Just Accessible

Those places which are just accessible but make no concessions to anyone have a special role in any natural landscape. There should always be valleys like this one where trees fall and remain fallen, where no maintenance or manicuring is attempted, where no grant funded work is done to keep people in jobs and the economy ticking over. I know no other parts of the local area like this one and any interventions would be a desecration.

Places like this make a habit of annoying and being difficult but at their glorious best are better than anything else within miles. Fallen trees remain fallen across the nearest thing to a path, bracken grows to an amazing height and you're liable to trip on trailing bramble. But new life thrives alongside decay and over many years the vegetation will settle to its own pattern and the woodland will mature into a new phase. Sometimes it seems to me that this land, recovering from the restrictive shooting estate management, is like one's own children growing up. They delight and irritate too and their between years are exasperating. But even then you would not have them different.

We desperately need places where you have to struggle to make progress but when you do you can find tranquillity and a raw natural beauty. It certainly looked today as if nobody had visited for weeks. The enemy of this feature is, as always, management and farm subsidy.

The hind that dashed over in front of us, the variety of tree species and forms, the exuberant bird song, the glimpse of an unidentified bird of prey, the rampant vegetation starting with bilberry and rowan and continuing with bracken. All part of the mix. Anyone find this kind of excitement on Burbage?