Less than 48 hours had passed since we had enjoyed romping up and down Hodder's Combe in the Quantocks, before we found ourselves back in this lovely part of the World on Easter Monday, poised like mountain goats for a second walk. Actually this walk was followed by a third walk later in the day, details on that in the next post.
Roll back a day or so. After returning home on Easter Saturday I found myself flicking through a walking guide of the area when I stumbled across the name Holford Kelting, which as it turns out is a Somerset Wildlife Trust nature reserve. 5 hectares of a steep sided valley in the Holford Glen.
Strange name I thought. I looked up Kelting - not much on-line but it is either a) a surname of Germanic origin meaning field or place by a field, or more likely in my imagination b) the ability when two (or more) people are able to communicate via Telepathy. The mind boggles, I've led a sheltered life, I had to visit.
By 11am we were off walking through the lanes of Holford Village and into the Glen itself. In all the years I've visited this area, I have never walked in this direction. Today, even with the car park full, no one else walked in this direction either it seemed. It was bliss. Soon we walked through a gate and into another world as we descended on a steep path through the most wonderful woodland. The woodland floor was awash with ferns, celandine, wood anemone and wild garlic. Mosses covered the buttress trunks of trees. Overhead woodland birds called. It was magical and we were not even in the Nature Reserve, this was just the aperitif. My notes I'd jotted down said - walk half a mile into the woodland and then enter the reserve, taking care on the steep sides which may be slippy if wet. Duly noted.
We kept walking, the path became steeply descending and we were in heaven walking into somewhere new where way down below we could hear the unseen river gushing and cascading through the understory. It is a long time since I've seen a woodland floor this covered in spring flowers - primroses, violets, and wonderful carpets of anemone rising up the valley side. And that was just what we could see while walking.
All the while I was looking for a sign or notice that we were at the reserve. We'd now been walking about twenty minutes and nothing was obvious by the time we came to a gate into a field. We went through and suddenly the landscape opened out. To our right and ahead of us a huge grass field littered with celandines. To our left a tree line crowning the lip of a steep valley. Maybe there's a gate into this valley further into the field.
This was magical, aside from a large flock of jackdaws noisily flying around some mature beech trees, we were the only other moving thing. No sheep, no cattle, just the jackdaws and us. The once well defined path up to the gate now became barely visible in the field. We were actually on a bridleway as seen by recent horse shoe indentations in the sward. But everywhere there were celandines and ad hoc clumps of primrose.
Mid field a really fresh badger set was being worked, it looked like the winter bedding had been evicted for a new spring mattress.
Eventually though we came to another gate. Mrs Wessex-Reiver checked her fitness app. We'd walked 0.8 miles. Where on earth was this entrance to the nature reserve then? We had not passed anything obvious at all. That said it didn't matter as we were thoroughly enjoying this walk into an unknown land, and ahead lay what looked like a wonderful piece of ancient woodland. I half expected to find Baldmoney, Cloudberry, Dodder or Sneezewort guarding this gate and their woodland home to BB's Little Grey Men. We stood by the gate for a while listening to the silence other than the chorus of the natural world. We then ventured in.
And what a woodland. The first flowers of wild garlic were just emerging, their scent was subtle but in a few weeks it will be overpowering. Aside from the pathway not an inch of land remained bare earth. What had been we thought wonderful woodland at the start of our walk, was now surpassed by this hidden gem of modest size.
Five more minutes walking and we reached another gate. We'd done 0.94 miles. As we'd missed the entrance to the reserve we needed to turn back, but before that we spent a few minutes enjoying the view towards Kilve and the Bristol Channel a mile or two further on. A new hedge and gates have been installed in this field which was interesting and I'm still not sure why there and then continuing up the hill, the distance between hedges slowly becoming narrower. Overhead a buzzard mewed while being noisily mobbed by a carrion crow. More jackdaws, the yaffle of a green woodpecker and a few other woodland birds completed the soundscape.
Reluctantly we turned and retraced our steps back through that magical woodland copse, through the gate and once more onto the wide fields rolling down the ridge to the tree line standing sentry to the valley below.
I kept looking as we walked but the fence on top of the valley lip contained no obvious entry points, until that is when we reached the felled tree. Next to this I saw a small wooden stile which we'd missed on the way out. But this can't be the entrance, it was covered in brambles and no obvious pathway lead from it. It felt right that the reserve was below us, we just didn't know how to get into it. Oh well we've had a lovely walk and on our next visit we can try again with better directions.
And then, just as we went through a five bar gate and re-entered the first piece of woodland we'd walked through I saw what looked like a path, one I'd not observed on the way through. A rarely used path indeed which ignited memories of exploring woodland as a child. I looked at Mrs Wessex-Reiver and said "shall we" and she nodded - and so we headed down this leaf strewn path as if descending into a primeval forest no human has entered before. It wasn't easy, with the leaf cover it was slippy in places but not obvious until our legs slid from under us. Hidden branches provided a trip hazard and fallen trees a head injury opportunity. But this was great, I was eight again and exploring the landscape of Rothbury in Northumberland. If this is the reserve entrance, the reserve itself must be superb.
And boy were we not disappointed. Suddenly the path emerged at the river we'd heard earlier. A rubble strewn shallow river which threw me back all those years to making dams and looking for caddis on the underside of stones. Water flowed over the pebbly bottom providing a chorus of liquid music into the otherwise silent valley. We stood at the water's edge, just taking it in, silent not talking. This is exactly what a river should be, meandering, semi blocked by fallen trees, little pools, shallow rapids, swirling eddies, chaotic.
And this is what being in the natural world is all about, nature quietly doing its thing and we as observers leave it well alone, and that was why we never went any further into the reserve, our path ended at the river which meanders to the sea, just as it should.
I can't recall how long we spent there, it felt like hours but probably a quarter of an hour. A mental note was made to return with a picnic and just sit and do absolutely nothing, nothing other than sit and watch the croziers unfurl from the many ferns down in the valley floor, or watch the sunlight dancing off the surface of the water. Of course like Brigadoon we may never find this place again, but I'll know where it is, it felt like home, and we will be back.
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