#83: The quiet carriage

You might have seen the TV advert for train travel. A man looks dreamily at the magnificent landscape out of the train window, enjoying the mildly trance-like state and space for creativity that a good journey can give.

Such an experience is now rare on trains, at least for me. Endless announcements about the next station, final destination, instructions about ‘personal belongings’ (what other kind are there?) and injunctions to ‘see it say it sorted’. And then there are people sharing their music, videos or conversations (both sides) on speakerphone.

Quiet carriages were meant to offer passengers some respite from this racket. Unfortunately they do not, because people are unwilling to be quiet or perhaps do not realise they are in a quiet carriage. On a recent trip from London to Chelmsford I asked a woman with a mobile and two noisy children to respect the quiet carriage (actually about one quarter of a carriage, containing four tables). The conversation became less than constructive, ending with her moving to another carriage and both of us apologising to each other when we had cooled down about half an hour later. This was unpleasant.

Why are train carriages not quiet? How can they be?

What is behind this? Do people not believe that silence is valuable? Is using your mobile an inalienable right? Whatever, I have a few suggestions for improving quiet carriages:

1. Improve signage. At the moment there is usually one sign on the outside of the carriage doors and tiny stickers on windows.

2. Charge a supplement for seats in quiet carriages. People would then be less likely to accidentally sit in a quiet carriage, and it would raise general awareness of them. Enforce this like the first-class premium.

3. Mute public announcements in quiet carriages.

I’m not alone in finding such noise disturbing. Wetherspoons has recently banned phones on speakerphones from its pubs, saying:  ‘We're yet to hear of anyone who relishes having a pint against the backdrop of a speakerphone call or someone loudly playing a video, so we expect this move will be greatly welcomed’. I suggest train companies follow suit and more robustly help to preserve this valuable thing, quietness.

#82: Merlin

The Merlin app

Poets often write about birdsong – Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush and Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale spring to mind. Both these poets knew how to identify the birds they heard. Hardy also sees his:

    An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

    Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

The nightingale is never seen in Keats’s poem, and indeed an obliteration of the senses is strangely part of what the poet desires to attain through the‘viewless wings of poetry’. He imagines the bird singing after his death:

    Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –

To thy high requiem become a sod.

These are solemn interpretations to put on creatures marking their territory or trying to attract a mate. Birds also make shorter ‘calls’ to sound an alarm, identify other birds, connect with the flock or, in fledglings, beg for food.

The Merlin app

I’ve often wished I could identify birds through their song – I could tell chaffinches, and more characteristic callers like wood pigeons, the hoopoe or owl, but not much more. Now the Merlin app, devised by Cornell University, has changed this. Holding up your phone for a few seconds brings a picture of each bird singing. The bird’s name is highlighted as they sing to help you link the song and the bird (if there is more than one listed). I caught a lovely glimpse of a golden oriole flying from tree to tree in Spain after being alerted to its call, learnt the background tinfoil crinkle-song of serins and of course the everyday chatter of sparrows. The app also allows you to compare birdsong with a recorded sample to check its suggestions.

The more virtual, the more real?

But does this mean that, using the app, your ability to identify birds independently diminishes? I’ve found exactly the opposite – once given guidance, you listen hard and learn to identify them yourself.

This improvement in my ability is an example of one of sociologist Steve Woolgar’s ‘five rules of virtuality’ – ‘the more virtual, the more real ‘. In other words, virtual engagement increases actual engagement (although Woolgar was writing before AI). The example Woolgar gave was of televised football leading to more, not fewer, people attending football matches. Identifying the birds via the app means identifying them more in real life. If you haven’t already, try it.

#81: Raising Hare

 

Raising Hare is Chloe Dalton’s account of finding a leveret on a path near her house in the country, taking it home (after initially leaving it alone for four hours to let it move away or be reclaimed by its mother) and rearing it.

This is, initially, against advice. A conservationist tells her he has never heard of anyone successfully raising a leveret. A friend advises her to give it to someone who knows about animals. But, says Dalton, ‘… I felt an inner stubbornness stirring. I will work it out.’

What do hares eat?

