The winter is past

Rise up, my love, 

my fair one, 

and come away.

For, lo, the winter is past, 

the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth; 

the time of the singing of birds is come.

(Song of Solomon, 2.10-12)

Yes, the time is long overdue for Angie to stir from her winter slumbers, pull on her walking boots, head into the Great Outdoors and resume her more frequent blog posts. Not that I have been entirely inactive during the long winter months and (to quote the Manchester Rambler) there really has been

a measure of some kind of pleasure

in wading through three feet of snow.

But (disregarding the probability of snow flurries this weekend) warmer days are here to lure me out of the house and resume my countryside adventures further afield than the Forest of Dean. So come away, just a few miles from my home, over the Wye Valley and into the hills above Llandogo. 

This short walk began in Whitestone Car Park, where there's a lovely playground for kids and a picnic area, but on this day no-one to enjoy it.  From there a broad path tracks through Bargain Wood, an oddly-named place that might be a corruption of 'bare gain', referring to the poor grazing to be had in former times. At three places along the path there are viewpoints down to the Wye Valley, each provided with a seat where one may relax and drink in the view. Here are two of them...

The highlight of this walk is Cleddon Falls. According to my walk book - Wye Valley: 40 Hill and Riverside Walks - the point at which the stream suddenly plunges down marks what may have been the level of an ancient sea, long before successive ice ages caused sea levels to drop and the land to rise. So now you know.  It would have been interesting to explore further down the falls but on this occasion I didn't relish the long climb up again. Maybe next time.

Not far from Cleddon Falls stands Cleddon Hall, the birthplace of the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. I was 21 years old when Russell died and my memories of him - on the sort of TV programme that young people rarely watch - was of a rather boring old man.

Cleddon Hall

He was fiercely anti-religion, which ensured his lack of popularity with my father, who also didn't think much of his vacillation over the rights and wrongs of World War Two.  As we grow older, though, many of us learn to tolerate, and even respect, views that are not our own. And I do like some of Russell's more well-known quotations, particularly as he bemoans the sad fact that idiots so often prevail over the intelligent:

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

And that is quite enough philosophising for one blog post!