parklife!

Another weekend, another walking trip to explore some green areas within a 20-minute walk of our house, another Newport park to add to the list of lockdown discoveries.

Beechwood Park, just round the corner, is our go-to park of choice for quick and easy running about, going down slides and climbing on stuff entertainment, and it's big enough that you can usually find a new and unusual way of making your way through it. I did notice, though, that there was another, smaller park area over just a few streets to the west, labelled as Woodland Park on the map. 

As always, although it didn't look like much on the map, there was plenty of interest to keep the kids happy once we'd got there, including the orthodox grassy park areas but also a couple of interesting wilder wooded areas, some of which contained some low walls whose purpose wasn't obvious but which seemed to indicate that buildings had once occupied part of the site. As always with a green area smack dab in the middle of a city there was a regrettable amount of random rubbish and occasional dogshit strewn about, but generally it was fine and the kids had a lot of fun exploring and climbing on the large number of felled trees around the place (precautionary fellings due to ash dieback, as far as I could gather).

We'll come back to the mysterious building remnants in a minute: one thing that struck me as I was walking round the wooded area was the number of low tree stumps which seemed to have little plastic plugs embedded in them, like the ones pictured below. No sooner had I stooped down to take a picture of one than Nia shouted at me from a few yards away to come and look at these weird bits of plastic she'd found in a tree stump. Nia is a terrifyingly bright and inquisitive girl still not completely cured of the opinion that I know lots of stuff about everything, so I was disappointed to have to add another data point in support of the obvious truth, which is that I am just busking being an adult and in fact know almost nothing about anything. 

Anyway, if you Google something like "plastic inserts in tree stumps" you can find the answer very easily, and it turns out that these are little plugs containing noxious stump-killing compounds to prevent regrowth. To be fair, that is broadly what we'd guessed they were at the time. You can get them in bulk here, if you have a ruthless campaign of tree-slaughtering in mind. 

Back to the mysterious apparent ex-buildings: further internet research reveals that Woodland Park as a publicly-accessible entity didn't exist until after World War II (unlike Beechwood Park which was opened in 1900), and before that date was largely occupied by a house called Gaerwood House and its grounds. After this and its unfortunate occupants were bombed into oblivion during World War II, the area was turned into a public park and a memorial (which we failed to spot) was placed in a prominent spot. Whether the walls we saw in the woods were part of the house, or were the remains of some other more proletarian housing bombed flat in the same raid I couldn't say.

As always, historical map sites are a source of almost endless interest, if you happen, like me, to have an almost endless interest in old maps. The excellent SABRE maps site yields this map (supposedly from the 1950s) which still shows a prominent house in the middle of what is now the park. I've marked the park boundary (roughly) in green and the house (if it was Gaerwood House, presumably just a flattened ruin at this point) in red. Some further info on the park's history, plus some photos, can be found here. 

Another excellent old map site yields this map from 1937 which has Gaerwood House specifically labelled and reveals that it is indeed the red one on the other map.