Forest Farm isn't quite outside the city. On three sides, there's housing and on the fourth there's a busy bypass. In between: a few fields, a small swampy woodland, the last remaining stretch of the old Glamorganshire Canal, a steep slope of woodland and beyond that a disused railway line. The old railway line is the only place I've ever seen earthstars - ten or more of them, leathery spheres nested on a pale starfish of petals.
Along the canal, there are ducks, moorhens, coots. If you're lucky, a glimpse of electric blue: a kingfisher sparking over the water. There are mink here too. Once we sat for ten minutes, watching one swim across the canal and back again, over and over until at last it came up on to the path, shook the water from its dense fur and rippled away into the undergrowth.
It's a brown, muddy place in January. The swampy ground on the other side of the canal path was frozen, a strange primeval landscape of ice broken by reeds, fallen boughs, trees, tiny islands of coarse grass.
On our way back we spotted a shy moorhen picking her way along under the overhang on the opposite bank.
No comments:
Post a Comment