bewilderbrain

Monday 23rd June 2025
Walk start time: 9.01am
Walk finish time: 10.37am
Walk area: Maritime footpaths, Shoni’s pond, lost footpaths
Miles walked: 3.2

The solace of water, the kindness of strangers, the conquest of lost footpaths and photographing a bee’s bum…

I didn’t start my day in the best mental state today. In my walking diary I will never dwell on this, or daily troubles, but sometimes the context is needed to explain the transformative feeling of a mini expedition.

I have allowed myself to get into a state of high stress and adrenalin over the completion of a project at the weekend, and I have not been looking after myself as well as I should over the last week or two, as I got myself tangled and strung out in my drive to finally bring my project to light (not looking after myself well often includes a lot of stress chocolate and crisps…I’m only human)

Overnight my brain decided to dive into a tailspin of anxiety, providing numerous dreams about scheduled stage performances to be planned for while having to look after a lot of people, and other fear inducing scenarios that had me waking up in a cold sweat.

So I am tired, but not just tired, more than anything, emotionally fragile. My brain has had an interlude of behaving even more insanely than usual, and at the same time I feel oh so very drained, and low.

That black feeling around the edges that comes when one of the ugly sisters of anxiety or depression is standing outside your window. Depression has a sallow and flabby face I think, with wet, dead eyes. She is dressed in all over drab colours with a tightly tied utilitarian headscarf. And let us say she also has an enormous bottom and a flatulence problem.

I digress, such feelings of low mood often make me want to hide away from the world, and more and more, I try to recognise and fight this instinct when it happens. I know what I need to do. I feel sad, but I pack a water bottle into a bag with the intention of going for a walk, and feel infinitesimally better.

I walk slowly today, looking around me expectantly, waiting for something to actually interest me, to shift my feelings. I head towards the pathway from Maritime industrial estate, the site of the old Maritime mine, toward the marvellous muddy footpath to Shoni’s pond.

I feel aware of my emotional fragility, that today I feel bare of leaves, open and exposed to the world, unable to cope with anything painful or negative. I actually find myself wishing for a friendly face, a smiling dog walker, an exchanged good morning, to bring me more into reality, into humanity. Sometimes these little everyday moments can have quite a profound effect on a struggling mood.

On the main road approach to the path, the first note of solace comes from the softly industrious sound of the running water from the wooded culvert that runs beside the road. I try to absorb it a little, and stop to take a photograph from the little wooden bridge.

As I enter the narrower woodland path, I stop to look at a flower in the sunlight. I think it is some kind of Orchid, and it’s quite beautiful. Having looked it up it appears there are several varieties, including a broad leaved Marsh Orchid or a Heath spotted Orchid that could identify my specimen.

As I head up further up the path, I spy what appears to be a bee, though it could be a wasp or some other flying insect, hovering directly in front of me. It doesn’t move as I get closer, and I raise the camera, thinking I’m going to get a wonderfully detailed shot of a bee in flight here. Just after I take the picture it zooms off, and I examine the result.

For some reason my blurrily inept picture of a mid-air bees bottom amuses me, and my mood notches up another subtle couple of millimetres.

I turn a corner and able to get close to the waters edge. The stream here wends its way up through the valley, leading to a magical little local arena called Shoni’s pond. Here, there is an opening out in the valley, with the sides still steeply flanked with trees, and pathways that are often muddy and inaccessible in winter. A pool has been in this spot for many years, and a rope swing hangs invitingly across it from the bank opposite the pathway.

Locals remember the pool being much deeper and further reaching, and tell of idyllic summers and days spent in the spot as children, but it still attracts the odd family in summer and plenty of walkers and dog walkers.I stand next to the edge of the stream leading up the valley, enjoying the reflections of the sunlight on the water, and listening to the birds.

I hear a nuthatch, and think I spot one flying into a tree. The remaining bird song appears to be a large selection of many and varied tropical birds, with a variety of high and low clear melodies, chirrups, squawks and tinkles. I smile, pulling out my bird app to check, but at this stage pretty much already knowing the answer. A Song Thrush.

