Northern Rising Sun

 

It's the first snow day of the season, and I'm setting out to properly explore the new-ish northern extension to the Rising Sun Country Park here in North Tyneside. I say first - there’s every chance this will be our only big snow event of the year. A snowless winter seems ever more likely to happen, and soon. But here, today, is a chance to take - thick snow, a deep and penetrating cold, and a dawn sky promising to change from dirty yellow to brilliant blue.

The walk to the Rising Sun from Wallsend can be almost as green (or as white) as you like, with several northerly routes through parks and quiet roads. The most direct is along the waggonway, which once shifted coal south from the Rising Sun colliery down towards the Tyne, on iron rails in waggons pulled by ponies. This long, wide track through Wallsend dene is rail-less now and flanked by thick undergrowth, but in the early twentieth century it must have been surrounded by mostly open country and farmland. The way is so straight and so long that a figure spotted in the distance (walking towards you, or the other way?) produces one of those interminable waits for a polite greeting, during which one's train of thought is completely disrailed.  I look for the redcurrant bushes I remember from the summer, which are oddly prolific here, but I can't find them – my eye is repeatedly drawn instead to the startlingly red hips and haws clustered profusely all around, frosted and laden with snow. I feel strangely self-conscious stopping to take a photo, waiting for the chap with the black dog darting in and out of the snow-filled ditch to pass. But he's cheerful, and so is his good morning.

This direct way to the old colliery is interrupted, now, by a dual carriageway, and once you’ve braved the underpass you’re in different territory for a while. The course of the waggonway is apparent as a narrow path between new estates, but the underpass leads instead to the course of a burn in an unloved depression of scrub, bramble and litter. This opens eventually to a muddy, treeless expanse of perennial rye grass, edged by modern flats, under which the burn has been diverted. The country park comes as an odd and sudden adjunct to this No-Ball-Games waste of space. The burn, although free and open here, is completely shaded by willow scrub and alder carr, and expands to a luxurious width, creating a dark, wooded wetland that the muddy grass field behind is clearly desperate to revert to. From here - once you're up out of the wet - it's not a long walk along paths bordered by glorious thick hedgerows to the eastern end of the northern extension.

This former farmland - still known as Scaffold Hill Mill Farm - has been producing corn for milling since 1089, and has been owned and let by the Duke of Northumberland and his successors since 1822. This, the part of the old farm that now forms part of the country park, is owned and managed by the Duke's Northumberland Estates and is - depending on your point of view - a generous addition of 35 hectares of valuable wildlife refuge to an already considerable country park; or a sop to justify the building of 450 homes on the rest of the former farm. Another condition (or another generosity) of the housebuilding was the provision of 100 allotments for the new estate - though these don't seem to have arrived yet (or I am looking in the wrong place). Elsewhere, in a West London outpost of their vast estate, Northumberland Estates have been engaged in a protracted fight to raze a well-loved allotment site to make way for new flats, in the face of fierce and emotional opposition. But, as their historical timeline makes clear, the company has been in the business of monetising land for development since the 1980s. Land ownership is a profit mechanism, whether you are building allotments or building over them.

Plenty of other stakeholders and vested interests will have had their say on the development. Strong local resistance to the housebuilding kept the plans in limbo for several years. Newcastle International Airport - six and a half miles away as the crow files - were consulted and provided a Bird Strike Risk Assessment. They requested that the drainage ponds "are designed in such a way so as to not become an attractant to hazardous bird species such as feral geese" and required "written assurances" that the planting scheme would "not include more than 10% berry-bearing, bird attracting species". All of which seems rather odd in the context of the lakes, ponds and definitely very berry-bearing hedgerows immediately next door in the old country park. The aforementioned drainage ponds are part of a series of "balancing" ponds intended to deal with water run-off from the new housing estate. The landscaping therefore fulfils multiple functions: bioremediation for pollution, water catchment for high rainfall, habitat for wildlife and green space for humans. Whatever opinions you might have about the profit impulse underpinning it all, this does at least demonstrate that careful, thoughtful design - and robust regulation - can mitigate against the worst aspects of that impulse.

The lake in the old part of the park - surely an attractant for all kinds of "feral" birds?

I scrape away the snow that covers an information board - three clean and satisfying sweeps. It tells me that in front of me is the hay meadow, which must now be in its third or fourth year. It looks gloriously scrappy and tussocky under the snow, but is not giving much away yet. I can't wait to come back in the summer and see the promised meadowsweet and ragged robin in flower - both species suggesting that the meadow is on the wet side. It's an odd reversion though. Until recently this was a modern, productive arable field - in fact part of a much bigger, hedgerow-less expanse - arguably the ultimate evolution of the long arable tradition in lowland areas like this. I doubt this had ever been a hay meadow, or at least not for many centuries. Still, to see a meadow like this, managed properly, is a pleasing contrast to some local urban parks, in which open areas have been inexplicably sown as hay meadows - replete with yellow rattle, the "meadow-maker" - only to be managed as amenity grassland, cut at seemingly random times of the year, and the cuttings "let fly". They will revert to weedy grass swards in no time.

By Duke's pond is a small stand of trees that, like the pond, has already been here for a few years. I follow a well-trodden, wayward path to a young scots pine, which has been hung with memorial objects, photos and decorations. It's a mirror of another memorial tree in the older part of the park, which is fully laden with hanging beads, toys, lanterns and messages, and is surrounded by piles of stones augmented by smurfs and minions. To me this feels like another layer of human pressure on the landscape: expectations of help for grief and pain, an outlet for the unresolvable difficulties of life. Easy to say, I suppose, for someone who is not grieving - and those expectations are surely as old as the land itself. But perhaps, for a lot of that history, a balance existed which does not exist now - despite the fenced off wildlife reserves and mitigation measures on display. Northumberland Estates now has its eye on Killingworth Moor, in a further annexation of the remaining open space along the A19 corridor - only this time, there doesn't seem to be any talk of nature reserves or allotments.

The dog walkers and young families seem happy enough with what's been provided here, as they emerge in long padded coats to brave the cold.  Someone is trying and failing to get their border collie to pose handsomely for a snowy snap. I think again of the thousand years of farming history - but I suppose there never were sheep here, on this old mill farm. In a few years the young trees and new hedgerows will define and accentuate the contours of all this careful landscaping, and it will be a handsome place indeed. As I stand by the remediation pond, a bird erupts from the hay meadow, zig-zags crazily through the sky, and disappears somewhere into the reedbed. Its call is as manic as its flight - a repeated, high, slightly gurgled pwee-pwee. The information board makes reference to grey plovers, odd for an inland area like this - I think it's probably a golden plover, wintering away from the coast. It has a winter home here - maybe it didn't, until now? - and thinks nothing of the history, and the weight, of human pressure on this old farm.