How Green Was My Valley

Sunshine and blue skies to start the day so a walk onto the hillside in celebration of St Davids Day is a must. Surprisingly warm after a clear night with frost promised, nothing that I saw .

What a brilliant walk! No sooner had I cleared the urban sprawl and started up the pathway alongside the brook than I get my first surprise of the morning. Redwings! Several of them flying around the lightly wooded hillside. Lovely sight and easy to spot with their distinctive reddish marking under the wing. I'm not a regular visitor here and it's a pleasant surprise that there's such abundance of birdlife in this relatively short walk. All the usual suspects of course, blackbirds, starlings and sparrows, but the old woodland also has plenty of treecreepers - I say plenty because the last time I wandered up here I saw them without trying too hard and the same happened this time. By the time I'd cleared the wooded slope to the "tumps", the mounds of coal waste now greened over but visibly scarred black where water run-off has gouged little rivulets, a pair of buzzards prospecting overhead caught my eye. I hauled myself up the steep slope of the tip and sat and soaked up the sunshine, just watching the birds circling lazily on the thermals overhead. More sounds echoed around the valley, the demented laughter of a green woodpecker followed by the equally manic hammering of a woodpecker somewhere in the nearby woodland.

The spell was broken when a microlight breezed over the ridge from Cwmcarn direction, then a helicopter tracking across the ridge from the opposite direction, following the power cables from Pontypool way.

From out of nowhere this scruffy mongrel appears, sort of German Shepherd with a stumpy tail. No owner, just this dog out for his early morning constitutional. Comes trotting up the track I'd just followed, trots around on the top of the mound and then flops down onto the ground, pulls himself to the edge by his front paws and then sort of "sledges", on his belly, down the steep hillside on the wet grass. Seemed to be having a whale of a time, the last I saw of him he was slipping and bouncing down the slope, then he was gone.

It was a fantastic start to the day and just couldn't get any better, so I headed back home for breakfast. By lunchtime the skies had clouded over and threatening rain, just for a change. It was good to get out and get some fresh air.