at the bottom when the slopes on either side of them are smooth comes as a surprise. They snake along like a wide path. It's better seen when you are standing there among them or looking down from a distance. (Distance is hard to get right on blogs.) And don't be put off by the telegraph poles either. It's because we are out in the country that wires have to be supported above the ground instead of expensively under it. This place is is not remote in the way some of the wilds in Scotland are remote - but there are no houses nearby (only ruins); and when I was there, no walkers apart from the friend who came with me. The silence is tremendous.

Nor would I like to suggest I'm terribly genned up on science and geology so I'll simply copy the Natural England notice at the top of the path.

'This National Nature Reserve is named after the distinctive boulders that tumble down this dry valley in the downs. These sarsen stones, of tightly cemented gravels and sands, derive from the former capping above the chalk that became fragmented during the freeze/thaw conditions after the last ice age 10,000 years ago.

'This Reserve is also notable for its fine chalk grassland and the associated insects and flowers. Scarce lichens and mosses grow on the sarsens, The downland and heathy grassland is maintained by cattle and sheep grazing.

'This is part of a working farm, managed in partnership with the landowner, the Bridehead Estate, and a tenant. Stock are present all year so please keep dogs on a lead.'

Some of the rocks are smooth, but others, as mentioned on the notice, are made up of smaller stones stuck together and some of the flints are so polished by the weather (or so compressed?) they have glass-like qualities . . . (anyone know what causes this?) . . . and their broken faces shine as if they have been consciously cut for the sake of reflecting light just as windows and car mirrors do - or binoculars in the distance . And in this I am not exaggerating. They are pretty and special.

The notice mentions wild flowers. Most noticeable when I visited were violets clustered around one of the rocks but there were the beginnings of bluebells here and there too - for all that it wasn't woodland. You know what violets look like. You know what bluebells look like. And I posted about Oil Beetles last year . . . So in the spirit of bringing you pictures you might not often find on other blogs - I spent a little while moving from cow-pat to cow-pat taking photogaphs of these beautiful Yellow Dung Flies (Scathophaga stercoraria) who were mating en masse in the sunshine. They may be called 'Yellow' but if I have named them I would have said they are gold. I'm a fan.

Thinking of bright colours - what do you think of my new shoes? They may not look much good for walking in but they are so supple they give an excellent grip on rough (dry) ground and are extraordinarily comfortable. (I haven't tried them in the wet yet.)

And remember - It's only a week before our next Tree Following Festival. THURSDAY 7TH MAY!

Tweet

NOTHING BUT STONES

I am going to take you to a bleak and beautiful place. A place where nothing grows. A place of stones.

In this post you will see little else. A van on a road and, beyond it - stones.

You will see no plants in this post - only stones.

There are no insects - only stones.

These stones (or, rather, pebbles - because they are smooth and rounded and you won't hurt yourself if you fall) go on seemingly for ever - up and up, then for two miles one way (if you walked left out of picture) and around fifteen in the other.

You can change the seeming height in photographs. Often the flowers and insects I show you appear on your screen massively larger than they are in real life. It has to be like that - otherwise you wouldn't see them! But in this post, I have the opposite problem. There is no way I can express in pictures how high this bank of stones is, nor how it seems when you stand on top and see it curve into the mist of distance.

Where we are now - towards the eastern end, a couple of miles before they join land at Portland, the pebbles are oval and about three inches long. At the western end, where they join the mainland, they are like gravel. The sea, it seems, sifts them. And for much of its way, there is water on either side. Sea on the south. A lagoon called the Fleet on its other side which separates it from the coast of Dorset.

Almost at the top - and you begin to see the sea on the other side.

Photographs of Chesil Beach tend to show it from above - from the top of the Island of Portland - so you can see the sweep of it, the roofs of houses leading down to it. This gives it a Mediterranean feel. But when you are walking along the road beside it, along the two mile causeway between Weymouth and Portland, it feels very industrial. But it isn't. This is nature.

This is looking down to the sea from the top. Again, height is difficult to express.
The waves are a long way down.
They are not as high as they are sometimes but they are bigger than they look.
Between us and them there are huge ripples in the arrangement of pebbles.
They go down in stages so you have to go down and up and down and up
before you get to the sea - except its best not to get close.
The beach shelves. There's a strong undertow. Get in and you might not get out.
There may be fishermen with rods and long lines but
there are no swimmers!

Of course there are plants here, if only in its lower reaches; otherwise I wouldn't be talking about it on Loose and Leafy! But before we look at the dramatic flowering which happens each year in May I want you to grasp the context. Outside the towns of England, we are used to 'green and pleasant'. Even in towns there are trees. There are pebble beaches along some of our shores; dramatic cliffs too. But there's nothing like this - not on this scale. Which is why it's a World Heritage site.

