May 1st - meanwhile, on the other side of the recreation centre playing fields, this sight to gladden the heart. New leaf growth, heralding another summer of green trees and warm days.

Bring it on. It’s been a long winter.

May 1st - Welcome back to the old Oak Park bowling green. This old, neglected facility - overlooked by the bright, perfect club green in the middle-distance - has been a pond since at least last November. Now spring is here, and drier weather, it’s drained and the grass is growing again. 

It’s sad that nobody seems to care for this once pristine public space.

April 30th - I see someone has been busy renewing all the footpath signs around Jockey Meadows and Coppice Woods off Green Lane, Walsall Wood, which is great. The new ones are lovely wooden jobs, well made. Excellent stuff.

I notice they make a specific and accurate distinction between public footpaths and permissive footpaths. This difference in status is crucially important and sadly little understood by many walkers.

Nice to see this - wonder how far the signage extends?

April 21st - At the other end of the day, I had to run an errand up to WAlsall Wood. The sunset was gorgeous, but there weren’t really any good vantage points where I was headed. Still, red sky over Bullings Heath, and then over Shelfield isn’t too shabby, as things turn out…

April 19th - I hadn’t wandered over Jockey Meadows for years - I must do it again. Leaving the bike in the hedge, I waded through the water meadow towards the deer. The land here is saturated, and appears very fertile. Globeflowers are in bloom, and frog, toad and newt spawn are evident in the shallow water (frog spawn is in clumps, toad in ribbons. Newt spawn is laid in small pockets on the stems of underwater plants or in the curls of leaves and fronds). There is a healthy greenness here. I can see why the deer love it. This is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and I can see why.

April 19th - I saw them fleetingly in the distance, and thought they were horses. Stopping to take a better look, I realised there was a group of at least 4 red deer in the middle of Jockey Meadows, between Green Lane and Lichfield Road, Walsall Wood. Crossing the wetland to get a better shot, it was very, very boggy, but I discovered there was quite a large, mixed group; largest I’ve ever seen here. Half the group disappeared from view as I approached, I’d say the total was maybe 20-25 animals. I can see why they like it here; open watermeadows for browsing with low scrub for cover when eeded. So wet, they get little disturbance (I was wading through marsh 6-10 inches deep), no dogs and plenty of fresh sedges and other greens.

I love the deer. They’ve probably come up from Brownhills Common, scared off by the noise of all the anti-heathland protestors…

April 18th - The landfill at Highfields South, just over the Lichfield Road from Jockey Meadows, is notable for a number of reasons. It’s pretty well managed, and is being filled in a very controlled way. It’s now generating electricity from the landfill gasses it produces, and it has a very diverse selection of gulls, and attracts birdspotters from far and wide.

I noticed as I passed tonight that the bulkheads bored into the mound were now all connected. Like the former Vigo Utopia landfill a mile away, this one will generate electricity by burning the methane it produces for some years to come.

Don’t kid yourself that this is green, however; it’s still burning fuel, it’s not renewable and merely utilises gas that would otherwise be lost. But it’s still a neat use of an unusual resource.

April 10th - The old derelict terraces at Streets Corner in Walsall Wood have been demolished now, except for the one at the southern end. This odd little house, under renovation for as long as I can remember, remains steadfastly in private ownership, and will, apparently, be built into the new development of houses to come here.

The new build scheme here seems to have taken ages to get off the ground. I hope it progresses well - the dereliction here until the demolition has been a blot on the landscape for many years, and that little end terrace, covered in creepers, looks very lonely on its own.

April 8th - Sping, come she will. After yesterday’s shock at finding myself snowbound not once, but twice, I noted the warm afternoon and spring flowers. I’m interested in the daffodils at the moment - they seem small to almost narcissus proportions this year; is this a symptom of the poor spring? Blooms that are normally large and plentiful at Sandhills are small and diminutive this year.

The faux village green at Walsall Wood - a grass verge councillors tried to convert to avert the expansion of the adjacent pub - does look lovely with a riot of crocuses. 

It’s not all growth, though; the polythene lined field at Home Farm still isn’t giving up it’s secret, and the bowling green at Oak Park is being named as a possible Olympic training facility.

A mad season, indeed.

April 3rd - The day looked splendid from the other end, too. Tired of the relentless wind, I hopped onto the canal to tack through it a little in semi-shelter. You can tell that spring is really in the offing now. Things are a shade more green; the sun a touch warmer; nature just that wee bit more active.

I love the way the land falls away from the canal at Clayhanger Bridge; the picture looks lopsided, even though it’s level. Now the nights are light again, things are really opening out, and it’s great to be cycling home in such strong, beautiful light.

Darkness has reached it’s end.

March 21st - I returned from Walsall in the beginnings of a storm of wet, heavy-flaked snow. It soaked through my jeans, and made me cold, wet and miserable, a mood not helped by the utterly relentless and unforgiving easterly headwind.

Walsall Wood church looked good in the cold night, and the lights of the new Co-op store on Streets Corner - only opened that morning - were cheering.

15th March - After a couple of dry, largely sunny days, the rains returned. It rained on me on the way to work, and again as I travelled home. In Tyseley, what was a light shower became a downpour as I left Walsall; by Shelfield, I was soaked, it was still hammering it down, yet over to the north, the sky was clearing and the sun was out.

Commuting on a bike on days like these is hard - damned hard. The hardest bit of winter is often the endgame; this year’s is beginning to seem endless.

March 14th - Monkeying through the back streets of Walsall Wood on an errand today, I traversed Hollanders Bridge, the pedestrian-only canal crossing next to Binary Wharf. Closing the bridge to through traffic years ago cut off Queen Street from the Lichfield Road side of the canal, and created an orphaned stub of road that was of no consequence until a new housing development was constructed adjacent to it, on the site of an old computer business. Somewhat cringingly, the road-stub was christened “Steep Bridge Way’.

Way back in August, 2011, local blogger The Stymaster noted the original sign was badly spelled; then, in May 2012, I spotted that sign had been removed. It seems to have been finally replaced.

One wonders at the cost, and how slowly the gears of bureaucracy can grind in such matters…

March 13th - There’s a lot of changes in progress at the moment in Walsall Wood, as I noted when I passed through tonight. The new Co-op store is finally ready to open on the 21st March at Streets Corner, and nearby, a new car sales showroom is being built on the site of the old library. Several applications had approval there, from a complex of flats to a convenience store. Nice to see something built after five years of dereliction.

Derelict for well over a decade, the abandoned terraces opposite Walsall Wood School are in the process of demolition, to enable the construction of a new housing development. It’s been a long time coming, and although it’s sad to see old buildings go, they were in a terrible state.

I hope the builders have the sensitivity to preserve the name-plaque and incorporate it into the new development, as was done with the Ivy House, nearby.

March 12th - The Black oak bridge has been in a grim state for a while, having recently lost some of it’s guard rails. When I noticed last week that the bridge was to be closed today for repairs, I was interested to see how the people repairing it overcame the problem of the the rotten angle iron rail supports that hold the guard planks up.

It seems we’ve been visited by Bodgitt & Scarper. When I crossed the bridge tonight, I too a look at the fix. The planks were only painted one side, and not cut or erected very well. On the northern side, they aren’t fixed to the uprights, but fresh supports have just been hammered in between the top and bottom rails to do the same job. 

It’s a fix, of sorts, but it isn’t well executed, and on the northern side, will probably fall apart at the next vehicle scrape. I know the Canal & Rivers Trust - formerly British Waterways - are short of cash, but there’s little excuse for such poor work.

Disappointing, I’d say.