I wrote this a good few days ago, about a trip I made last Saturday with my good freind Bexx, to a gem of a reserve in the heart of North East London.
Today was a gorgeously sunny day, and I spent at least part of it in the back garden watching the Holly Blue butterflies, which must have just appeared. As the air cools and darkens I’m going to take the opportunity to share a trip to Walthamstow Marshes, an Olympics survivor and nature reserve, which I visited with my friend Bexx a couple of days ago.
Today was a gorgeously sunny day, and I spent at least part of it in the back garden watching the Holly Blue butterflies, which must have just appeared. As the air cools and darkens I’m going to take the opportunity to share a trip to Walthamstow Marshes, an Olympics survivor and nature reserve, which I visited with my friend Bexx a couple of days ago.
Walthamstow Marshes sits beside the River Lee and opposite a
pub, somewhere in Hackney, or possibly Haringey, in urban North-East London. Two railway lines
cross the nature reserve and the well made, gravel paths are well trodden,
indeed, it is not the kind of place one can go to be alone. However it is a
wildlife oasis, set in the middle of the gritty urban jungle, and as such, not
a bad place at all to escape the to, and a valuable asset to the local area.
On a grey Sunday, my friend Bexx and I decided to give the place a visit. We’d passed it on our last stroll along the Lee, and had a drink in the Anchor and Hope opposite, a pub popular with the Lee’s narrow boat community, as well as ageing indie kids like us. On route we saw a couple of Common Terns over the river, apparently fishing, and several of the usual mallards, mute swans and Canada geese, which seem to thrive here. Upon arriving at the reserve, having walked for some time beside the Lee, we crossed the bridge and were immediately greeted by a building housing a new (and temporary) basketball court. Signs promised that the land it used would be restored as open access green land “by October 2012,” but it was an incongruous addition to the otherwise surprisingly lush landscape.Graffiti on the bridge itself also expressed local resentment to the coming Games, and the heavy price the host boroughs have paid for it. Perhaps we should wait for the Olympic Park before we write off the event in terms of the environment, David Lindo, famous for his "urban birder" columns, reckons the habitat creation there has been pretty good. I imagine I will find out in time.
As we walked alongside a ditch, which according to signage hosts a rare fern called Adder’s Tongue, we could hear a blackbird and a reed warbler singing, and there were several swifts wheeling about, giving their gleeful, excited whistling calls, one of the most joyful sounds of summer to my mind. Yellow flag bloomed in the ditch, and a blue flower I later learned was an introduced species and speciality of the Lee Valley called Russian Comfrey, was everywhere, alongside several escaped specimens of Oilseed Rape, a common crop grown for oil and animal feed. It is the same yellow stuff which covers whole swathes of the countryside from now until mid June. Some fresh phragmites was beginning to emerge from the water, and the grasses were mostly of the bright green, broad and lush variety. A few stinging nettles, characteristic of nutrient rich soils peered out from among the waterside vegetation, and cow parsley thrived too, suggesting perhaps some mild nutrient enrichment, but not atypical of these flat, low river floodplains.
A railway bridge crosses the site not far from the Anchor and Hope, and a blue plaque advertised that this was where Alliot Vernon Roe first flew his triplane in the 1900s, becoming the first British man to fly a British designed and built aircraft. He assembled it under the arches. Beyond the arches a Kestrel was hovering. I realised that I like this place a lot.
On a grey Sunday, my friend Bexx and I decided to give the place a visit. We’d passed it on our last stroll along the Lee, and had a drink in the Anchor and Hope opposite, a pub popular with the Lee’s narrow boat community, as well as ageing indie kids like us. On route we saw a couple of Common Terns over the river, apparently fishing, and several of the usual mallards, mute swans and Canada geese, which seem to thrive here. Upon arriving at the reserve, having walked for some time beside the Lee, we crossed the bridge and were immediately greeted by a building housing a new (and temporary) basketball court. Signs promised that the land it used would be restored as open access green land “by October 2012,” but it was an incongruous addition to the otherwise surprisingly lush landscape.Graffiti on the bridge itself also expressed local resentment to the coming Games, and the heavy price the host boroughs have paid for it. Perhaps we should wait for the Olympic Park before we write off the event in terms of the environment, David Lindo, famous for his "urban birder" columns, reckons the habitat creation there has been pretty good. I imagine I will find out in time.
As we walked alongside a ditch, which according to signage hosts a rare fern called Adder’s Tongue, we could hear a blackbird and a reed warbler singing, and there were several swifts wheeling about, giving their gleeful, excited whistling calls, one of the most joyful sounds of summer to my mind. Yellow flag bloomed in the ditch, and a blue flower I later learned was an introduced species and speciality of the Lee Valley called Russian Comfrey, was everywhere, alongside several escaped specimens of Oilseed Rape, a common crop grown for oil and animal feed. It is the same yellow stuff which covers whole swathes of the countryside from now until mid June. Some fresh phragmites was beginning to emerge from the water, and the grasses were mostly of the bright green, broad and lush variety. A few stinging nettles, characteristic of nutrient rich soils peered out from among the waterside vegetation, and cow parsley thrived too, suggesting perhaps some mild nutrient enrichment, but not atypical of these flat, low river floodplains.
