Hale Lighthouse
Preamble (pun intended)
This shortish (approx. 2 miles) walk takes in a range of habitats – hedgerows, farmland including wheat and vegetable fields, estuary and mud flats, shore and scrub – and a lighthouse, and can be extended into Hale Park woods and back past the attractive cottages and the statue of John Middleton, the Childe of Hale, on Church Road. Today, though, I turn off at the lighthouse (now a private residence) and head up Lighthouse Lane to end my journey at St Mary’s Church, home to Middleton’s grave and that of John of Ireland, the original chapel’s founder, amongst others. There are some incredibly beautiful grave markers too, such as a large stone cross with relief carving of ivy and a bird – presumably a dove – seen in the photo above, which one day I aim to weave into a story.
Part 1
On a mid-July walk down Within Way, a wide, hard, baked-dry soil path, the view to the right is of two fields, one of very short wheat, and the other that has been sown with wildflowers. The wheat, as I later learn from John Lewis-Stempel’s excellent The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland, part natural history, part memoir, is short because that’s the preferred style these days, as there is not much call for straw anymore (try telling that to my mother, who uses it for the tortoise’s bedding), and I encounter it all along the estuary this year. The second field is a sea of purple, yellow and white, dominated by lacy phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia), also known as purple tansy or fiddleneck (presumably because the curling flower stems resemble… fiddle necks), a non-native but exquisite hardy annual used as a cover crop/green manure. The plant is a nitrogen holder, and so needs to be dug into the soil to release these benefits, but it has the added advantages of being attractive to pollinators such as bees, wasps and hoverflies, and having vigorous branching roots that break down soil, making it easier to work. I make a mental note to buy a pack of seeds for the allotment – anything that cuts down on the digging can only be a good thing! Swifts are hawking above this meadow and in fact over most of the fields I pass, which is both a delight and a relief, as they and the hirundines (martins and swallows) have been in very short supply this year. Chalk it down to the ecological catastrophe that is happening all around us – driven by intensive farming practices and the continued use of fossil fuels, amongst other evils.
Lacy phacelia – photo by Martin Ludlam, licence-free on Pixabay.com
Over the fields on the opposite side is the arch of the ‘old’ Runcorn Bridge – an impressive through-arch bridge constructed of pale green steel spanning approx. 330 metres. It’s an impressive sight and a very nostalgic one as I remember childhood car journeys across it when I was quite apprehensive and used to close my eyes until we were safely on the other side (mustn’t do that when you’re driving, though). I usually stop at this break in the hedgerow and take a photo, so that’s where we will leave me for now.
Runcorn Bridge – but from a lot nearer than Within Way