February is not the sunniest or warmest of months but a winter's day walk can reveal its own kind of misty magic. David North of Norfolk Wildlife Trust tells us more.
This morning when I set out for Holt Country Park, I was sure the early mist would clear. I was wrong. My aim was to walk through the Country Park to the adjacent Holt Lowes nature reserve. On arrival if anything the mist was thicker. The tops of the trees were hidden, the air damp and still.
Mist transforms a landscape. The sparkle of frost and snow can add a touch of wonder and magic to the land but mist, more than anything else in nature, adds mystery. Walking from the car park, busy with families, I was soon alone within my own misty circle. Mist is a shape-shifter with the power to render the solid and fixed into fluidity and movement. Today trees could appear on the edge of my vision and then disappear, the tops of distant trees hanging in the air their trunks invisible. A moon-like sun, a perfect circle of dim light hanging suspended between filigree branches of birch and pine appeared and then vanished into mist as I walked between tall trunks of conifers standing straight either side of the path.
The land which forms Holt Country Park has a fascinating history. Its sands and gravels originate from some 300,000 years ago when ice sheets and glaciers shaped north Norfolk's landscape.
Today in the mist it was easy to imagine the heathland stretching as far as the eye can see. It once extended northwards between here and the coast and southwards towards Norwich. In the early 1700s, this open countryside became the location for a racecourse until the enclosure of commons in the early 19th century. By the mid-1850s, the land now forming Holt Country Park was part of Holt Lodge Estate. Its owners, the Oddy family, had experimented with plantations and landscaping, perhaps introducing the rhododendrons which still thrive here. The current woodland, mainly Scots and Corsican pine, originate from plantings in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1979 North Norfolk District Council bought the area known as Holt Lodge Woodlands and in the following year designated it as a Country Park.
My misty walk through Holt Country Park took me down past a pond. Today it's iced over and apparently lifeless, but the information panel here tells me of crucian carp that live here and three species of newt found in spring, along with many species of dragonflies. A photo shows a crossbill drinking at the pond, one of the rarer birds regularly seen in the Country Park.
Passing through a kissing gate on the edge of the Country Park, I head down through gorse and bracken, past open areas of now brown heathers onto Holt Lowes. Mist not only coats all it touches with a fine layer of dew, it also seems to create a special kind of quiet, a silence that feels so physical you feel as if you have to push your way through it. Today the mist has coated every spider's web in jewels of dew and even the yellow gorse flowers are encrusted with tiny droplets.
The winter landscape is a tapestry of muted colours making the gold of the gorse gleam even brighter. Nearing the bottom of a shallow valley my path takes me along the edge of a small area of 'carr' woodland. At the base of the alder trees rich layers of moss form a pattern of varied greens.
A misty world focuses attention on the near at hand and I spend some time photographing the textures of fern, moss and bark before moving on. The bottom of this valley is a mire. A mire is no place to walk (think 'Grimpen Mire' in the Hound of the Baskervilles) but where water oozes, sphagnum mosses thrive, and people have the sense not to wander, then rare wildlife prospers. Back in the early 1900s one of the founding fathers of modern conservation, Charles Rothschild, drew up a list of the 284 most precious sites in Britain for wildlife and on that list was Holt Lowes. Many have sadly been lost, but today Holt Lowes, through the vision of its Trustees, aided today by the support of Norfolk Wildlife Trust, is well protected and managed.
Heathlands have an annoying habit of turning into woodlands. In the past this was prevented through common grazing, and the collecting of heather, bracken and gorse as fuel. Holt Lowes was (and is) common land established as a 'Poors Allotment' in 1807 to provide the parish poor with fuel and pasture. These practices are long gone but it still requires management to prevent the mire and open heathland becoming covered in scrub woodland. The signs of one of the key tools in today's conservation management are literally under my feet – horse dung. And walking back towards the Country Park I am pleased to round a corner and find some of Norfolk Wildlife Trust's Dartmoor ponies working hard at keeping the gorse under control. One mist-grey pony is eating birch and a bracken-brown pony is busy munching its way through the needle-sharp spikes of green gorse.
These are very special places and this walk has reminded me that winter walks in the mist can be exciting, especially when you meet two such attractive 'conservation workers'.
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