From heaven’s gate to prison gate

Hanwell was on a sunshine high last weekend. More people were out and about than for a long while, all enjoying a lovely warm late morning.

The top of High Lane

Many of them had congregated on Church Road, at the top of High Lane; walkers and cyclists engaging in a strange sort of passive-aggressive jostling to get on the footpath. Their enthusiasm sat uneasily with their social distancing fatigue. We must have hit pandemic recreation rush hour, for High Lane looked likely to be a bit of an obstacle course today.

Heaven’s gate

So we ducked away from this leafy bottleneck and scurried through the opening in the hedgerow at the top of Brent Valley Golf Course. We dropped down the other side, parallel to High Lane, and paused to admire the wonderful vista of the course spread out below, all the way over to the tree-lined back gardens of Studland Road in the distance. It felt like we were at heaven’s gate.

As we made our way down, we listened to the sporadic bursts of cheerful spring bird song that now overlay the Great Tit’s regular beep-beep beat we first noticed a few weeks ago.

Aka Horsey Hill

High Lane is intriguing, though I know little of its history. There’s an old map of Hanwell in The Viaduct pub, on which High Lane features as one of only two thoroughfares running south to north from Church Road, the other being Cuckoo Lane. Everything else was fields.

The path starts off with a steep winding descent down which packhorses, carts and livestock would have been led slowly and gingerly, before the ubiquity of motor travel. A path down which whole families now freewheel in a matter of seconds on their weekend bikes.

The horses’ field through the hedge

Just after the horse stables (a popular stopping off point for parents of small children) is golf trolley crossing and a good few sloe bushes. From then on the path is flat and fairly straight, splitting Brent Valley Golf Club in two all the way to the bottom of Studland Road.

Golf trolley crossing by the stables

It has the feel of a proper path of ages, with its familiar yet insinuating topography. The hedgerows and trees on each side almost form a canopy, an elongated half-cocoon that would once have helped shelter travelling tradespeople and farmworkers from the elements, and now helps protect joggers and dog walkers from stray golf balls. In my running days and until a few years ago it was all dirt and gravel, if memory serves. Indeed, it used to be called Mud Lane. Now it’s lovely smooth tarmac.

The ditches alongside the path often flood in wet weather. Trees occasionally fall across it in windy weather. Parakeets screech; there seem to be more and more of them each year. Squirrels jump-scurry around and robins, wrens and blackbirds flit across and back again.

These are indications that a lot’s going on up and down High Lane; as are the flying bicycle signposts and the golfer/cyclist awareness notice.

Beware flying bikes

High Lane stops being a path and becomes a normal road at the bottom of Studland Road, at the top of which there was a windmill in the 13th century (but not much else). This section is much shorter than the long path we’ve just come down, only just managing to fit in High Lane Estate and Community Centre, a playground and a primary school that had a massive extension completed just before the pandemic started.

Norman Stanley Fletcher…

We unlocked the big metal allotment gate, shuffled in and clanged it shut it behind us. Then, as always, the loud slam and rattle of the rectangular metal bolt piece got me reciting the Porridge intro sequence: “Norman Stanley Fletcher… you are an habitual criminal who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard and presumably accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner…” in a posh old judge’s voice. It’s odd, for in reality being at the allotment is the best feeling of freedom I know. And for the past year it’s been sanctuary too.

Inside the allotment gates

Today we brought the strimmer with us for the first strim of the year. On each allotment visit for the next few months I’ll bring the recharged battery and tidy grass paths while the mind roams free. Well, not totally free. You have to mind out for frogs and toads sheltering in the longer grass by the raised beds.

Strimming is what I do when I should be finishing the last of winter’s tasks: harvesting, weeding and pruning; or sowing the first seeds of spring and contemplating the maybe-marvels of the new growing season. Some things sown in winter have already started to emerge: broad beans, garlic and chives. On another plot, a neighbour grows hops, still dormant right now, but soon the thinnings from the new green shoots will go in salads. Nothing wasted.

The strimmer battery ran out as the robin arrived. What timing. It perched in the apple tree, watching as we uncovered the first bed of the year. We removed a few weeds, then the robin removed a few worms.

If you have any details of the history of High Lane, I’d love to hear about them.

