For Beltane this year I wanted to do two things for certain regardless of what happened on the day: I wanted to be in a forest for as much of it as possible and I wanted to take the day as a holiday. So I booked 1 May 2013 off and so did +David .
Ideally it would be good to have taken both the day before and/or the day after. Actually whilst we're being ideal about it all, why didn't I just take the whole week off? After all, 1 May being a Wednesday.Wednesday's are "hump" days - in that they are the middle of the week. You get past Wednesday and it's ALLLLL down hill 'til the weekend. So when you take Wednesday off, it creates a couple of mini working-weeks. Which means your brain is pretty much confused cum Thursday when it thinks it's sort of Monday. Well I wasn't being very ideal and I just booked off the day. Meant going back to work today was a right pain. And it was.
I digress. Beltane. 2013. Yesterday. Holeeeday!
We had to be in a forest so I took a satellite view of the area surrounding us the night before. This is how I found the vast green expanse that you see below. The joy of living on the edge of London - half the folk that live here honestly have no idea of what is right on their doorstep with regards to wild places and spaces.
And then my eye caught the words "Mad Bess Wood".... I mean.... come on....? It was settled - we HAD to go and pay a visit.
Perhaps not so odd was that whilst we walked there we began by talking about trees and spring. For example: "What birds bring spring?" When the red-red robin comes bop-bop boppin along, is it meant to be spring? I've seen some crazy memes involving the Boy Wonder and folks seeing him in their backyard and deducing that "it must be spring" so I get that robins may be a symbol for this... but I see robins all year round in Watford and as +David pointed out, the robin in the snow is one of the Yuletide seasons most popular non-christian greeting card.
So are there actually specific birds that come and visit your garden during the spring? The only one that we could think of was a Canadian Goose. Although this year they arrived around February. More an Imbolc ice-maiden than than a Beltane babe.
I started to sing regularly my little ditty in the style of Monty Python, the lyrics for this resembling the following: "Now is the month of May....hay....hey! and green buds all are swelling". We explored Park Wood, Copse and of course Mad Bess Wood! It really required the extra emphasis. By the end of the walk we had moved on to a variation of Black Betty, of course sung Mad Bessie and really there is no need to mention anymore singing.
On the way to the Lido we found a burnt out cottage, within it a discarded bonnet, and the smashed remains of a little china doll. It was all rather eerie. By the Lido there was a overflow drain that actually really resembled one of the six direct doorways to hell. All through the woods we heard the strange scritching scratching of Mad Bess' toenails clacking across the forest floor (okay, that last sentence was just me and my big imagination but I I'm sure the local kids have a tale or two to tell about the place along those lines).
We did come across a rare site - a grass snake slithering across the forest floor. In fact it was the strange rustling noise it made over the leaves and twigs that drew my attention to it. Fabulous moment. That, and the marsh tits. There were some GREAT tits! Oh, and it was pretty warm, we didn't see many BLUE tits... yeah, I could go on but I probably shouldn't.
We actually found Mad Bess Cottage too. Turns out the cottage (how quaint to call it that, I mean, it only has 5 bedrooms...!) was built for the local Gamekeeper around the beginning of the 18th century... and said Gamekeeper mayhaps had a wife called Bess who used to prowl the forest at night looking for poachers? Well that's what this site tries to intimate anyway. Then I found a whole blog on the subject. which was clearly created by somebody on August 5 2012.... and they never posted anything again......!
Then I typed Mad Bess Cottage in google and under images came up this lovely image. When I clicked on the link I was taken to a genealogy website... but i couldn't find the image anywhere. Then I noticed the distinctive chimney shape in the background.... could this be Mad Bess? Do you notice how it seems her smile grows the longer you look at her?
I quite like her hand bag. It's very practical if you need to conceal an axe or a small hammer.
