SP in Buckholt Wood, Gloucestershire

My lie-in this morning was interrupted by a call from Helena at 8am asking me to drive her to work in Cheltenham as her lift had failed to arrive. We set off 15 minutes later trying to avoid the rush hour traffic jams, and get to her job by 9am. In the end, after driving three sides of a square we arrived only ten minutes late much to her relief.

I decided to do a bit of shopping in cheltenham to let the traffic die down, and then headed home by the direct route, which is also the most beautiful. I drove up on to the Cotswold escarpment, past the Air Balloon roundabout, near Birdlip, before heading for Bisley and then Stroud. I had brought my camera and stopped beside the road in Buckholt Wood, an ancient woodland I have blipped before, as it is one of my favourite places at all seasons of the year.

It is predominantly beech with some ash, holly and hazel found at various places beneath the high canopy. There was no direct sunlight through the clouds today, but the colour of the few remaining leaves on the trees and the fallen swathes of leaf litter were still richly coloured. I'd thought that all the leaves would be down by now, but even as I look out of my window now, I can see various types of oak trees still mostly covered by yellowy-brown leaves.

This old woodland has been a working environment for countless centuries, until quite recently. There are huge stools of linked tree stumps throughout the wood, and in some places there has been quarrying for stone, producing gullies and bowls in the otherwise flat surface at the top of these Cotswold limestone hills. My eye caught the rich green of the moss on this old stool, which now has two large trunks of beech climbing high up towards the sky. Directly beneath the trunk you can see here, however, there is now fresh air, (which isn't too obvious in the picture though). It is caused by the erosion of the gully, on the edge of which the stool is hanging, and it has precious little support. I love these root systems of beech, which spread horizontally very close to the surface of the earth and this rich assembly of mosses was incredibly vibrant. Eventually the trunk will fall, the gully will widen, but the roots will just carry on spreading and throw up new shoots which will themselves become large trunks some decades later.

I set the camera on it's bag on the ground on the other edge of the gully, roughly aimed and focussed on the roots, set the self-timer and ran across to look relaxed as I listened to the sounds of the quiet wood. It is only two days since I left my work in Shepherd's Bush, London, and here I am enjoying the solitude and atmosphere of our wonderful countryside. When I then left and drove away along the very old drove road, within three hundred yards I saw a deer standing in the road ahead of me, and I managed to stop beside where it then ran off into the woodland and saw it stop and turn to look at me. How very rewarding.