For old maps of Hanwell:

Hanwell in 1800 – The Underground Map

Detailed Old Victorian Ordnance Survey 6 inch to 1 mile Old Map (1888-1913) , Hanwell, Greater London Co-ordinates 51.498250, -0.344696 (archiuk.com)

Walk out to winter (on parallel paths)

BOOM!!! CREEEESH! THPOCK-THPOCK-THPOCK! FWHEEUUU! WHEEEEE-URRR-eee! SHWIZZZzzzzzz!

Fireworks launched in defiance seared the night sky and exploded hope. I drifted into a doze-dream that the scatter-shot of bangs and whizzes over Hanwell were in celebration of the end of the pandemic. But they weren’t, of course. Not over yet, not by a long chalk. They were only heralding the New Year, while saying goodbye to the old one and for just about all of us, good riddance to it.

When the first Covid-19 lockdown started last March we rarely ventured outside Hanwell. Like many others, we were working from home (if at all). We were no longer commuting, we were making occasional darting forays to local shops instead. And our daily lockdown exercise soon took the form of the familiar 40-minute walk from home to allotment.

At first, this involved following our favourite local paths, but with everyone else out walking too it got harder to keep social distance, especially along the Grand Union Canal and the River Brent. Before long we found ourselves exploring previously unvisited corners of Hanwell, like Boles Meadow.

Boles Meadow

The neat sign at the entrance to the meadow tells us that livestock once grazed here and that it’s now a nature conversation area. There are also the remains of an old ice storage house, though we’ve yet to find it. The sign also mentions that the nearby footbridge is a good place for bat spotting on summer evenings.

Even on familiar paths there have been new discoveries. Stepping off the path on the edge of the Brent Valley golf course to maintain social distancing, we would stop briefly and look into clearings and tangles of undergrowth we’d never noticed before, despite having passed by them almost daily. On walks with no fixed destination, no rush to get anywhere in particular, we would sometimes Covid drift. That is, we would let the necessities and niceties of social distancing prompt us to drift off course, to explore new paths and corners.

Capital Ring-ing the changes

In the past year this Capital Ring path junction in Hanwell has been transformed into a gyratory by a combination of greater use leading to wet/dry path erosion/compaction, and associated social distancing.

When encountering other walkers we would switch to a single file formation out of courtesy, or just stand around for a minute, out of the way. Not everyone does likewise, staying two or even three abreast, perhaps thoughtlessly, obliging us to step off the path.

We soon learned not to get annoyed, just to roll with it. What’s the point of making a fuss when you might get embroiled in a row? I’m sure there have been moments when we failed to notice other walkers because we were wrapped up in conversation, or had spotted an unfamiliar bird, or had met a cute puppy. Perspective and acceptance – a different kind of rambling.

Not only were new paths explored, they were also created; tracks formed naturally by walkers alongside existing paths to help maintain distance from others, such as on Brent Meadow and Churchfields recreation ground.

The new Covid tracks alongside the main path on Brent Meadow

I guess all the walking and exploring we’ve done, and seeing nature get a bit of respite from what we humans do to it with our busy lives, are silver linings on what for many has been a really miserable cloud. And lots of people have found their own positives, and their own ways of getting through lockdown and self-isolation. Some have coped with it by trying not to think of it as something bad – the artist Maggi Hambling gave it a friendly name: Locky Lockdown.

Allotment gates

Our walk has brought us to the allotment gates, the cold air misting our breath. It’s a lucky thing that the allotments were allowed to remain open; for a while it wasn’t certain they would be. Many plotholders petitioned their MPs, and the allotments were reprieved, subject to hygiene measures and a ban on bonfires. Early on there was even talk that the food grown might be needed by the community.

The sheds inside the allotment gates

Two plot neighbour chats and one hello to the robin later, I was standing on an old water tank, long pruner in hand. I was trying to reach the highest of the forest of water shoots atop the apple trees, up in what I like to call the canopy. As I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, the tank wobbled on the uneven ground. It was like being perched high up the mast of a gently swaying sailing ship. I put my free hand above my eyes, as though straining for sight of land from my crow’s nest. What I saw was grey sky over a sea of leafless branch tops, and the Hanwell Community Centre clock tower beyond. Pruning the apple trees is a December job that we didn’t quite get round to finishing in December. We never do. Which is a shame, since January is meant to be about enjoying that promise of a fresh start.

During the pandemic, new friendships have been made on the allotment and existing ones made deeper, despite social distancing. The time spent up here instead of on the Piccadilly line means our plot has never looked better, and makes a welcome break from the world of work by Zoom at home.

Here’s to a happier new year.