Dalton knows little about raising hares and soon finds out most advice is about cooking and eating them, not feeding them. She eventually finds out what to feed the leveret in Cowper’s poem ‘Epitaph on a Hare’, written after the death of one of his three pet hares:

His diet was of wheaten bread,
And milk, and oats, and straw,
Thistles, or lettuces instead,
With sand to scour his maw.

On twigs of hawthorn he regaled,

On pippins’ russet peel;

And, when his juicy salads failed,

Sliced carrot pleased him well.

This hare refuses carrot and lettuce, but oats prove a long-term favourite, along with clover and grass from the garden:

It adored clover and would bury itself in the deepest patches, until only the tips of its ears could be seen, foraging freely for the plants that it had spurned when I cut them, preferring to crop them fresh from the ground.… Grass it would eat from the tip of the blade down to the stem, flowers the reverse. It would snap dandelions off at the root and gradually draw the stem into its mouth until the vivid yellow petals hovered at its muzzle, whereupon it would neatly sever the flower head and let it fall by its paws.

Such close observation and description of the hare’s appearance and habits was for me the main strength of the book. Here, for example, is the arrival of the hare’s winter pelt:

At year’s end, its coat was russet-coloured, almost flame-like in the sunset light. Its face bore prominent white markings: a beautiful pale circle around each eye, with an additional patch of white above and below it, presumably intended to break up the dark shape of the face when seen against the snow. Just as when it was small, its rear legs and lower haunches were once again a pale milky-coffee hue. At dusk, these streaks and patches of white would remain visible while the rest of its body disappeared in the fading light.

Dalton’s familiarity with the hare is shown by linking its winter coat to the pelt of its youth, and her sensitivity to its surroundings and habits by describing how the pelt appears in the light and against the snow.

Citizen research?

I can’t help feeling such description may be of use to scientists, and indeed Dalton once or twice finds the hare’s behaviour at odds with what she’s read in scientific papers; for example Dalton reads that hares are absentee parents, but when leverets arrive (showing the hare to be female), she is an attentive mother:

The hare remained close by throughout the day, ensuring that the leverets stayed undercover while keeping an eye out for predators. On several occasions I watched her lunge fearlessly at crows that came too close, wielding her front legs like a battering ram and successfully chasing them off her territory, despite their larger size and formidable beaks.

She also finds she feeds her young more often than asserted in various studies.

Other things one learns in the book is how hares run and leap; that they build ‘forms’, shallow grass-filled grooves in the earth, rather than burrowing underground like rabbits; and they strongly dislike changes in their environment, as when Dalton disposes of an old sofa, then has to reinstate it after the hare is unsettled.

The sofa question leads gently onto Dalton asking herself whether she should enclose the garden, which would deprive other gambolling hares of their playground, then to a wider comment on all the human barriers to animal roaming, and information that many hares may cover 9-12 miles of ground per night to feed. Gentle seguing from personal observation, to questioning, to factual information is another strength of the writing.

Helping hares

There is also a plea for a closed season on hunting hares (amazingly, there is none at the moment), and information that they are often killed by farm machinery, since leverets defend themselves by hunkering down and staying still rather than running to escape, which makes them particularly vulnerable. A chapter called ‘Blood in the Harvest’ recommends using drones to detect the animals so often harmed through agriculture:

If it is possible to create robots and drones to reap our fields for us, could we not use technology to detect the presence of leverets, and fauns, and nesting birds, and could reasonable efforts not be made to relocate them, rather than simply leaving them to be crushed beneath our machines?

Raising Hare is (thankfully) mostly free from any ‘journey’ of personal development on the part of the author, although she does describe how being with the hare made her question her often frenetic life as a foreign policy specialist. The book’s core is her experience and observation of the hare, and any wider exploration is based on and grows out of this close observation and description. The hare’s pace of behaviour permeates the writing; the book takes its time on description, is not overly concerned to form a narrative and trusts the reader to try to enter into the hare’s texture of life.

Raising Hare is published by Canongate.

#80: Wilding at Knepp

Wilding is Isabella Tree’s account of how she and her husband Charlie Burrell gave their 3,500-acre arable and dairy farm back to nature. They started in 2001, initially since they could not make traditional farming pay, but discovered there was government funding for conservation. The subsequent transformation of the land has made Knepp one of the most important spaces for wildlife in Britain.

The book mixes delightful observation of the ever-changing activity of animals, plants, soil and insects, with information about the various species, as well as detailing the couple’s efforts wrestling with various bureaucracies to convince government of the importance of the project.

