Over the last week I’ve found myself doing a lot of wandering. I think it’s time well spent when I have a few days off work. One walk leads to another, and before long you’ve found yourself revisiting places you haven’t properly thought about for decades.
Yesterday’s walk began somewhere that was familiar long before I reached the footpath.
I parked on Godfrey Street in Netherfield, outside the first house I ever bought. It’s funny how ordinary somewhere can look once enough years have passed. At the time it represented everything that came with finally becoming an adult: my first mortgage, decorating rooms that were suddenly my responsibility, discovering just how many things can unexpectedly break when you own a house. Standing there yesterday it was simply another terraced street with cars lining the kerb. If I hadn’t lived there, I’d probably have driven straight past without giving it a second thought.
From there I wandered down towards Netherfield Lagoons.
If you’ve never visited, it’s a remarkably peaceful place. Reeds sway gently beside the paths, dragonflies dart over the water and birds seem to outnumber people. It’s difficult to imagine that this landscape was once anything else.
Yet that’s not how I remember it.
As children, Dad would occasionally bring Rich and me here armed with an air rifle and a pocketful of pellets. We weren’t hunting anything more exciting than tin cans balanced on old banks or tucked safely into whatever earthworks we could find. My memories are hazy now, but I remember rough ground, overgrown ditches and a landscape that felt forgotten rather than protected. There were railway lines too, active ones from memory, where crossing points seemed rather more casual than modern health and safety would ever tolerate.
Perhaps memory has exaggerated some of that. Perhaps I simply didn’t quite find the same corner yesterday. Either way, I found almost none of the landscape I remembered.
Instead there were butterflies drifting across wildflowers, birdsong replacing the metallic soundtrack I’d half expected, and cyclists, dog-walkers and birdwatchers quietly enjoying somewhere that has become one of Nottinghamshire’s loveliest nature reserves.
Walking beyond the lagoons and alongside the River Trent brought back another memory.
I remember meeting my uncle here while he was fishing. I couldn’t tell you whether he caught anything that day. I can’t remember what we talked about. I simply remember him sitting there, rod in hand, as though he’d always belonged beside the river. Funny how memory works like that. It often remembers the person far more clearly than the event itself.
A little further downstream I reached Trent Lock, where the river briefly divides around the weir before boats continue their journey through the lock. It’s one of those pieces of engineering that quietly does its job without demanding much attention.
No boats were using the lock whilst I was there – which probably spared me from reliving a somewhat traumatic canal boat holiday from childhood. That’s perhaps a story for another day.
Leaving the river, the footpath heads back across the fields as you reach the village of Stoke Bardolph.
Most people know Stoke Bardolph for its water treatment works. As children, however, we had a rather less sophisticated name for it.
It was simply “the shit farm.”
Dad would occasionally bring us here too, where we’d stand at what seemed a perfectly acceptable distance throwing stones into what I now know was sewage slurry. Looking back, I’m amazed we were ever allowed anywhere near the place. Today, mature trees screen much of the works from view and modern security makes wandering up to the edge completely impossible.
It’s probably for the best.
Some childhood adventures are best left in childhood.
The more I walked, the more I realised how thoroughly this landscape has reinvented itself. The lagoons themselves exist because people reshaped the floodplain. Gravel was dug here, railway sidings once spread across the area, and later the settling lagoons received coal slurry pumped back from nearby Gedling Colliery after the coal had been washed. It was a working landscape, built to serve industry rather than wildlife.
Now, nature has quietly reclaimed almost all of it. That’s the most remarkable transformation of all: a landscape once shaped entirely by industry now feels as though nature was always in charge.
It’s remarkable how completely it has succeeded. Standing among the reeds, it’s difficult to picture excavators, freight wagons or industrial settling ponds. If you didn’t know the history, you’d assume the birds had always been here.
As I looped back towards Godfrey Street, it struck me that I’d spent much of the afternoon searching for places that no longer really exist.
The rough ground where we balanced tin cans has disappeared beneath grass and wildflowers. The industrial landscape has softened into wetlands. Even the sewage works has hidden itself behind a curtain of mature trees.
Yet somehow the memories remain perfectly intact.
Perhaps that’s what these walks have really been about.
Not finding places exactly as they were, because they often aren’t – although not every landscape changes so dramatically. Lambley Dumbles and Colwick Woods still feel remarkably close to the places I remember growing up.
Places evolve, just as we do. Industries close. Nature returns. Houses change hands. Children grow older.
What stays with us isn’t the landscape itself but the moments we borrowed from it.
Goddammit 
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