OK, there's a bottle of Tizer from the fridge on the back seat and The Crickets are singing "Please Don't Ever Change" - we're off to the Rowley Hills. Unfortunately it's like a furnace out there, people are driving like angry wasps, and in the distance the slopes are starting to go yellow from too much sun. It's curious thing: as far as I know these hills don't feature in anybody's Book of Really Interesting Places to Visit. Believe me, if this were Cambridge, say, they'd be telling you that this was "the highest place west of the Urals" or some such nonsense. But we're in the Black Country, so nobody bothers to mention the hills at all. Yet the views from here are nothing short of spectacular. In fact I once lived here, at quite an altitude, in the thinner atmosphere of Tower Road, in a house with a garden sloping up to an air-raid shelter and Bury Hill Park, and with a glass verandah for plants. The sound of rain pattering on a glass roof is guaranteed even now to send me off into catatonia, probably because of many hours spent dozing in a pram among my Granddad's geranium pots. At the top of Tower Road, by a stile there was a spring, always a place of mystery, where water bubbled up inexplicably through a patch of pebbles, creating a brook which ran down between the park and the houses and ultimately to the distant Trent. I used to love that brook and played in it for hours. Today I stop the car next to where the spring used to be: there's nothing except grass, although a gap at the end of every garden, now filled with an impenetrable tangle of vegetation, suggests that I might not be losing my reason after all...
- Site of spring at top of Tower Road (below silver car).jpg (49.89 KiB) Viewed 22192 times
Somebody's been busy mowing the grass on the hill, I stumble through swathes of hay up to the top of the ridge. At my feet is a vertiginous drop now covered with dense bramble and pink dog rose where once you would have had absolutely nothing to break your fall into icy water. Down in the valley there is just a glint of sunlight on the pool, now overgrown, where, in a landscape full of smoking chimneystacks, once stood the neat and opulent "Edale", a 1930s house by its own lake next to the Wolverhampton New Road, with trimmed lawns, a gazebo and (unless I'm dreaming) a boathouse. The whole area had been cunningly reclaimed from the Blue Rock Quarry, perhaps, or from a marlhole. Further along the ridge and down towards Bury Hill Park, an implausibly tiny yellow Post-it note stuck on the iron crossbar of an old broken iron fence says "Warning - Risk of Death", written in an ornate hand. "Edale" has been demolished and a drive-thru Kentucky Fried Chicken stands in its place. Its lake has been similarly democratized and is now used by a local angling association whose members, at intervals among the rushes, gaze intently at their floats on this opening day of the coarse fishing season.
- Edale circa 1953 S.jpg (12.52 KiB) Viewed 22167 times
- Site of Edale and lake, house now demolished and slopes overgrown.jpg (59.5 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Former motorcycle scramble area, Wallace Road and site of Pratt’s marlhole viewed from Bury Hill Park.jpg (56.52 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Steep slope to Edale lake from Bury Hill Park.jpg (59.41 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- P1020945[1] Edale Pool today S.jpg (62.96 KiB) Viewed 22098 times
I half march, half slide down the slope to where Bury Hill Park once had its swings, long iron rocking horse and roundabout. There's nothing now to graze my knees or bruise my head - just a patch of ground in a woodland clearing. And yes too, the smell of nettles - you can remember it - that dusty, pungent, green smell from those innocent-looking tassles. It's the essence of wild and abandoned places, with just a hint of menace like the plant itself. These hills were never entirely safe, which is, I suppose, part of their attraction. There was always the chance of some mishap. I remember my Dad carrying me from one end of the Rowley Hills to the other on his shoulders, past the gigantic chasm of the Hailstone Quarry with water lying at its bottom, like no hole I'd ever seen, and its colossal machinery silent on a Sunday afternoon when nobody in those days worked. You would try in vain to get near the Hailstone now, apart from on Google Earth - it's sealed off on every side. And Bury Hill Park? Nothing left of the rockeries and border displays, the path is overgrown and leads nowhere - except possibly to oblivion if you go through the hole in the fence (see above). The park keeper's building has gone. All that is left are the rusting green gates with the words "Bury Hill Park". They once bore a magnificent polychrome metal crest of Oldbury Borough Council, which somebody told me has been saved from the general shipwreck of the place. Higher up the hill is a modern children's playground. That's pretty much it now.