Purple emperors

Knepp is the site of the largest breeding population of purple emperor butterflies, for example, which, explains Tree, was always thought to prefer woods, because woodland was the only habitat humans had left to it. On the evidence of its behaviour at Knepp, it prefers the sallow, a type of willow – itself given space at Knepp by patches of earth thrown up by the rootling of pigs which were introduced in lieu of the wild boar which would have been present in the true wild. The video below shows a purple emperor emerging.

The ‘magic of rewilding’, she says, shows us how little we sometimes know about species:

… We forget that our landscape is so changed, so desperately impoverished, we may be recording a species not in its preferred habitat at all, but at the very limit of its range. Naturalists believe the purple emperor was a woodland butterfly only because – with no significant areas of sallow left – that is where it has clung on.… And we can dwell on the delightful thought that, in times past, purple emperors would have been a feature of the English summer, present in huge numbers in every sallow-strewn county.

If they had set out to create a perfect habitat for purple emperors, says Tree, they would never have achieved the same numbers as flit among the trees now.

The episode shows the interconnectedness of plant and animal species – it is plainly difficult for Tree to describe one species without showing how others interact with it, as the pigs do here in preparing the ground for sallow, which nurtures the purple emperors.

‘Lettuce from hell’

The couple had to learn to leave nature to its own devices – to work with it, not against it. One of the most striking episodes for me was a spectacular outbreak of creeping thistle (also known as ‘cursed’ or ‘lettuce from hell’ thistle) in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Tree describes how the dusky pink flowered plant heads covered acres of the park. She says:

It was the biggest challenge yet to our rewilding ethos. We looked out on the day of the Triffids and knew what our neighbours would be saying and the threat the thistles could pose to our Countryside Stewardship Scheme funding with their unashamed invasion of the Repton Park. Less than a decade earlier, under the old regime, we would have been out with the toppers and weedkiller for all we were worth. It took all the courage we could muster to hold our nerve and do nothing.

But in May 2009 there was a ‘bonanza’ of painted lady butterflies migrating from Africa. They descended on the thistles:

That summer, spiky black caterpillars swarmed over the thistles, spinning silken webs like tents, which soon filled with frass and inedible leaf spines. The whole area took on the appearance of a chaotic army encampment. By autumn, after the caterpillars had wolfed down the leaves, pupated and flown, our creeping thistle fields were in tatters, their stalks draped in dirty silk, the pink flower-heads nodding on skeleton stems – easy pickings for the ponies.

The thistles did not return, perhaps because the caterpillars’ devastation had admitted a virus or other pest. ‘Now,’ says Tree ‘when people stand shaking their heads in our fields of ragwort or – latterly – acres of the pioneer fleabane, we smile benignly and shrug off their concerns. Not even plagues of injurious weeds last for ever.’

Tree and Burrell also found that the thistles’ prickly cover had protected other butterflies, moths, lizards and insects: ‘gravid females with dark stripes scuttled between the thistle stems along tracks made by field mice, hunting for insects in preparation for the birth of their wriggling young.’ Anthills appeared, protected from animals’ hooves by the thistles. ‘Charlie watched for hours as, mandible by mandible, the worker ants cut down thistle and grass stalks to add structure to the new mounds. By the time the thistles died back in autumn the anthills had gained height and stabilised, capped by a coating of living moss and grass like the rind of a cheese.’

So they were able to observe nature’s natural boom and bust, ‘thanks to sitting on our hands and keeping the diphosphate under lock and key’.

Horses at twilight on the estate

Wrestling with bureaucracies

She comments that management of nature to keep it static in order to benefit a particular species may miss the larger picture, only available when nature is allowed to take its dynamic course. Indeed, this was a long-term frustration for the couple in trying to get funding. English Nature, she says, wanted ‘computer modelling, targets, safeguards, setting parameters for the number of animals and vegetation cover, and lots and lots of further research’. But targets and parameters made no sense: ‘the only way to test the impact of freeroaming grazing animals in a landscape was to put them into action…The idea of constructing a computer model to identify the outcomes of self-willed land seemed like trying to predict the lifetime achievements of an unborn child.’

