NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley

IT was a wintry walk down memory lane that my wife and I undertook just after Christmas.

During the early 1970s it was a walk I used to do often although the vista was completely different.

On that Sunday in late December we parked at the Holden Pool car park and set off up the Cycle route 55 way towards Chatterley Whitfield via Ford Green Hall.

In the 1970s you would have seen a landscape of dereliction. I would take this route to visit my mate Pete who lived in Smallthorne, no doubt I would have a new Free or Who album tucked under my arm as I edged past the large tip which is now the site of a housing development.

Not so far away was the still working Norton Colliery and towards Baddeley Green Bullers who made insulators for the electrical power industry – all gone.

Our walk at the end of 2020 now takes us on a well laid out cycleway alongside the Ford Green Brook following down from the north which eventually joins the Trent at Milton.

We walk onto the 16th century Tudor black and white timbered Ford Green Hall. One imagines what Christmas festivities the Ford family must have enjoyed then?

I have enjoyed Yule times in the hall myself as the Stoke Archaeological Society used to have a ‘do’ every Christmas there.

I have memories of the late and great director of the City Museum Arnold Mounford enjoying a libation or two.

A few wildfowl on a pond behind the building are fed by families as we walk carefully up frozen paths polished by children sliding on them.

The notices on the nature of the valley mention crack willow (Salix fragilis).

It grows alongside rivers and streams and is given the name because it is highly susceptible to damage by the wind and snow.

Like other willows, it produces yellow catkins in the spring. It has a reputation as a good pollinator attracting bees in the critical time of the early spring.

Its leaves are jagged and often contain gall projecting above them containing a saw fly grub. Charcoal from the wood is favoured by artists for drawing.

Weeping Willow is a hybrid creation of crack willow and Chinese species and was introduced into Britain by gardeners in the mid 18th century when it became very fashionable.

Of course, the tree features on the willow pattern design mass produced in the Staffordshire Potteries initially by Spode in the 1790s.

No doubt shards of broken willow pattern and other debris form part of the land on which the housing developments are built beside the Ford Green brook.

We turned around at Chatterley Whitfield and my memory instantly turned back to visits I made in the 1960s to relatives in Fegg Hayes when the spoil heap from the pit seemed such a blackened monstrous, looming presence.

Now, mountain bikers whizz up it.