My first post-lockdown real thing was that I met up with my friend Catherine for a countryside walk a couple of weeks ago. Catherine is a nature connection guide and feminine rewilding coach, a retreat host, a wanderer and an artist and all that makes her a very good companion for a country walk. She’d like to take you out too and if you can get down to Dorset, I recommend her talents. The walk became quite the nature lesson.
We were walking on my Single Map, a walk I did with my dad a couple of months ago, at the beginning of March. Three months later, almost to the day, and the route has been transformed. Where there was a bare field, there’s now long grass and flowers and insects, where there was a meadow there’s now hay bales and where there was woodland there’s a lot of cow parsley.
We started at the medieval Fiddleford Manor because there’s a free car park. You go through the farm, past some very old-looking buildings that seem to be nothing more than extremely oversized nest boxes these days (there was a great tit making itself comfortable up by the roof last time) and across the bridges and walkways that survive from when this was a working watermill. It now has an Archimedes screw generating electricity and a fish ladder to help the fish make their way from the lower river to the upper bit – rather than a waterfall, there’s a series of stepped pools with submerged ramps and the screw is fish-friendly too. I think it kind of operates like a lift, saving them the effort of swimming up it or jumping their way up the ladder.
On the other side of the river is a field with a warning that there’s a bull. I don’t know about these things but Catherine does: there’s a public footpath, therefore it’s illegal to have a “warning” about a bull because you can’t put a dangerous animal somewhere it can have easy access to the public. If there really is a bull in that field – and I’ve never seen one – the most they’re allowed to say if there’s a public footpath is “be aware” or something like that.
The next field follows the river and the path is a lot more obvious now the grass is long. The first time, we just had to guess exactly where we were going or follow other walkers. Down by the river there’s a patch of yellow iris and among the flowers are hundreds of insects I’d never have even noticed without Catherine. We saw blue damselflies, which I’d have called “look, dragonflies!” previously, which I’ve since learnt are banded demoiselles and which are rarer than this field suggested. We saw a white damselfly which I’ve since learnt is a white-legged damselfly. We saw bees, which aren’t quite so exciting but I like bees. And of course, I learnt about yellow irises and how the insects weren’t posing nicely on them.
Somewhere along the way, I mentioned that I’d been learning about trees, accidentally creating Tree Exam Mode in Catherine. I got 100% in the ones I recognised, although there were plenty I’d never seen before and couldn’t even guess. I was introduced to… oh no, I’ve forgotten! Red campion? A plant that turns into excellent, if stinky, plant food. I also met water hemlock or water dropwort, or possibly both, the carrot’s lethal cousins. I thought giant hogweed, which causes massive phototoxic burns was the really dangerous one of that family but apparently it only really works on people who are sensitive to it, whereas the water hemlock (or water dropwort – well, both, I’m just not sure which one Catherine showed me) is just plain fatally toxic. A single gram can kill a sheep, so I reckon a single gram can maim a human and two grams kill one. Best keep well away and never eat plants you see along your walk (unless you’re on a foraging walk with a genuine expert who says it’s 100% safe).
We stopped for a picnic lunch at Sturminster Newton Mill, a working watermill. That is, it’s a museum but one weekend a month it actually grinds flour to sell to visitors. It’s also a good place for lunch, with picnic tables and river views – and trees Catherine couldn’t identify. Not for certain. I produced my tree app. It’s called PictureThis and if you take a photo of a tree, or any plant, it runs it through its database and within seconds tells you what it is. I don’t know how accurate it is because I don’t know what any of the trees are until I scan them but it confirmed Catherine’s educated guess of whitebeam, correctly identified a stinging nettle (which we both knew, of course, and were using as a control/demonstration) and declared that the thing next to us, which looked like a cherry of some kind, was a wild or bird cherry. Catherine was more dubious about that because of the flowers and when I scanned the flowers it declared it a peach tree. I guess it’s not impossible to be both. I know you can create hybrid trees by grafting things on, make lemon trees that also produce limes and oranges, but in this case, I think it was probably incorrect. A more mysterious tree which I’d assume to be an oak turned out to be Swedish whitebeam. Catherine had been wondering if it was a whitebeam of some kind and so faith in the app was restored.
