Backley Bottom

Today was one of those surprising walks, filled with the unexpected, unexpected because we were in an area visited regularly, but still managing to tread ground I've never trodden before, seeing aspects of the familiar anew and experiencing woodland I'd only known from a far. At Bratley Arch where the Black Water, here known as Bratley Water, leaves the uplands of its birth for the dense and diverse woodlands of the Central forest; up hill through Bratley enclosure (1829), it's maturing Oaks standing proud.  I'm beginning to be able to gauge the age of the enclosures and the trees much better now.  On a ridge overlooking Backley Bottom I think I may have found a World War 2 site; a group of trench features amongst the ferns, several oval depressions banked on one side and a standard slit trench; this site requires further investigation.   Now on Bratley plain, I visit an mound rising from the regular flat heathland, it's a Bronze Age burial mound, its heart robbed out by the antiquity hunters of the 18th and 19th centuries leaving a roughly cross shaped depression in the center.  We enter Slufter enclosure, slightly younger than Bratley, dating from 1862; I've never walked in this part of Slufters and it differs greatly from the major part, which had been replanted with Pine at some point, here the woods were mixed, Oak and Beech with the occasional Douglas rising majestically, gnarly Holly and Yew.  I will come this way again.