​It’s a grey, wet start to October, with the mornings struggling to become light. Nevertheless, the longer I sit beside the river the more life that I notice: a few rooks flying overhead, plenty of fish hunting for insects, and a few song birds that I cannot see although I can hear them. The river itself has risen a tiny bit, but looks like it needs some added strength, a minor flood really, to come into its own. Before I leave a single swan comes swimming by, quite quickly, making grumpy noises.
 
The following morning there’s thick mist and it is cold. Winter weather is approaching much earlier than it did last year. The sun rises through the mist, growing gradually brighter and bigger; the sky immediately above is clear, the beginning of a bright day. As the sun rises a little higher there is steam coming off the river – a real autumn scene – for the first time this year. The fish are more prolific than ever; there’s not just signs of the surface being broken here and there, but occasional splashes, or bubbles, or a big circle in the water where most of them are small. Pike, perhaps.
 
The third day, and the sky over to the west is a changing array of orange, red, and streaks of blue sky. It’s cold, but a reminder of the most spectacular sights of last winter. A breeze is gently blowing from the west, downstream; the flow of the river itself is very slow, but there’s a fresher feel to it with the surface of the water puckering up and the reeds rustling in the wind. Each morning from then on, it seems to get gradually darker.
 
Some mornings the fish are busier than others, and some mornings there are more birds about than others, all for no obvious reason. I notice a big crowd of birds that appears each morning somewhere over towards Edgarley (southwest). At first I think it’s a rookery waking up, but it seems bigger than that. Something about the way that they fly, dipping and weaving, reminds me of the starlings – though they are much bigger, and noisier; maybe the jackdaws that spend their day around the edge of town. I wonder whether the starlings will reappear before the end of the month, and look forward to them arriving.
 
There’s a group of three young swans, still wearing their grey signet plumage, that occasionally come foraging down the river, pecking and pulling at the waterweed. There are also some much smaller birds – I wish I knew what they are called – that live on the riverbank and sometimes come flying low over the river surface, hopping and darting about in the reeds, chirping quite close to me where I’m sitting. There’s a particularly loud sound from one of them just across the river when the swans are coming by – when they are close to the far bank the noise absolutely erupts, and when they move on it calms down.
 
I am half way through my last month of a year coming, every morning that I can, down to the river. I note that it has changed something in me, though I’m not very clear what it is. Awareness of the natural world is one thing, for sure; and also a sense of being more in touch with my creative self. It has been a momentous year for my health, with two visits to hospital – with the ‘Transient Ischaemic Attack’ (a minor stroke) last November, and E-coli this August/September. The TIA was followed by muscle problems, which I eventually saw as being caused by cholesterol deficiency, as a result of taking statins (eventually I just stopped taking them). The e-coli infection left me feeling very depleted, and the doctor has told me that it may take three months to get ‘back to normal’. My sense is that I am gradually coming to the surface however – I’m beginning to feel batter than I have done all year.
 
In the rhyne that leads between the field and the road down towards the river, often in the morning I see a heron feeding. Usually I disturb it by walking past, and off it flies. One morning there is a pair of them, but then it’s back to just one. Another morning, on my way away from the river and on my way home for breakfast, I see what I’m sure is a small group of starlings – not enough to call them a ‘murmuration’, but sufficient to have me looking forward even more to them returning in large numbers.
 
As the mornings get darker the full moon seems brighter, when it is there. And as it gets colder we begin to have frost – so much earlier than we did last year. One afternoon I see starlings making their way home past my house, so they are arriving now. It’s October 26th when I see them coming over in the morning for the first time, though I’m sure they were there before, I just got my timing wrong. At first I didn’t recognize the familiar sound of their approach, a bit like seawater drawing back across shingle after a wave has come in by the sea; then there they were, stretched right across the riverside landscape and moving on further upstream.
 
I see them a couple of times towards the end of the month, whilst other days I sit there waiting for them and they just don’t appear. Maybe I’m too early, or too late, or maybe they have taken a different route – or they are high up, above the cloud and mist. On the 31st I wait for them, especially keen to see them, but in the end I get very cold and decide to walk home disappointed. I must have been too late; on the way I see a bunch of them, lined on the telegraph wires, looking at me as if to say ‘well, where were you then?’

In Glastonbury, traffic coming along the A361 down Chilkwell Street and Bere Lane is a serious problem. In response to protests and petitions, three years ago an ‘A361 Committee’ was set up by the Town Council to consider possible solutions. This committee has, however, found itself ignored and side-lined by Somerset County Council, which appears to have its own agenda: to build a relief road along the route of the old railway line from West Pennard to the Wells roundabout (formerly Tin Bridge) – ultimately to become part of a proposed ‘Mendip Expressway’.

Before jumping to the conclusion that anything is better than the appalling heavy traffic that is right now ruining our homes and our lives, this relief road scheme needs to be looked at carefully.

It would be funded through ‘partnership’ with property developers, who would pay for the road in return for access to land for building houses and establishing light industry – initially in Brindham and Wick, though this would open up land along the whole route for future development.

The impact on the environment would be enormous. The heritage aspect of Glastonbury as a historical spiritual centre would be severely damaged. The Tor and Chalice Hill would be cut off from the open countryside and put in danger of becoming green blobs in the midst of urban sprawl. That which is most important here would be disrespected, even desecrated, and made subservient to a crass version of ‘economic development’.

Even this, however, would be an illusion. Most new enterprise that might be created in the development area would merely replace existing business that is at present situated nearer to the centre of the town. Meanwhile tourism, on which the town depends, would be flagrantly undermined.

