After a couple of days away, a long drive back and then a morning of re-booking flights with a clogged up brain, it was great to get out for a walk this afternoon. There is a vast quarry up the road from me, where they are digging out stone for building and paving and the like.

All around the quarry are scowles – left over slag from previous workings – which get taken over by nature, making the distinctive landscape of the Forest of Dean.

In the photographs, you should be able to see how the Quarry are now bulldozing their slag up against the old scowles. In places it looks like a glacier of rock pouring into the spaces in between. I noticed a cardboard box on a tree stump below one of these piles of terminal moraine. I thought it may have a warning not to come too close writing on it, but no, it was an airgun target! Pop bottles, strewn around, evidence of kids doing a bit of target practice.

It won’t take long for the raw, bare scree to get colonised by lichen and moss, then covered in leaves, which will rot and provide compost for the trees and plants that will eventually turn this industrial eyesore into a walker’s tourist heaven, another scowle, another piece of classic forest landscape.