Throughout the book a bewildering plethora of organisations, departments and schemes pops up – Natural England, English Nature, the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, the Environment Agency, Rewilding Britain. It is clear that rewilding needs subsidies. But then farming itself is heavily subsidised, as are other estate parks. One wonders about the rewilding potential of other grand estates. Knole Park in Kent, for example, is maintained carefully for its deer populations. What would it look like under a scheme like this?

Help from others

It is clear from the book how much the couple depended on others’ expertise and influence to advise on developments and assess and argue for Knepp’s importance in Britain, Europe and worldwide. Naturalists and academics gave the project credibility and boosted morale. Tree singles out naturalist Ted Green, who visited them early on to advise on tree care and pointed out how a tree’s life-support system includes a vast underground network of fungal filaments which may even span entire continents. Another early inspiration was Frans Vera, who had started a pioneering rewilding project in the Netherlands which had attracted, among other creatures, white tailed eagles.

Beavers

One of the most moving passages is when Tree describes seeing beavers released into the wild in Scotland:

Two of the beavers slid down river and disappeared within seconds but the largest, a pregnant female, after a lap of honour, emerged onto the sand-spit in front of us to preen. The size of a portly spaniel, she sat up, whiskers diagnosing the air and, balanced by the flat scaly tail on the ground behind her, began to comb through her long, slick fur with a back claw. Perhaps the dream of having beavers at Knepp was not so far away.… Our concrete dams and Lego block slipways would be things of the past, the floodplains punctuated with woody debris blockages not of our own making, our clumsy, artificial scrapes a staircase of pools, Spring Wood a resurgence of coppice. And with this watery refinement a whole habitat would spring to life, an aqueous kingdom such as Knepp has not seen since the early Middle Ages, a place of vegetative complexity where even water voles would have a sporting chance to outwit the mink. 

Knepp does indeed now have beavers, introduced in 2020, two years after the book was published. Not only that, but stork chicks hatched that year for the first time, and 45 hatched in 2025. Some of these will be transferred to an open aviary in Dagenham this year.

Words such as ‘ecosystem’, ‘sustainable’, ‘diversity’ are so common these days as to be unremarkable, but Wilding shows how delightful, unpredictable and essential they are in practice. Rewilding is spreading, partly thanks to Knepp and Tree’s optimistic, joyful, skilful writing.

Knepp offers safaris, tours and workshops as well as accommodation and events. There are also public footpaths through the estate.

The kitchen garden

#79: John le Carré: Tradecraft

 

John le Carré

Le Carré, who died in 2020, left 1,237 boxes of documents to the Bodleian, and this exhibition delves into them to try to show his writing and thinking processes. It touches on many of his 26 novels, from the early ones such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy establishing George Smiley, MI5’s insider-outsider mole hunter, to the later post-Cold War work like The Little Drummer Girl, set in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and The Mission Song, about a Western-backed coup in the Congo.

Beyond the Cold War

We can clearly see how le Carré fearlessly tackled big issues, placing his characters in war zones, hospitals and in the middle of corrupt and criminal processes worldwide, whether as protesters, participants or somewhere in between. He didn’t hesitate to move beyond his Cold War novels, which made his name, to other conflicts. On display is a pithy typewritten summing up of geopolitics, describing how ‘Third World potentates’ buy guns instead of butter, adding to the ‘near-total poverty of their countries’ and how ‘We embargoed South Africa for decades, put a real tight ring around her. What was the result? The Israeli arms dealers had a field day, the South Africans built up their own industry, and now they are out there in the marketplace, the absolute leaders in crowd suppression.’

Who helped him?

Le Carré used a network of ‘friends and lovers, journalists, academics, authors, politicians and others’ to help with his research (not to mention his wife Jane, who typed everything out). There is a handwritten list of contacts for The Little Drummer Girl, given him by an Israeli journalist, which includes the Israeli ambassador in London and Knesset members who were the Minister of Police and and a former chief of Mossad (the latter has ‘articulate’ next to his name on the list).

Also on display is a letter to a friend, Ruth Halter, asking for help in finding out if there are controls on First World countries’ manufacturing of drugs for the Third World, and particularly: ‘… If there are any instances where there is a suspicion of dumping unserviceable pharmaceuticals on Africa, or using Africans as human guinea pigs to test drugs out for the Western market’. This query became The Constant Gardener. One may remember Tessa Quayle in the book or film resolutely refusing to go to a Western hospital, preferring the basic hospitals which most of the native population used in a country where indeed ‘guinea pigs’ are found and used to test an anti-tuberculosis drug.

