In Breakheart quarry near Dursley, Glos. 8.45 am. It is very windy on the exposed slopes of Waterley Bottom hill, but warmer and sheltered in the quarry, although the wind is blustering through the bare trees. The sky is filling up with scudding rain clouds running East and gulls are wheeling in the wild air. The teasels on the flat ground are the ordinary variety, not the Fuller’s teasel with hooks.
A tortoiseshell cat is sitting in the Test Centre compound, but the Centre is shut up and barred. Does it live there? Perhaps there is a watchman . . .
Someone has been using the quarry as a cycle track, making a cicuitous route round the strewn boulders. A helicopter passes close, the pilot having to compensate a lot in the stiff wind. A man and his terrier dog going the other way round the path said ‘hello’..
Lots of tree planting going on in the wood and the landscape is beginning to change. I’m looking from the far bank now, across to Nibley and the sky is lowering and full of rain. A young man with a slobbering bull-mastiff passed me as I sit there contemplating the vista.
The wind rushes by, veering North and the birch trees on the flat ground bend away with the blast. Another man and his dog enters the quarry. It seems a favourite spot for dog-walkers. He disappears from sight and a lone magpie flies down to grub about in the arid ground.
LATER . . .
Waterley Bottom is living up to its name. A sleepy hollow land, the narrow lanes are awash with streamlets, the tarmac pitted with erosion from the endless downpours since September. A land of green fern and mud, a few homesteads clinging to the hillsides, the creeks and coombes rolling into the woodland, wet and remote.
The rain has started, heavy and forlorn, puddling the windscreen as I now sit here in the car, having emerged from what they call ‘The Throat’ to the Old London road near the top of Adey’s lane. Other folk seem to have ventured out, mostly to walk their dogs, and they will be caught in this heavy downpour, wetting the old earth still more, washing the land to the sea.
It feels sad – a depressing end to the Millenium year: or maybe it’s just the way I feel. . .
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