Westwood reprise

14 April 2017

It isn’t often Commando wants to go for a walk with me so, when he said he said he fancied a stroll in Westwood to stretch out his legs after weeks and weeks of marathon training runs, I jumped at the chance. Westwood has become a bit of a bête noire of mine. It seem so to be a place where I always end up getting lost or on the wrong trail. Commando, who spent his boyhood in these parts, knows it far better than I so walking it with him would be a real treat. 

This was never going to be a long walk and I didn’t take the fancy camera because Commando gets a little irritated when I keep stopping to take photos. All that running makes him eager to keep moving. We drove down to the shore and parked up there then set off through the main Westwood gate. Almost at once I was stopping to take photos of anemones beside the path and Commando was huffing quietly. Then there were the bluebells. There seemed to be far more of them that there had been last week. Commando waited almost patiently while I snapped away with my phone.

A few more shots of anemones meant I had to run to catch up though. After that I put my phone in my pocket in case I lost him altogether. If that happened there was a good chance I’d never make it out of the woods because, by then, we were deep inside and I had no idea where we were.

Last night Commando ran through Westwood with the Itchen Spitfires on a club run and he wanted to walk the same route. After a while he began to doubt we were on the right trail. Westwood does that to you. There are so many trails criss crossing it, so many opportunities to take a slightly wrong turn. After a while they all begin to look both familiar and strange at the same time. When we came to a patch of burnt gorse he breathed a sigh of relief.
“I know we passed this last night,” he said. “We turned here. I remember Tree swearing and grumbling.”
Tree is a Spitfire. She swears a great deal when the going gets tough. It’s her way of getting through a run.

Right on the corner there was blossom on a real tree. I got my phone back out and took photos then we walked on talking about the burnt gorse. Commando thought it was probably kids playing with matches. I was just glad only a small part of the woods got scorched. Gorse goes up as if it’s been sprayed with petrol and the fire can easily spread and turn into a huge, unmanageable inferno before you know it, like it did on Peartree Green a few years back.

We passed a dandelion sprinkled side trail but Commando was sure he hadn’t gone that way so we kept going forwards. Here we found a square of grass enclosed by spiked metal fencing. Inside were odd looking cages. Neither of us could work out why they were there or what they might be for. Commando couldn’t remember seeing them when he was running and he began to doubt himself again.
“Everything looks very different at walking pace,” he said. “We might have passed this and just not seen it. You see much more when you’re walking.”
This is precisely why I prefer to walk but I didn’t say so.

“Are those daffodills?” Commando asked a little further on, pointing at clumps of yellow in the meadow ahead.
“Could be, but most of the daffodils are over now everywhere else,” I said, straining my eyes to see better.
When we reached them they turned out to be cowslips. Of course, I stopped to take a photo and Commando didn’t even grumble.

Right after this we came to a gate.
“I remember going through this,” Commando said. “We had to slow down to squeeze through the gap.”

Through the gate I found Cuckoo flower, or Lady’s-smock as they’re also called brightening the side of the trail. They’re supposedly a common sight in damp, grassy places but I rarely see them so I stopped to take a photo. They are also another sure sign that spring has arrived. The name cuckoo flower comes from the fact they appear at the same time as the first cuckoos.

By this time I’d completely lost all sense of where we were and, when I noticed a road ahead, I asked Commando what road it was.
“Hmm,” he said. “I don’t remember a road last night. I think we’ve gone wrong somewhere.”
“But you remember the gate,” I said, “and we haven’t turned or even seen a turning since we went through it.”
“I think it may be Grange Road or Woolston Road,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t notice the road. I was dark and there probably wouldn’t have been any traffic.”
“You didn’t go out onto a road then?”
“No, we didn’t. I think I’ve gone wrong somewhere but I don’t know where.”
So we turned back and retraced our steps. We went back through the gate and headed up the hill through the meadow. Commando was sure they hadn’t run that way either.
“I’d have remembered Tree swearing if we had,” he said. “She hates hills.”
We passed a ring of huge stones surrounded by picnic benches. Commando didn’t remember them either but I stopped to take a photo anyway, thinking they might turn out to be something interesting. On closer inspection the stones were not as old as they first appeared. They were likely put there to mark the picnic area, maybe for people to use for barbecues.

Further on we stumbled upon an odd metal hatchway in the middle of the grass. The two huge rusting metal doors surrounded by concrete looked a little like pub cellar doors. They were securely padlocked so there was no chance to look inside but I’m fairly sure they led to a bunker of some kind. These woods were part of the World War II, Coastal Defence and there are lots of odd structures hidden within them left over from those dark days. In all probability this was once some kind of air raid shelter, although I could be completely wrong.

Around about then we turned right. Commando was still trying to find the trail he’d run and, after a while he hit the jackpot. The trail opened up onto a field sloping steeply downwards with a trail cutting across it and another to our right. In the distance I could see the spires and towers of Fawley. Right at the bottom was the road we’d stopped at earlier. We’d been in the right place all along and had now walked in a big circle.
“We ran up this hill,” Commando said. Tree swore a lot. I didn’t even realise there was a road behind the trees.”
We stood for a moment or two looking down at the spot we’d been standing on earlier. There was no point walking down the hill just to turn around and come back up again though so, after I’d taken a couple of pictures, we turned and headed back the way we’d come.

Soon we were in another meadow, or perhaps it was one we’d already passed. By now I was throughly lost. This meadow was filled with golden cowslips. Such a beautiful sight I had to stop and stare for a while. I had an idea I’d walked through this meadow myself once, although there were no cowslips then and I was coming from the opposite direction. That day I’d taken the wrong trail right at the start of my walk and had emerged into the meadow searching for a place to get back into the trees.

Commando didn’t need to search. He knew exactly where the trail was and soon we were heading down it. At the bottom though he wasn’t quite so sure, he couldn’t remember whether he’d run left or right. For once I actually knew where we were more or less.
“If you go right you’ll end up at Newtown Road, near the boundary stone,” I said. “If you go left you’ll end up back at the shore on Abbey Hill.”
We turned right but, when we came to the bridge over Tickleford Gully, Commando couldn’t remember crossing it so we turned back. After a bit, when nothing looked familiar to him, he decided he must have crossed the bridge without remembering so we turned back around and headed for the bridge again.

It seemed very odd that I should now be the one who knew the way but I have walked this trail  beside Tickleford Gully several times now. We passed sights familiar to me that Commando hadn’t noticed at all when he was running, things like the split tree trunk filled with shelf fungi and the odd stump where something has eaten a network of holes. This may once have been a mason bee nest.

We crossed the bridge Commando didn’t remember and, after a quick stop to look at a fungus covered tree and the spiky flowers on the willows, plus a fallen tree even I had to stoop to get under, we saw the green fencing and the steps out of the woods.
“I remember walking along beside this fence,” Commando said.
“If you’d said there was a green fence earlier I could have told you you must have crossed the bridge,” I said,

In the interests of following Commando’s running route we left the woods here and walked along the streets of Weston until we came to the tall flats. Commando wasn’t quite finished with Westwood though. We walked past the flats and along a narrow trail towards an interesting building.
“You know what that is don’t you?” Commando asked.
“No,” I said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“Its the Weston Adventure Playground.”
“I have a vague memory of taking Alex’s boys here years ago but I’m sure there wasn’t a swish building like this back then.”

Then we plunged back into the woods. It was a brief interlude. Commando knew exactly where he was going and we quickly came out again right where we’d started off. As usual, Westwood had been a slippery customer. It seems even if you know the place well the labyrinth of trails can be confusing. Something about that makes me feel a whole lot better about all the times I’ve got lost there.

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