A SHORT LONG WALK

I tend to wake up most days in spring and summer with the sunrise accompanied by the dawn chorus which is wonderful because I have a few hours just to do stuff I sometimes find difficulty with during the distractions of the working day and today was no exception. I am I admit quite excited as tomorrow I fly to Copenhagen and then off to an as yet unnamed place to begin a new episode of a new survival reality show with my good friends Myke and Ruth. I needed to get some things from our local 7/11 or for UK readers the Co-Op and so took a walk from the new house in the direction of said shop. The route follows a main road or there is the option of cutting across a meadow known locally as the Lugg Flats so for me the choice was really no choice at all and so I hopped over the fence following the course of the Lugg River upstream. Now this place is not really a wild place as it is so close to the ancient town of Hereford and you never quite get away from the roaring traffic that thunders along the road bordering this space, but, there is a sense of jumping into nature and at this time of the year with the early spring bluebells dying off and being replaced by the late spring meadow plants. To my discredit I have never wandered on this place before even though I have known about it for as long as I have lived in this part of the world. It has always been a place that I believed the teenagers ran rampant and where they came to indulge in under age boozing and getting up to mischief and maybe they do sometimes, but not in the early hours of this morning.

Its one of those experiences that you wish you could capture and the few pictures I took on my pathetic mobile phone didn't do the place any justice. I would have loved a professional outdoor photographer to capture the vista and those little things that you see that thrills you whenever you walk in nature, but even then it would not have been enough. As soon as you step onto the meadow the colours are in your face, bright yellow buttercups, small white umbillifers as yet to be identified (but not cow parsley), and purple clover. But a photographer wouldn't have been enough because there is so much other sensory stuff going on, the perfume and the sounds, traffic aside, that have to be processed and go toward creating the whole experience. And this is what being in nature does, if you allow it to it will draw you in, if you pass through wild places and slow down and force yourself to not only see but to open up all your senses then you start to understand the wonder of nature and realise that anything we humans create in this world in nothing to what nature can achieve, and here is the thing..... you do not need to know what the plants are called or the birds or indeed anything.... you just have to open up and experience and surely you will be moved.

Lugg Flats ancient Norman pasture nature reserve, Hereford UK

Purple flower Comfrey a survival medicine reputedly a
medicine good for healing bone fractures which has now
been confirmed by modern science. 

Of course if you do know something about nature then pleasures of discovery abound in places like this. As I entered this space I read the board describing this reserve and its history and what can be found there. It is centuries old and goes back to the Norman era when Hereford Cathedral was being built (now famous for housing what is reputably one of the oldest maps in the world, the Mappa Mundi). With this little bit of information my exploration of this place took a whole new meaning and I was looking at how life would have been sustained here and at that moment the meadow and the flats and all the resources within it opened up and I could clearly see how one would have been able to not only survive, but flourish on this lush pasture land, with its abundance of resources that has apparently changed very little since then.

The short walk I took to the shop, should have only taken no more than 45 minutes round trip, 2 hours later I arrived home!