Seasonal area
September 2010
Current Seasonal Area is
here
September seems to be becoming the
Forest of Dean month - or, at least, last September was in the
Forest too. (The previous two Septembers before that were set
on the Wentloog.) The Forest of Dean is an attractive place and
when the photography department get fed up with taking depressing
pictures in the Wye Valley for the Planning Department - who are
happily too busy planning objection letters to interfere in anything
else - they tend to gravitate to the area next door, which used
to require the lengthy and awkward process of turning the map
over. It isn't too hard to do on the bonnet of a car, but the
front of the Sprinter train used to get the Official Photographer
to the Forest isn't really designed for such things. Regular users
of double-sided OS Explorer maps will get the gist. Happily the
photography team can now largely get around the Forest without
a map and so can leave it on the Wye Valley side.
The Meterological Office promised a
hot summer, but the weather purely exists to annoy the Met Office
so it rained fairly steadily. Once the Met Office declared that
summer was over the weather cheered up and so some decent trips
out to get some good pictures can be made easily. This one shows
Woorgreens Lake - the newest and largest of the big lakes in the
Forest. It used to be an open-cast coal mine and shared its name
with a rather less successful deep colliery half a mile down the
road - a colliery which managed the unusual accolade of bankrupting
a confidence trickster when he forgot to check that the colliery
that he was buying wasn't a pile of ruined buildings and rusting
rails before he signed on the dotted line.
Woorgreens open-cast mine appears to
have been somewhat more successful - the colliery has no spoil
heap, which rather suggests that very little ever came out of
it, whereas the open-cast mine has left several acres of splendid
lake with its attractive wooded island, glorious reed and tree
backdrops and agressive semi-tame ducks. In the winter sun it
has a certain air of the mythical Lake Avalon of Arthurian fame.
The stream flowing out of the lake
to the left is the humble beginnings of the Blackpool Brook, which
actually never gets much more impressive on its seven-mile journey
from here to the River Severn at Brims Pill, near Awre, which
is some miles from anywhere which non-locals will ever have heard
of before.
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Area August 2010<<<
^^^Current
Seasonal Area^^^
>>>Seasonal
Area October 2010>>>
04/09/10