- Former site of swings, Bury Hill Park.jpg (60.98 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Entrance to Bury Hill Park from Wolverhampton Road at Rounds Green.jpg (58.69 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Bury Hill Park Gates.JPG (54.63 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
My brother, who loves hill walking, went to Rowley Regis Grammar School, just before it ceased to be one. If I remember rightly, the school's motto was from Psalm 121,
Levavi oculos, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help". So let's head back up that way. Although much of the area has been built on, the (more or less) south-facing slopes of the Rowley Hills are still pretty much wild and covered in trees, scrub or grass. With a bit of work and imagination they might produce a passable bottle or two of fizz...Birmingham presents an unmistakably North American skyline to the east, with its Post Office Tower, Quinton is straight ahead, Blackheath and Clent over to the west. To the north east, beyond West Bromwich, is Barr Beacon, further still around the compass is Tipton and a glimpse of canal. But let's climb higher up, to Turner's Hill with its pencil-like radio masts replacing the one of my childhood which looked like a fencing mask.
- Slopes of Rowley Hills to Turner’s Hill radio masts.jpg (47.42 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Birmingham skyline from the Rowley Hills.jpg (46.02 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Whiteheath, Blackheath, Frankley Beeches from Rowley Hills.jpg (46.91 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Bottom of Tower Road from Bury Hill Park , looking towards Great Bridge and Walsall.jpg (46.94 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
There's a lane behind the Wheatsheaf pub from which you can see in the other direction across Dudley Golf Course, surely one of the best locations in the country, that is if golfers were ever inclined to take their eyes off the game long enough to notice. I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at, ten to fifteen miles to the west, but I think it's the Clee Hills and then the area around Abberley.
- The Wheatsheaf pub, Turner’s Hill.jpg (44.87 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- P1020991 View west to distant hills from Dudley Golf Club S.jpg (43.08 KiB) Viewed 22098 times
Let's return to the Wolverhampton Road. Rounds Green and Brades Village were very much my grandparents' stamping ground in the 1940s and later. I can see them now at a St James's Church Garden Party, they had friends at the top of Dingle Street and for a while my grandfather worked for Edwin Danks the boilermakers, where my other Granddad had lost an eye in a rivetting accident. The Prince of Wales was their pub, of course, now demolished and being replaced by flats. Go down the hill and there's not a great deal you'll recognize of Brades Road, if you knew it when I knew it. The infants school is still there and Brades Tavern, but there's no trace of the Brades Works where the famous garden tools were once made. But between the modern factories there's a tantalizing hint of the past with the word "Edwin" still visible across the canal on the side of Wellman Robey's factory, into which Edwin Danks was absorbed.
- Dingle Street, Rounds Green leading to Brades Village.jpg (45.71 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Florence Road , Brades Road , Rounds Green Primary School.jpg (47.88 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Brades Tavern, Brades Village.jpg (48.34 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- Former Edwin Danks boilermakers, from Brades Road.jpg (44.68 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
Continue along to Brades Bridge and you're in for a pleasant surprise. On this glorious day in high summer the post-industrial canal, once crammed with narrowboats, toxic with heavy metals and covered in a film of oil, is tranquil and lined on both sides with beds of yellow water lilies. There are even fishermen here. I ask whether there is anything alive in what was once such a dirty stretch of water that you were reputedly in danger if you fell in and swallowed any. Indeed there is, comes the reply: huge carp, tench, pike, but also that omnivorous interloper, the European zander, which has spread inexorably across the country from the Great Ouse where it was first introduced in 1963, hoovering up everything in its path... You may have come across it as
sandre, since it's considered very good eating in France. A nice Brades Village
filet de sandre en blanquette, anybody, washed down by a
Côtes de Rowley?
- Fishermen clearing canal weed, Brades Village.jpg (57.13 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
- The former Edwin Danks factory and canal, Brades Village.jpg (53.33 KiB) Viewed 22179 times
© Dennis Wood 2010