How did he decide research questions?

A draft for The Mission Song shows clearly how le Carré identified research questions. The main part shows the ‘premise’, introducing Salvo, son of a Congolese woman and a Northern Ireland Catholic missionary. Questions in the right margin, to be researched, ask: ‘Is this broadly feasible? What was happening in the Congo around the boy as he grew up? Did the missionaries stay under Mobutu? Did the boy witness atrocities? ‘ One can see how these questions come to form the story itself.

The premise for The Mission Song on the left, research questions on the right

Getting to know his characters

Le Carré wanted to get to know his characters in depth. A document here shows him writing about the Cold War as Jim Prideaux, the brave agent in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: ‘the divisions of our time produce divided men and women on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain,’ says le Carré in Jim’s voice. ‘So many divisions, in fact, that one can hardly speak of sides. We have to ask ourselves what the real war is… A war between the divided ones and the absolute ones…’.

But by the time we get to the novel such explicit avowals disappear – Jim shows his loyalty in action, not words, agreeing to undertake a mission which he suspects is ‘poppycock’, for reasons which are unclear, perhaps even to himself. ‘What the hell does my motive matter in a damn mess like this?’ he tells Smiley. This shows le Carré’s judgement that questions like motivation cannot be easily summarised. It also shows the submerged work le Carré did on his characters which never makes it explicitly into the novels but which, on this evidence, was needed for him to understand and present them as individuals. Is this depth of research partly why Tinker Tailor is such an intelligent book?

Le Carré's best novel, IMO

Matters of geography

And research was not only into psychology – here are painstaking evocations of geographical locations, perhaps more important in the pre-cyber days of dead letterboxes and paper. There is a partly fictional map of a few blocks next to the Berlin Wall, with a Turkish café which readers of Smiley’s People will recognise as where Smiley and Toby wait, over too much coffee, to see if arch-enemy Karla will appear over Checkpoint Charlie to surrender himself. Here too is a snap of the building at Cambridge Circus where in Tinker Tailor policeman Mendel waits at night for the mole to emerge from the building opposite, standing in the darkness ‘the way coppers stand the world over, weight on both feet equally, legs straight, leaning slightly backward over the line of balance’.

Partly fictional map of an area near the Berlin Wall

Could have been more literary

Generally I would have liked more of a literary element in the exhibition – for a writer who so often describes what happens when ideology and humans meet, there could have been more on literary craft, plot, characterisation. More on humans, less on ideology and politics, in other words. (The exhibition is called ‘Tradecraft’, after all). However, one display does focus more on the craft of writing and le Carré’s feelings about it. Speaking of Smiley’s People, he says: ‘it made me very sad to write it somehow – the spiritual death of a marooned Brit administrator, Smiley as a doomed anachronism, me as author – it all seemed so hopeless. Then somehow it became funny and somehow Toby helped.’ He is referring here to one of the MI5 bosses, the slightly dandified Toby Esterhase, who after being implicated in the admission of the mole to The Circus, moves on to run a gallery selling fake artefacts, but returns two novels later to play his part in Karla’s downfall.

The alchemy of the writing process

But perhaps it is less easy to trace the alchemy of the writing process, the repeated ‘somehow’ in le Carré’s comment above, than identify political stances. One example of this alchemy, for me, is in the description of Jim Prideaux in Tinker Tailor, after an informal interview with Smiley, walking back through a country church graveyard to the school where he teaches:

    The last Smiley saw of him was that lop-sided shadow striding towards the Norman porch as his heels cracked like gunshot between the tombs.

 The ‘Norman’ church hints at the result of earlier, long-ago battles, the incessant military struggles which go way back before the Cold War. Perhaps ‘gunshot’, as well as describing Jim’s curtness, hints at the threat of aggression, necessary abroad in order to protect peaceful country schools and churches at home.

Or back with Mendel at Cambridge Circus, watching for the mole:

    From his window he covered most of the approaches: eight or nine unequal roads and alleys which for no good reason had chosen Cambridge Circus as their meeting point. Between them, the buildings were gimcrack, cheaply fitted out with bits of empire: a Roman bank, a theatre like a vast desecrated mosque.