Beautiful birds to look at, their incredible vocal range is both beguiling and comical. There is a clarity about the song of a song thrush, a little like the blackbird, but much louder and infinitely more diverse in style. It can mimic the sounds of an astounding range of other birds, and will often provide a mind boggling range of different effects in quick succession.

On a recent camping trip, a Song Thrush seemed so determined to become the unequivocal star of the dusk chorus, that it started to produce seemingly ever more elaborate noises, from traditional fluting melodies, through toots, honks, squeaks, nee-naws, bing-bongs and car alarms. It was incredible, and hilarious.

I haven’t seen a soul on this quiet pathway, and as I am lost in listening to the Song Thrush I am suddenly startled by a small dog enthusiastically wending its way around my legs.

I turn round to see that its owner is as startled by my presence standing quietly by the stream as I am to suddenly have company. He apologises for his dog, I pet it, we talk about dog walkers in general, the beauty of the spot, I learn that he walks his dog there everyday.

Then he tells me that a few weeks ago he saw a young buzzard on the ground flapping its wings, and that he feared it had fallen from the nest. He didn’t want to leave it there, but was rightly scared to approach it, and this man spent forty minutes on the phone trying various animal welfare agencies to see if he could get some help or advice, or get someone to come out, but he couldn’t.

I told him that it was lovely that he’d done that, and that it was much more than most people would have done. He showed me how big it was, and I said it sounded like maybe it was nearly fledged, and that it was possible the adult might still be feeding it. He told me that his neighbour walks for miles all over the county, and she came up the following day to feed it some chicken.

He was worried that he might be keeping me with his chatting, and I said that he wasn’t at all, as I stood there perfectly content discussing wildlife with him. We decided that as no dead buzzard had been discovered on any later walk, we were going to choose to believe that the story had a happy ending.

Before he went on his way with his dog, he told me that it had been really lovely to meet me and talk to me today, and I told him the same. It was like my hope for a friendly stranger to brighten my perilous mood had been answered tenfold.

I felt buoyed by another persons efforts and concerns for wildlife and lifted by his general kindness and engagement with me. If you ever read this buzzard-rescue man, and dog, Thank you. In fact I just discovered I took an accidental picture of part of your dog, and my foot, which I hope you don’t mind me sharing, as you were such an important part of my walk.

I continue now on the pathway towards Shoni’s Pond, feeling infinitely lighter, like I don’t necessarily need to go much further today, but determined now to simply enjoy the rest of my walk.

The path ahead remains partially blocked from the storms of the winter, and is much too muddy for me to attempt today in my inadequate footwear. I traversed the numerous obstacles on the pathway one day at the end of winter, and ended up losing my footing and sliding down a sleep muddy bank on my bottom. No real injuries other than a little bruising and some extreme mud styling, but it wasn’t a pathway to take on lightly.

I retrace my steps away from the pond, back onto the main gravel path. There is not a soul in sight again, and the persistent wind today bustles the branches beside me in a continuous soothing swish. On the other side, the water from the stream adds in its bubbling rush, and the steadiness of my feet crunching on the gravel completes the grounding soundscape.

I take the path that leads toward Graig hill, rather than the one back through Maritime, and as I have done so many times before, walk up to where a grand looking detached house stands gated off in its own plot of land.

Before you reach two gates, both apparently private access lanes to the house, a notice tells you in no uncertain terms that beyond this point, is private property, private access road, and says Public Footpath this way, next to a crudely drawn arrow.

The sign appears to point into a fence and a solid bank of trees. Having examined it more closely on a previous occasion, I identified two small stone blocks which seemed to be an intended path over the stream to the fence.

On stepping over you are greeted with two wooden fence posts with a piece of aluminium between them up to about hip height. There is no official footpath sign here, no sign of a path on the other side of the fence, only the crudely drawn direction from the house owners.

I have looked it up before though, on a comprehensive map of footpaths and byways in the district, and I know that a permissive path (no maintenance, uncertain condition) should in theory exist here.

If it were passable, it would provide alternate access to the lanes and countryside of Penycoedcae, which are impossible to get to on the busy main road up the mountain as there is no pavement. Finding a route through would mean being able to make a circuit from one of my favourite walking areas up from Gelliwion.

