A woodland walk

Last Sunday's walk - only the third of the year, and March half gone already! - took us through Wynyard Woodland Park, on the fringes of Stockton. I'd never been there before, and although durham_rambler had visited it for a training exercise, he hadn't really explored the park, and much of it was new to him, too.

Even the shape of the park is unexpected: it's pretty much linear, for the very good reason that the basis of it is a stretch of disused railway (part of the Castle Eden line). At points along the line, paths loop off through a series of patches of woodland.

I was hoping for the first of the spring flowers, but didn't really see any. It was a sunny day, and warm enough, at least in the shelter of the railway cutting, that I wished I'd brought a backpack and could talke my coat off. But the only flowers I saw were a few clumps of snowdrops, by the car park in Tilery Wood, at the northern end of the walk. Other than that, some catkins, some green leaves beginning to point through the earth, but no primroses (even on the sunny slopes), no celandine - not really spring yet, then.

Along the path which provides the long way round through the northern woodland there are a number of benches, slabs of tree trunk perched on crude metal legs, the wood sculpted with a realistic representation of a coat and glovesm, say, or a jacket on which a clutch of eggs are gently cradled. We asked each other if this was the work of Colin Wilbourn, and agreed that it probably was. (It is).



Our map showed another sculpture, The Celestial Kitchen at the southern end of the walkway - 'Celestial' because it eachoed the themes of the Planetarium. Wait a minute, there's a Planetarium? I suppose there's no reason why a Planetarium should be a facility of the big city (given the excess of lighting in most cities, there's every reason why it shouldn't be) but I was brought up in London, once taken on a school trip to the London Planetarium, and it's not something I expect to find in a field at Thorpe Thewles. Nonetheless, that's where it is, just across the walkway from the Observatory (about the size, on the outside at least, of the TARDIS).

After a break for coffee at the Visitor Centre (the former stationmaster's house) we made a short detour, to see the Kitchen. In the middle of a field, a collection of outsize kitchen utensils are neatly labelled with explanations of their astronomical uses: a colander is pierced with the constellations of the northern hemisphere, a plate sits within its own shadow at noon on the spring equinox, and a spoon and fork have holes cut into their handles which allow you to find the Pole star. There's something disconcerting about everyday objects at the wrong scale, magnified or reduced beyond reason, about the realism of the mimicry and the fantasy of the scale, and a similar incongruity about the scientific earnestness with which these domestic objects are to be deployed. We liked it very much, and found it difficult to tear ourselves away.

But we were at the furthest point of our walk, and there was a long way to walk back. We made it even longer, by taking the path which skirts Thorpe Wood - and it felt longer still, as the going wound around the perimeter of the woodland, up and down and round corners, and slippery underfoot with mud. At one point there was a view off across ploughed fields to Teesside in the distance which made it seem almost worth the effort - well, almost. But the final slog back along the railway did seem very long.

I must be very unfit. Better try again tomorrow.