Not many people realise that the Highways Agency was privatised in 2015 and replaced by a limited company, Highways England Ltd. Since then the government has been encouraging plans for a widespread and aggressive new road-building programme. This has been described as ‘saloon-bar policy making’, ignoring the evidence that building new roads simply leads to more traffic, that the suggested economic benefits are largely illusory, but that the damage to the environment is extensive and very real indeed. Construction work on the first wave of this programme is expected to begin in 2019.

In this context, Wells MP James Heappey has been promoting his plan for the so-called ‘Mendip Expressway’. Heappey is Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chris Grayling, the current Secretary of State for Transport. In its full extent, the ‘Expressway’ may go all the way from Nunney Catch near Frome, past Shepton Mallet and around Glastonbury, and then on to join the M5. However the signs are that it is to be presented as a series of local by-passes, each apparently meeting the needs of local communities desperate to escape the noise, pollution, damage and danger caused by an overwhelming volume of heavy traffic.

The reality of this proposal is actually for a major new road to carry this traffic through central Somerset to the motorway. There are right now several possible freight routes other than along the A361 and the A39, though this is the one preferred by the County Council – in consultation with the Freight Transport Association; it is the shortest route, not necessarily the best route. A new road would have very little to do with Glastonbury, Walton, or any of the towns and villages along the way, and would make little or no contribution to the economic well-being of these communities.
​
The problems on Chilkwell Street and Bere Lane may be alleviated in the short term, but this proposal would not be a long term solution. It would be a disaster for Glastonbury as a whole.

​Updated 6/11/17: Glastonbury and the Major Road Network

After my illness it is four weeks before I have the strength and energy to resume walking down to the river in the mornings. By then the weather has got grey and damp like autumn, though still warm and humid. The river is a little fuller than the last time I was here, and the reeds out in the river have died down – they are reduced to bare stalks sticking out of the water. Most of the foliage on the other side of the river has gone – it has been cut down, and the edge of the river cleared with a digger. This side the reeds are left to gently subside.
 
An autumnal chill and mist along the course of the river meet me next morning, though soon the sun is up in the sky and shining, almost blindingly if I look straight at it. The day before, when I'd been here later in the day, a pair of white butterflies with black markings had danced along beside me for a while as I walked towards the river; so it still seems to be summer in the middle part of the day. Whatever the weather, I’m feeling relief to be back – so pleased to see the river and to re-connect. A couple of small silver fish jump right up from the water to catch their insects.
 
Another day and the cloud cover has returned, though it’s still warm and humid. There’s darker clouds coming up from the southwest however – I think we’re going to have rain. The river is looking rather scruffy, though through no fault of its own. The denuded far bank and the shattered reeds in the middle of the river create an impression that I suppose is the modern autumn. The water level is quite low too, and I think that it could actually do with a good fall of rain to give it back its self-respect. The rhyne has one bank cut down to the level of a mown lawn: it already has plenty of duckweed encroaching, now there are dead reeds and a few clumps of grass mowings to add to that – it too looks like it needs flushing out with a strong shower of rain.
 
Sunny weather, if interspersed with cloud and rain, hangs on for a couple of weeks yet though. A heron is flying around each morning – I often disturb it from foraging in the rhyne. Most of the birds now are dark and autumnal however, like crows or geese (I saw one group of geese in a V-formation, with the lead bird honking to keep them in order). A breeze from the east, against the flow of the river, ruffles the surface as happened so often last winter, which gives me the feeling that the season is moving on. Along the road, the same breeze is beginning to take the leaves off the trees too.
 
It takes me a while to get back into picking up litter. I get some plastic gloves and a bottle of anti-bacterial handwash, though they don’t really seem to help. Then one morning I see that the tent that’s been pitched beside the river on the other side of the rhyne has in fact been abandoned, and now there is garbage strewn all over the place and if nothing is done it will eventually find its way into the river. After a lengthy debate with myself I do come with a plastic bag and a pair of gloves that I can wash, and collect it up. The tent I leave, I don’t even look inside, but a week or so later it’s collapsed and I prepare myself for another bagful. When I get there next morning, however, I find it’s all been stacked neatly; I go and spend a little time sitting by the river, and on my way back I see a truck stopped there; it’s the little ‘Highways maintenance’ truck that goes around emptying rubbish bins, and it has collected it all. Clearly I have not been the only one thinking about it!
 
Some balloons that someone had tethered on the opposite bank do of course end up in the river, and I think the river spirit must be cross with all this careless behavior. I make a point of checking out my picture of ‘Copper, the weaver of rivers’ (a print of one of Carolyn Hillyer’s pictures), which seems to express different feelings at different times. When I look, she seems sad rather than angry. When I eventually clear the site of odd bits of litter after the tent has gone, I notice that there’s a tyre in the water, too heavy and too far out of reach to be retrieved; also a fluffy white swan feather.
 
By the time of equinox it is definitely autumn. The past week has seen the seasons shifting and it has been neither cold nor hot, dark nor light, wet nor dry. I find myself thinking that the river spirit is perhaps sad, although the mess around here is so minor compared to the long, hard sadness that has persisted over centuries. The river is, I fear, in its last time of sadness, its last effort at survival; ‘the only thing it can do from here is to flood, with acres of wet tears’. All the same, I remember a woman called Johanna who has walked down the river, connecting with the river spirit and also carrying water from the source to pour along the lost route of the river across the moors; and another person I have heard of who is approaching the River Parrett in a similar way. I know She is pleased with these things.
 
The reeds on the river bank are still more or less whole, but they have lost their vigour – the leaves are turning brown at the tips and the stalks are beginning to lean at angles; they have begun the process of dying back that will finish with bent broken dried up stalks by next spring, when they will be overtaken by next year’s growth. As I turn to go back home, the Tor is shrouded in misty cloud. By the last day of September, it seems a long way from the first when it was still summer.