Here again are the faint influences from past imperial power struggles, present now only in decorative details, part of the same process of political rise and fall that has made Smiley ‘a doomed anachronism’.

My other criticism of the exhibition is my recurrent gripe about literature exhibitions – where are the books (apart from in the gift shop)? Let visitors pick them up and leaf through them, or project a quote on the ceiling, or put an extract on a text panel – let’s read the final magical product, which all the research was in aid of.

John le Carré: Tradecraft is open until 6 April 2025.

#78: Park Run

Sizewell Park Run. Sizewell A and B nuclear power stations in the background

Park Run is great. A 5km circuit in the company of a few hundred others with your time recorded and emailed to you soon afterwards. Marshals cheer you around the course, dogs are welcome and mums and dads run with buggies. People wear ‘milestone’ T-shirts – 100 runs, 250, even 500. There's also an event for children. Some GPs even prescribe Park Run.

I’ve notched up 20 Park Runs so far, the first in the grounds of Bristol’s Ashton Court last June, the latest last month at Alexandra Palace in North London. Along the way I’ve run in other places like Oswestry, Cheam and Sheffield. As well as a burst of positivity and feeling of achievement to start the weekend, you learn something about the local area. For example, that Birkenhead Park in Liverpool influenced the design of New York’s Central Park. Or that Sizewell C power station, currently being built, is enormous already, maybe over twice the size of Sizewell B. Anyway, it’s a brilliant way to start the weekend.

Banbury Park Run's 10th anniversary celebrations

Is Park Run good for you?

Research with over 76,000 Park Runners just published by Sheffield Hallam University shows I am not alone. About 90% of participants thought it had improved their fitness and sense of achievement. On almost every measure their experience was more positive than they had expected when they signed up. Volunteers who help organise said it made them feel more part of the community, and just over 72% of volunteers said they were happier because of taking part. However, the research authors admit that since only Park Runners answered the survey, it could be biased towards the positive, and it didn't include people who dropped out or never ran after registration.

Reading the journal article reporting the research I learnt a new word – eudemonic, conducive to happiness. There is overwhelming evidence that physical activity improves physical and mental health and ‘substantial evidence’ that vigorous activity (like Park Run, for most people) is even better than moderate activity. Looking forward to the next one.

Find your local Park Run here.

Nonsuch Park, Epsom

#77: Withymead Nature Reserve

The Thames Path accompanies the great river from its source in Gloucestershire (where ‘an infant Thames runs shyly through its meadows’ says my guidebook), to the Thames Barrier 184 miles later. For the past two summers I’ve been walking it. One of the loveliest stretches so far has been between Goring, (11 miles west of Reading), to Cholsey four miles upriver. I was captivated by the trees leaning over to the riverside and delighted to see a kingfisher flash by.

The Thames path between Goring and Cholsey

It turns out the opposite bank holds a secret – Withymead Nature Reserve (not marked on my OS map). A backwater there provides a secure home for those kingfishers, and the 13-acre reserve hosts other flora and fauna such as foxes, bats, deer, grass snakes and slow worms. It is known for its Loddon Lilies, like snowdrops, in spring.

Reserve warden Pete lives as a volunteer on the reserve half of each week, cutting rushes, repairing the boardwalks and generally keeping it in order. He tells me he has seen a family of four otters playing ‘which is quite special’ and that the 7 mile strip of land between Wallingford and Goring makes up 14% of Oxfordshire’s fenland.

As so often happens with nature reserves, it was a farsighted public spirited individual who established it – in this case Anne Carpmael, who lived in the area for 60 years and bequeathed it to the public as a place for people, especially the young, to enjoy nature. It opened in 2004.

Slip rails from when it was a boatyard

Boattbuilding hut, now a bats' home

Before that it had been a boatyard and one can still see the winch and slip rails, as well as the boatbuilding hut, now a home for bats. It is well worth a visit, with winding paths and carefully constructed nooks for opening a thermos and maybe catching a glimpse of a whiskered head in the water or an iridescent fluttering wing.

Withymead Nature Reserve is open on Sundays from April to August, and for pre-booked visits on Fridays throughout the year, depending on availability.