Woodland stream

We live in a landscape of wide lazy rivers, swinging their way through the meadows - or ruler straight drains with steep trapezoidal banks, carved by man through the low-lying fen, where you can only view the water from afar. But on the limestone soils to the west, you can still find babbling streams, clear and spring-fed, with petrified reefs and cascades. 

This is a winterbourne, a seasonal stream, emerging from a spring on an undistinguished field boundary before wending its way through Bedford Purlieus, one of the larger remnants of Rockingham Forest, splashing and trickling over flat lumps of limestone, gurgling through gullies. Forest trees are  briefly reflected in its surface, before it disappears into a sinkhole, creating an underground aquifer which eventually emerges to feed the Mill Pond at Sacrewell Farm.  In the summer all that remains of the woodland stream are a few patches of damp earth, and an occasional mosquito-filled puddle.