Wolves Wild

These catkins are on a male tree: those on a female tree are green.

The adult ed centre on St George’s Parade is one of the few distinctive and attractive recent buildings in the city centre.

The area it is in is likely to become even more of a backwater when Sainsbury’s make their planned move to their new site.

Misty view of the Staffs & Worcs canal heading downstream just outside Wombourne on a misty morning.

The large nests in the bushes probably belong to magpies.

One of the characteristic sights of Wolverhampton city centre, the distinctive building which began life as the Chubb factory.

Another cutting in sandstone to make way for a transport corridor. This sandstone cliff was created roughly a century earlier than the ones in the previous post. It’s on the Staffs & Worcs canal, a short distance from the canal’s crossing of the river Stour near Stourton.

The picture shows the base of the cliff, ivy trailing down from above; ferns growing in a niche at water level, and the reflection in the water.

It is noticeable how much less vegetation has managed to establish itself on this rock compared with the railway cutting. Is that because of the steeper rock face, or because it is a different type of sandstone?

A section of the South Staffordshire Railway Walk, along the course of the same former single-track railway which figures in the Smestow Valley LNR.

Here, just north of the B4176, the line has been kept more or less level by quarrying a cutting out of the sandstone, which now has a good covering of trees, mosses, lichens and leaf-litter.