Bluebells and the Coln in May

The bluebells come late to the woods above the Coln valley, which is part of their charm. By the time the rest of the country has finished talking about them, ours are just hitting their best. Early May is usually the moment, give or take a week depending on how kind April has been.

I keep half an eye on them from about the third week of April. The wild garlic shows first, then the green spears of the bluebells, and then one mild week they all open more or less at once. There is no fixed date, which is the honest answer to the question I get asked most. If the spring has been cold they hold on later, well into May, and a warm one brings them forward. The safest thing is to come and look rather than chase a particular weekend.

The walk I send people on starts at the bridge in the village, the one by the old trout farm. You follow the Coln upstream, with the water on your right and the meadows opening out ahead. It is flat for most of the way, which matters if you want a stroll rather than a march.

The early part is open and gentle, the river on one side and the fields running up to the treeline on the other. In May those fields are full of the ordinary things that make a good walk: buttercups, the last of the cowslips, the odd heron standing patient in the shallows. It is pleasant enough that you could stop here and be content. The bluebells are the reason to keep going.

Where the path lifts a little and the trees close in, that is where to slow down. The bluebells gather under the beeches in loose drifts, more blue than purple in the right light, and the smell is faint but there if you stop and notice it. Wild garlic comes through at the same time, so you often catch that first, a green sharpness on the air before you see a single flower.

When to go and what it takes

Go early. Not for the crowds, which are rarely a problem this far up the valley, but for the light. Before nine the sun comes through the new leaves at a low angle and the whole wood turns the colour of a held breath. By midday it flattens out and you lose half of it. The same patch of bluebells that stops you in your tracks at eight is just a nice carpet of flowers by noon, and I could not entirely tell you why, except that it is true.

The full loop is about three miles if you cross back over and return along the lane, and you can do it comfortably in an hour and a half with stops. It is not muddy in a dry spring, but May has a way of throwing in a wet morning, so I would not set off in anything you mind getting marked. Proper shoes rather than trainers if it has rained in the night, and you will be glad of them on the short rise into the wood.

Take a flask. There is nowhere to buy coffee once you leave the village, and a bluebell wood is exactly the sort of place you want to sit in for ten minutes rather than walk straight through.

One quiet rule worth keeping: bluebells bruise easily and the patches recover slowly, so the photographs are always better from the path than from the middle of them. Stay on the worn ground and the wood stays good for the next people through. It is also, for what it is worth, where the best pictures are anyway. The drift reads as a drift from the edge of it. Wade in and you are just one person in a flattened patch of flowers.

If you would rather make a morning of it, the village has somewhere to get a coffee once you are back, and you can take it down to the bridge and watch the water for a while before the day fills up. There is no need to rush off anywhere. Half the point of a walk like this is the slow return, with the bluebells still in your head and the rest of the day entirely your own.

If you are staying with us in May, this is the walk I would do on the first morning, before you have done anything else. It sets the tone for the rest of the week, and you are back in the village in time for a late breakfast.