by Colin Pantall

When Isabel was a baby, I took her out for early morning walks by the River

Avon. The mist would hang over the river and we’d see Kingfishers diving for fish.

She’d sit against my chest in a Baby Bjorn, facing the world, taking in all the sites

and the sounds of the trees and the flowers and the weeds. We’d smell the smoke

that rose from fires at the campsite of lean-tos and benders that had popped up

across the river. Further down we’d see the informal clearing of undergrowth that

was taking place on a derelict patch of land by the Grosvenor Bridge. Strange

mounds started appearing and then patches of carpet.

As Isabel got older we returned to the strange mounds. They had become a set of

BMX jumps; during dry periods we’d see boys, and sometimes men, leaping around

the course. There were 24 jumps that could be taken consecutively over two

circuits. We watched them as flew over foxglove and comfrey, bypassing brambles,

hogweed and ragwort as they zipped around the jumps. We named the place

Bicycle Mountains and Isabel took to running around them as though she were on

a bicycle. I followed her, exhausted by the ups and downs of it all.

When Isabel was five, I passed my driving test and we bought a car. From the

window of the flat where we lived we could see a low escarpment with a tower at

one end. This was Brown’s Folly, a nature reserve that was home to ancient forest,

wildflower glades and Boris, the oldest horseshoe bat in the world. But for all the

idyllic nature, what made it most special was the weird topography. Brown’s Folly

had once been a site where Bath stone, the stone that Georgian Bath was built

with, was mined. Parts of the folly would be laid out like a tree-covered mogul with

outcrops of stone rising out of the leaf mould. Underneath the nature reserve was a

network of old mine-shafts led into an underground system of caves and tunnels

complete with tram lines and rinsing pools.

On the trees around the valley there were rope swings. Some of the swings you

could sit on, some you needed pushing, but the best one, Rope Swing Number Two,

was just for swinging. It was hanging from a branch on the side of an excavated

slope. We’d run down and jump off into a circle, taking care not to fall onto the

rocks and branches below, nor to hit back into the trunk of the tree, George of the

Jungle Style.

We went to Brown’s Folly every Saturday. We’d swing on ropes, race through the

forest, climb rockfaces, spot mushrooms, hide in dens and build imaginary camp

fires. As Isabel got older, we found logs to balance on. The logs got higher and

higher and trips to Brown’s Folly became a journey to the edge of my fear.

Brown’s Folly and Bicycle Mountains are places that have been reinvented by

history, industry and government. And every time we go there, we reinvent these

places again. We free them from their past, making a tree or a rock or a mound of

earth into something quite different. At weekends when we go camping in

Cornwall, Wales or Dorset, we find places where we climb and swing and imagine,

reinventing a place into something of our own making. And in the countryside of

the UK, however wild or natural, it seems as though the places we visit are always

being reinvented, that the agricultural, industrial or leisure undercurrents of

everywhere we step is being forgotten or destroyed by our very being there. This

book is about that, that freedom of making a place your own, a celebration of a

world that can be reinvented in a million different ways but can never be pinned

down.

The Beginning