Back to the causeway road. On the other side strong winds are
appreciated by kite surfers who race alongside it in Portland Harbour.

In the next post - I'll let you see the flowers!

Tweet

HERE COME THE FLOWERS

There are two easy ways to make a nature blog look especially attractive.

1. Take photos only on sunny days.

2. If you have to take them in a mist, adjust them to make the scene look more cheerful than it really was when you were there.

The disadvantage (apart from giving a wrong impression, a misleading record and, therefore, in effect, lying) is that, when the sun and summer eventually come, it is hardly of note. The seasons meld and can even seem pointless.

* * *

I don't want to labour the bleakness of The Hamm (the causeway between Weymouth and Dorset on the South Coast of England) but it hasn't quite hit clear days yet!

24th March 2011 - Cold and hazy!

When the sky blazes blue in the summer and the sea does too; when the wind drops on land and the heat rises; when the air shimmers and flotillas of white sailed training boats tag across the harbour; when the arcs above kite surfers are bright with colour . . . it all feels completely different.

Chesil Beach - 24/03/11

Even then, it's still a bit odd. It's still not easy to remember that, once you climb to the top of that overpowering and horrifically dull pile of pebbles (or look down on it from the heights of Portland) . . .if you do that, you will see that this is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Indeed, it is so special, it is a World Heritage Site. It's on the same United Nations list as the Pyramids in Egypt, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, Yellowstone National Park in the U.S.A.; the Taj Mahal, Venice, the Dolomite Mountains and the Great Wall of China.

Looking towards Portland.
Sometimes surfers hanging onto the kites
skim along the surface of the sea
faster than the cars on the road.

But, on Thursday last week (March 24th 2011) it was cold and hazy. Mist thinned the view. The kites of the wind surfers were almost colourless. 

Spring was, none the less, springing underfoot - and the nice thing about taking photographs close up is that there's hardly any mist to look through - so the white of the haze disappears and the sun, which is filtering through eye-level glare (when standing) is all that's left between us and the flowers.

As you can see, there used to
be a railway here.
The sycamore tree we are 'following'
is on a bank in a cutting
about a mile behind us but
on the same line.

When the weather warms, when the sun comes out with more confidence - I'll climb that bank of pebbles (over on the right and stretching into the distance) and show you the view.

BLEAK POST

There's a causeway running between Weymouth and the (almost) island of Portland on the south coast of England. It isn't a 'desert' in the technical sense of the word but it's not an easy place for plants.

Alongside it runs the back of Chesil Beach.

'Beach' is a confusing a word. Forget ice-cream and donkeys. Think a seventeen mile stretch of pebbles which starts from the west of here with little stones lying against the land. As the 'beach' runs east, the stones get bigger and little pools appear which gradually merge into a brackish lagoon defended from a raging sea by a massive rampart of smooth, flattish stones. At its eastern end, the water of the lagoon flows away, under a bridge, and the 'beach' swerves south to follow the causeway. Thousands and thousands of tonnes of pebbles  keep the sea from the road; from the flat, straight, grassy path of an old railway line and the calm of Portland Harbour.

'Harbour' is almost as misleading a word as 'beach'. This isn't a cosy place where fishing boats unload against a jetty or children drop crablines into the water - think 'sea' - with a wall crossing the horizon; it's a massive wall but it's so far away it looks small.

The stones along the
east side of the causeway
are interesting and irregular.

Imagine you are standing on a narrow stretch of land; two miles of stones and dryness and bitter winds and no houses. There are seabirds and windsurfers and a harsh white light and a road with no stopping places. It's hardly ever quiet.

When the wind isn't roaring, the cars and buses and lorries hum away irritatingly - unless one drops down over the edge of the bank to walk by the water - and there the noise drops.

I expect there is somewhere like it - but I have never been there!

At its start - an empty carpark sets the scene.

At its ending - a prison on a hill, an ex-naval base, a new marina, boat building factories and workshops and acres of land to keep boats out of the water, and a sailing academy which will be the base for the sailing events of the 2012 Olympics.

This is not going to be a tree post!

Plants, to survive here, need to be tough and low growing and their heads need flexible necks.

It's astonishing there are plants here at all. But there are - many of them specialists.

Soon, there will be flowers. Indeed, there are already some.

I'm not going to risk saying what these plants are just yet. (Well, there's a dandelion!) I'll add their names if and when I'm more certain.

Rather, I'm setting a scene so, when the spring gets further under way and the summer comes, if the wind doesn't shake everything about too much - you'll be able to appreciate what happens.

Hurray for Lichen!

P.S. One day, I'll post about Chesil Beach itself - but I'm waiting till the weather is warmer!