Meet at 11.15 a.m. on Sunday 6th January outside the Prince Albert

The Prince Albert Pub Exterior

Rendezvous Prince Albert for our first springs walk and organise cars. It seems oddly contradictory to ask for a dry day when we track six springs in the Toadsmoor Valley, in our search for the genius loci of Stroud and the Five Valleys, but there we are. Please give us a dry day, Fate.
As the Guardian editorial put it today: “It’s the soundtrack to 2012. The hammering and splatting of rain on roofs and umbrellas, the plonk and the hiss as it falls into swelling puddles, the swish of passing cars on sodden roads, the swirling suck as it disappears down the drain – and the ominous gurgle as it comes back up again. This year, it has rained stair rods and cats and dogs and then it’s drizzled and mizzled…The result is often startlingly beautiful…And in the literary imagination…It is a wild, roaring, uncontrollable force…So farewell, 2012, and here’s to a dryer 2013. Not too dry, of course.”
Hope to see you on Sunday the 6th, ready to reconnoitre, record and re-imagine our landscape.

The Prince Albert Pub Exterior