A Delightful Walk. A Humble Stream. A Perfect Day. Book Choice.

                                                   ALL PHOTOS CLICK FULL SCREEN.

A few days after the unexpectedly busy Bowling walk on a Saturday I was back out again, this time in midweek. And this time I picked an unfashionable area I've always enjoyed in the past. As I will probably want to do it again I will not name it as I don't want to jinx it... or make it busy.

This walk is handy as I can get a bus right up to it. Funnily enough I've always found that the quietest walks occur most often on the edge of cities and towns and this is certainly the case here. Around 8 years ago Alex and I went to Knoydart, supposedly a remote empty Scottish Highland wilderness yet it was mobbed, around 200 people in the small village: the main and only pub on that peninsula full every night with hill walkers, yacht folk, tourists from London, Munro baggers, tour boats, kayakers, cyclists, and internet influencers. Probably because for decades the pub and the area around it has featured in numerous newspaper colour supplements as 'the remotest pub and village in Scotland/ and the UK. . The place to be.... ( May 2017 it was, just looked it up on here.)

Fortunately this area has not appeared  in newspaper supplements/ anywhere else important, to the best of my knowledge, so I'm happy to keep it that way. A humble stream above. This housing estate and the woods above it also transported me right back to childhood as in both places five minutes walk from your front door takes you into woods, streams, meadows and open heath lands. Wild, empty, delightful. If you know where it is don't say as I'll just delete your comment :o)

It was a beautiful stream so I followed it uphill until it turned into a shallow pond with tadpoles and frog spawn in the water. I was the only person here so I was able to easily think back to all those past times, alone or with young companions in the 1960s in a similar environment around Nitshill. In those days children could wander about in the woods without parental supervision and a stream like this one was a powerful magnet.

you could play with the tadpoles, even take them home in a jam jar ( not advisable now. dig your own small pond in your garden or even a sunken plastic container level with the ground making sure any frogs/ newts/ tadpoles can get back out again easily and they will come of their own accord if no fish are put in it.) or you could cross the stream on a fallen tree, catch fish, push each other in etc.... hours of fun and entertainment.

Further up it had several deeper pools and waterfalls with a delicate path running beside it all the way. Loads of other walkers or cyclists would have ruined the magic somewhat ( and trashed the path) but so far my luck held. No one but me here.

I'm not completely anti social and I enjoy a good chat if it happens so when I met a local dog walker we had a few minutes pleasant conversation about this and that. I was already in a good mood seeing the tadpoles and it continued for the rest of this walk.

Numerous paths crisscross the landscape above the estate so although I've walked here many times over the years there's always scope to find new routes. During the entire walk  in this vicinity I bumped into four people. Two male elderly dog walkers, a female jogger, and a local young guy. My kind of numbers for a walk... instead of hundreds. And not a single bike. Bliss.

Part of the reason for that might be the number of toppled trees up here blocking many of the paths and not cleared away yet. ( Although I used to cycle myself the sheer number of cyclists now, especially on local canal paths and cycle tracks does annoy me somewhat. As a walker you have to be hyper aware of them at all times now to avoid a painful accident... yet when I was a cyclist, despite being careful and going slow around any potential hazards, all my crashes occurred on shared paths: dogs on extended leads suddenly running straight out in front of me, children doing likewise, farm dogs attacking, youths in notorious housing schemes throwing things at you, other much faster cyclists cutting me up etc...(luckily it was only me swerving and getting hurt, not them, so no legal issues).....which is why I always preferred the minor road network or wild empty tracks. Much safer.  

As a child I'd have loved this mind you. A test of balance route across the stream.

 Nature's windfall playground... with the added risk as to how far you could walk up it before they crashed to the ground. Pick one you can jump off easily if they do fall.

Even as a humble old walker it was a mini adventure obstacle course to get round the number of trees toppled across the paths in the wake of Storm Eowyn.

After the woods and meadows higher up I descended into the housing estate itself as I remembered a central green ribbon running through it that was also pleasant to walk. It starts on the left here once across the road.

 A nice additional route down to the roundabout.

Most of the time you would hardly know you were walking through a housing estate at all.

The other half of the walk took place on minor roads and tracks with few cars. My kind of cycling... or walking route.

 And this too was very pleasant. A perfect day out in fact. 10 out of ten for pure enjoyment. Passed nine people in total, chatted to five. Not a single bike encountered. A modern miracle. A bus back from a second much larger housing estate completed the walk.

While we are on the subject of enjoyment I can recommend two book sets.  The GONE series by Michael Grant and The ENEMY series by Charlie Higson.  In both everyone over 15 years old has disappeared or been changed dramatically leaving the children to fend for themselves. Like Lord of the Flies on steroids... or LSD. If you liked Dune, Lord of the Rings. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Andre Norton's Witch World or Game of Thrones you should like these modern classics. Fast paced, vivid characters, no dips in quality at all from beginning to end. Best books I've read for years. Adventure/ Fantasy/ sci fi/horror genre. Around six books in each series which is remarkable. A journey of a lifetime as a reader as I'll probably never encounter anything as good as this again sustained over 3000 pages.

If you don't fancy that genre much then I've just finished James Patterson's Jailhouse Lawyer which is another good book I'd recommend. Two gripping enjoyable legal plots in one book.