A railway bridge crosses the site not far from the Anchor and Hope, and a blue plaque advertised that this was where Alliot Vernon Roe first flew his triplane in the 1900s, becoming the first British man to fly a British designed and built aircraft. He assembled it under the arches. Beyond the arches a Kestrel was hovering. I realised that I like this place a lot.
At the next bridge we walked away from the river and through
some scrub into an avenue lined with magnificent Horse Chestnuts with towering pink
and white blossoms. Swifts circled above our heads and somewhere a robin was
singing its heart out. The wild flowers here were pretty, but included
introduced cultivars like Russian Comfrey, which we were introduced to by a
kindly, if slightly eccentric pair of Botanists who we found standing among it.
According to them it was introduced 200 years ago and now flourishes through
the Lee valley. It has blue flowers, and was brought home from St Petersburg by
a local landowner and keen gardener. Also among the plants were oilseed
rape, the big yellow Brassica famous for its EU subsidies,
and cow parsley, a common plant of these nutrient rich grasslands. A couple of
Linnets flew past, which struck me as unusual, to see such a farmland bird in
the city, but beyond the railway was a field of horses, and a small riding
school, still so close to Hackney and the city.
We saw a song thrush, sitting on a bush, singing, and a couple of whitethroats flying about. There were a few green and goldfinches overhead. For birds nothing here was unfamiliar, but in concrete London these are things which are seldom encountered, and their presence underlined the importance of these urban oases. Chiffchaffs and Willow Warblers sang, too. We had to pass under a couple of railway lines, with accompanying graffiti and concrete on the way. People walking in the opposite direction were mostly Londoners, and generally differed from the usual nature reserve crowd in their studious avoidance of any verbal communication, although the botanists were very freindly, as were several of the dogs.
The botanising couple recommended a trip to the Waterworks, and we headed where another small nature reserve, with plenty of interpretive signage, had apparently been created in a disused water purification facility. The route took us along a stretch of road, which had on the opposite side of it, numerous business premises, some of them vacant. It was quite jarring to leave the tranquillity of the Marshes nature reserve and find ourselves back in Hackney. In acknowledgement of the danger of leaving interpretive signage unattended at night in North East London, by the time we arrived, the heavy gates of the Waterworks Nature Reserve were closing for the night. Perhaps it left us a little more to investigate in future. Cutting across the corner of Hackney Marshes, now used as a recreation and sports ground, we proceeded back to the Lee and its boats, and watched a little crowd of Long Tailed Tits fly over the water, and a cormorant drying itself on a pipe which crossed one of the canals. In the overcast the light was beginning to fade, and we made our way back through the local park, past a pair of Egyptian Geese, which were grazing on the short grass, and past the little crowds of young people who had begun to gather with their dogs in the park, back into the concrete jungle.
We saw a song thrush, sitting on a bush, singing, and a couple of whitethroats flying about. There were a few green and goldfinches overhead. For birds nothing here was unfamiliar, but in concrete London these are things which are seldom encountered, and their presence underlined the importance of these urban oases. Chiffchaffs and Willow Warblers sang, too. We had to pass under a couple of railway lines, with accompanying graffiti and concrete on the way. People walking in the opposite direction were mostly Londoners, and generally differed from the usual nature reserve crowd in their studious avoidance of any verbal communication, although the botanists were very freindly, as were several of the dogs.
The botanising couple recommended a trip to the Waterworks, and we headed where another small nature reserve, with plenty of interpretive signage, had apparently been created in a disused water purification facility. The route took us along a stretch of road, which had on the opposite side of it, numerous business premises, some of them vacant. It was quite jarring to leave the tranquillity of the Marshes nature reserve and find ourselves back in Hackney. In acknowledgement of the danger of leaving interpretive signage unattended at night in North East London, by the time we arrived, the heavy gates of the Waterworks Nature Reserve were closing for the night. Perhaps it left us a little more to investigate in future. Cutting across the corner of Hackney Marshes, now used as a recreation and sports ground, we proceeded back to the Lee and its boats, and watched a little crowd of Long Tailed Tits fly over the water, and a cormorant drying itself on a pipe which crossed one of the canals. In the overcast the light was beginning to fade, and we made our way back through the local park, past a pair of Egyptian Geese, which were grazing on the short grass, and past the little crowds of young people who had begun to gather with their dogs in the park, back into the concrete jungle.
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