So I stand again at this so called entrance, and the mass of almost impenetrable greenery on the other side. Almost, being the key word. I don’t know what makes today different from all the other times I have stood here, perhaps my encounter with the buzzard rescuer, perhaps the level my mood has lifted in a short time, but clearly, today is the day.

I clamber over the aluminium panel, fighting through the brambles and greenery on the immediate other side.

I find myself in a small clearing. There is no obvious pathway leading in any direction from this point. I am not prepared to give up yet though.

Having a notion in my head as to the approximate direction the footpath is supposed to take to get to a possible destination, I head off to the right, through an area of deep leaf mulch, all the time scouting for signs of anything resembling a possible pathway.

This sort of looks like it could once have been a path, but directly ahead of me a huge limb has been severed from a living oak, and it is impossible to progress in this direction without going either over or under. I get myself into the middle of the fallen trunk and have to stop for a moment to photograph its mossy surface, before eventually settling on scrambling underneath to get through to the other side.

I survey the scenery ahead, there is a, well, sort of route, little clearer patches of mulchy ground up ahead that could be a path, if you use a lot of imagination, but its far from certain. I plough on regardless.

I am heading uphill, wending my way between trees and following my imagined “route”, when all of a sudden my pathway simply disappears.

The scenery is beautiful, but is most assuredly not a path. I can see that the trees are becoming sparser though, and the landscape is more open ahead. Some kind of pipeline lies directly in front of me, and I use it as a path through the long grass. After persevering for a few minutes, I arrive at the bottom of a steep field. There is no path to be seen, but I have a look to see where I am on google maps, and realise that I am close to the main road which goes up to Penycoedcae.

I push up straight ahead, through long wet grass and tall thistles, over uneven ground that is liberally sprinkled with molehills. I have only gone twenty metres or so, when I am delighted to encounter this…

It’s a pathway! or at the very least a grassy indent, and sure enough it wends its way up to the public footpath sign on the main road. I have managed to connect two reluctant points on a map and I feel triumphant.

The point on the road I have arrived at however, is the point where the pavement disappears, and if I head the other way towards Penycoedcae, the round trip through the lanes and back down Gelliwion will probably add 3 miles to my walk, which I’m not prepared for today. On another day I will be.

Which does of course mean that I now have to find my way back…

As I head back down the field, I know that I cut across my own route when I first entered it, so I attempt to follow the indent across the grass to lead me to where the path proper should be, on its entrance way back into the woodland. I find it, but sadly, it looks like this… Perhaps I need to bring something for thwacking through undergrowth on another occasion.

In the other direction, some semblance of a path also appears to disappear off into the trees into the other direction, which would take it back in the direction or Gelliwion, or the higher pathways which extend from Shoni’s pond. I am definitely going to have to have a good study of a map later.

The views from the field edge are wonderful, and two buzzards, which I skilfully fail to photograph, wheel gracefully for a few moments in the blue skies above me.

As I step across the would be pathways, I place my feet down as firmly as I can, imagining clearing the way slightly for the next intrepid visitor. It’s sad that these pathways can’t be maintained, when they are such a wonderful opportunity for people to explore – some appear to be almost entirely disused, and I would dearly love to bring them back to life.

As I tramp ferociously back to where I think I came out of the woodland, I imagine that maybe next time I come this way I should bring with me a pair of giant shoes. Snow shoes, or clown shoes perhaps, in order to be more effective in each walk at reclaiming some pathways. I see a familiar bit of pipe up ahead…my “path” back into the woodland.

Once I get past it, I have a moment where I am completely unsure where to go, and I pick my way cautiously through the leaf mulch, my feet sometimes sinking in too far in the mud, until ahead I spot my fallen oak waymark.

On the other side, a rusty iron bar with a plate fixed to the bottom lies on the ground, and I wonder if this was once a signpost for a better used pathway.

It is still difficult from here to spot the way I originally came, but a little further on there is the welcome sight off to the side of nearly hidden aluminium panel.

I traverse the final obstacle with aching legs, and descend with a certain amount of relief onto the solid road. Making my way the last half mile or so home, I feel like today has been an adventure.

What started as a simple walk which got better and better and pulled my flagging spirits up a hill, ended up a wonderful quest into the unknown.