We crossed the road and walked up the side of the chapel to the stairs hidden behind. This doesn’t look right but it is. At the top, it opens out into a couple of fields before a nice woody path but if you look immediately to your left, over the fence, there’s an Iron Age hillfort just in someone’s garden. With a trampoline on it. Hill forts are abundant around here but imagine having one in your garden.
Our next point of interest was a badger sett. I’d seen it before and had guessed its owner but now it was confirmed, as well as confirmed probably abandoned. There are a lot of sticks piled around the entrance and badgers are tidy creatures who wouldn’t stand for that sort of mess. Then there was a hawthorn, covered in an absolute blanket of fluffy pinky-white flowers. I’d already correctly identified the leaves of a hawthorn earlier but I didn’t know about the blossom. There were a few of them along the path.
Next, into the woods. A lot more overgrown than last time with cow parsley – another cousin to carrots, water hemlock and giant hogweed, although a pretty benign one. It was a hot sticky day and the bit of woodland offered some gratefully-received shade. My favourite thing about this particular bit of wood is that you pass along above a cottage and two minutes later you’ve lost enough height to be standing at its gates. It’s a very pretty little cottage by the woods and it’s nice to imagine either of us would ever be able to afford it.
Below the cottage is another bit of woodland, this one a bit darker, a bit more ferny, with a bridge over a stream, a bit of wood that felt more prehistoric than the earlier bit and a strong contender for Catherine’s favourite bit. Here we saw a badger path going steeply up the side of the hill – maybe the new home of the badger that used to live up above the cottage.
At the top of the woods is a gentle but long slope up the village of Broad Oak and then another steeper slope up to the main south gate of Piddles Wood. There are lots of Piddles and Puddles in Dorset but they’re not around this area, they’re around the River Piddle which is more or less the area between Dorchester and Wareham. I don’t know how a wood up in North Dorset got the name Piddle and although people have ideas (descended from Pytell’s Enclosure or an Old English word for kite or hanging ground), I don’t think anyone really knows.
It didn’t feel very woodsy last time. There’s a path and trees but in March it was lacking any of the undergrowth or canopy or character or anything that made it feel less like a park that’s got out of hand. Today it felt more woodsy, which is partly because we got lost. We tried following the signpost to Fiddleford Manor rather than Fiddleford Inn, which would deliver us to the wrong end of the village we’d parked in. But we missed the turning at the bottom of the hill and ended up going on a small adventure, going down smaller and smaller tracks in search of a way out. I learned that ivy produces seeds that sound a bit like pink peppercorns to me and after several patches of shells, where blackbirds or thrushes have smashed a nice juicy snail for a snack, I learned about banded snails. They come in pink, yellow or brown and with anywhere between zero and five stripes. The darker ones thrive best in darker environments like woods and the lighter ones best in grass where it’s lighter. The ones with more stripes are more visible and therefore more likely to get eaten and Catherine was spotting lots of smashed pink shells, which probably don’t camouflage as well in the woodland as their brown siblings and so get scooped up for a snack. I also learned that squirrels will break a hazelnut shell neatly in half whereas a mouse will nibble its way in.
By the time we got back to the car – very sweaty and via the wrong end of the village after all – I felt like I’d had a proper education in all things natural along the way. I feel like I’ve learned quite a lot about my little world since lockdown but in the company of someone like Catherine I discover there’s still an entire universe of stuff I never imagined and never notice. And Catherine learned of the existence of PictureThis.
If you want to benefit from her knowledge and experience, you can find her on Instagram and at her website, both Velvet Barnacle, and I’m sure if you can get to Dorset this summer she can arrange a nature walk so you too can return home knowing about snails, hawthorn and damselflies.