Excerpt from In A Hedge Druid's Grove

Nimue Brown

Oct 3

(David)

A five-minute downpour in the valley, vertical, with no wind, dramatic, sounding like a hundred bass drummers immediately over my head on the roof of my study. The trees and shrubs in our back garden seemed to lift their faces to it in gratitude.

I walked through to our front room window and enjoyed the vigorous stream that immediately flowed down the avenue, as it always does in heavy rain like this, spreading from the lower gutter opposite, halfway across the narrow tarmac road surface, and flowing like a young river.

I'm convinced the line of our avenue is close to the original route of a westerly flowing stream down the hillside. I've seen a map of 1880 that shows five springs in the valley, three high on the southern hillside and two high on our northern hillside, one of which is above and to the east our house. I assume it flowed down where our avenue was later built, until, near to where the mill was then, where the primary school stands today, it joined other streams in the bottom of the valley and together they entered the tidal marsh.

In A Hedge Druid's Grove