It’s not all bad, it’s actually quite pretty with its pink orchid-like flowers, but aside from the obvious threat it poses to our biodiversity in the Lakes, it also poses a real threat to the stability of our riverbanks.  Himalayan Balsam is an annual plant which means that it dies back in winter, leaving riverbanks bear with no roots holding the soil together, leading to erosion and siltation of our rivers.

In and amongst these boisterous pink flowers on the damp ground were clusters of meadowsweet, frothy and cream-white with a sweet, pleasant smell.
The Tudor herbalist and botanist John Gerard called this wild flower the “Queene of the medowes” and described how it was used to scent people’s houses and “delighteth the senses”. When crushed meadowsweet’s odour is more antiseptic – possibly befitting a plant in which aspirin is found. Despite being known as the “Queen of the Meadow”, this wild flower’s name doesn’t actually derive from where it grows. In Anglo-Saxon times it was known as medowyrt – the “medo” referring to meodu the Old English word for mead as it was often used to flavour the drink. In contrast, in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, meadowsweet is known as crios Chu-chulainn: the belt of mythological hero of Ulster, Cú Chulainn. Meadowsweet has a number of medicinal uses including against headache; it is a traditional hangover remedy.

I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and not even carrying a raincoat: there are not many occasions in this year on my map when the weather has been so kind. Yet although the weather is being kind, the footpaths have become anything but. This was another week of hacking through jagged brambles, squeezing past nettles and swatting mosquitoes in the damp, undisturbed undergrowth. All this slashing and whacking and stinging and scratching felt like a jungle expedition, albeit one accompanied by the permanent roar of the nearby motorway! It is one of the things that I enjoy about the British countryside that this is as ferocious and unwelcoming as our nature ever gets.

That under-used footpath took me into the woods running along the back of a row of houses. A compost heap of lawn cuttings steamed and smelled of summer. Archaeological evidence from the British Isles suggests that Scots improved their small-scale farms with compost as far back as 12,000 years ago. These early farmers likely plowed and seeded compost heaps in situ; instead of moving compost into fields, they turned the heaps into plots and planted directly in them. From the Stone Age, it took another 10,000 years before someone eventually wrote about compost. As the first empire to implement a functional bureaucracy, the Akkadians in Mesopotamia kept records by scrawling cuneiform onto clay tablets. Some of these tablets, from King Sargon’s reign around 2300 B.C., are believed to include the earliest written reference to compost.

I made it through to the lakeshore that I was trying to reach, but was inevitably disappointed by the signs warning me of private property, trespass and forbidding me to swim. Normally I would have heeded the mantra that it is easier to seek forgiveness than permission. But there were several fishermen around the lake with all their rods and tents and cool boxes. I didn’t want to disturb their fishing so opted not to swim. All the fishermen I encounter on this map look very similar; men in their 50s and 60s with brown or green clothes and round bellies.

I sat on a bench by the lake to eat my lunch, enjoying watching a pair of grey squirrels foraging for food. Then two rats appeared from the undergrowth and joined them. I was interested that although the animals were around the same size and looked very similar, the rats revulsed me in a way that wild animals rarely do (exception: snakes, giant spiders and any time I need to rescue a bird from inside the house!). The brown rat has a bad reputation, but it mostly lives side-by-side with us without any problems. The brown rat is an incredibly adaptable mammal and can be found almost everywhere in the UK, in any habitat, all it needs is shelter and food. Brown rats are omnivorous, eating pretty much anything, from fruit and seeds to human food waste, insects, birds’ eggs or even small mammals. They are particularly common around towns and cities. Brown rats live in loose colonies and dig their own burrows. They are famously good breeders; a female brown rat can breed from around 3 months old, and has an average of five litters a year, each of up to 12 young.

I settled for taking a photograph of the lake, discovering a new panorama mode on my camera that I have used extensively for the past five years, then stepped away from the peaceful, sleepy lakeshore onto the racing, roaring hard shoulder of a motorway slip road. Though I have encountered traffic such as this regularly on my map, it never ceases to shock me when I’m close up to it. The footpath ran alongside a busy road, with a metal crash barrier between me and the traffic. Wild flowers flourished here, such as the blue chicory and the bright pink Pyramidal orchid with 100 flowers on each densely-packed flower head. I launched into the melee, cycling quickly around the four-lane roundabout. The large motorway roundabout swept around and encircled about 10% of today’s grid square. The exit sign was decorated with a sticker of a black cat peering around the corner. I have seen these cats right the way across my map but haven’t been able to solve the mystery of who puts them up, or why.

A motorway hotel chain and pub chain were set just off the roundabout, catering for weary travellers. The kitchen’s ventilation system was pumping out the delicious smell of bacon sandwiches which got my appetite going.

The smell of success, for many stores, is now an actual smell. As more shops add odour, the battle for noses is getting intense. Restaurants are adjusting recipes to make aromas more concentrated and pleasant. Stores are installing discreet misters to diffuse essence of tea, wood and other scents into the air.

Stores relying most on aroma to draw in customers or nudge them to buy more have found achieving the right scent is complex. One person’s sweet aroma is another’s stench. A store’s smell has to be powerful enough to lure in customers yet not offend neighbouring businesses and landlords. Cinnabon, the bakery chain, places ovens near the front of its stores so the enticing smell of warm cinnamon rolls escapes when oven doors open, says Kat Cole, president of Cinnabon.

The scent of the restaurant can influence how much people eat too as ‘odour can influence food consumption through taste enhancement.’ Thus by piping pleasant scents into their restaurants, fast food chains can encourage people to eat more. They can also do this by making people queue and order at the counter, rather than offering table service. This means the customer has to wait to see the person in front of them being served their food at the counter on a tray. The first customer will then walk back past the waiting customers who will see and smell the food on their tray – again enticing the waiting customer to order more when it’s their turn. The music fast food restaurants play can also effect how much we eat. Hearing soft music that’s not too up-tempo has been proven to encourage diners to stay at a restaurant longer and eat more. Hence, slow songs and easy going pop music is played in fast food restaurants – not drum and bass or techno dance tracks.

Scent Marketing, or the use of appropriate scents & aromas can result in extremely good results in terms of promotion and marketing for restaurants and cafes. Studies have shown that the use of custom Café scents & aromas can increase food sales – up to 300%!

Round the back of the hotel, past the carpark and the overflowing recycling bins was a footpath into a wood. In there it was surprisingly cool, dark and peaceful (motorway roar excepted, as usual). The maple trees all seemed unusually close together and the trunks were all wrapped in dark green ivy. Ivy covered the ground too, so my eye was drawn to a patch of golden brown at the base of a tree. It was wood dust, covering everything on the ground around the base of a trunk. The dead tree was being gnawed away from the inside by an intrepid troupe of wood boring beetles. Unfortunately I couldn’t spot any beetles to identify what they were: perhaps Death Watch Beetle, Ambrosia Beetle, Fan-Bearing Wood-Borer, Wood Boring Weevil or the Asian Long-Horned Beetle. I love those names.

Spiders had set up shop on the outside, wrapping the trunk with their silk webs. These in turn were covered with frass (the technical term for wood dust, I just learned) giving a cheap Halloween effect to the tree. Less spooky were the delicate tiny flowers of the deliciously-named Enchanter’s nightshade that was thriving in the shaded wood. I have never paid much attention to flowers before, but what has brought them to life for me on my map is the Seek app which tells me their names. And the names of Britain’s wildflowers seem to be all imaginative, delightful and dripping with centuries of people being far more connected to their local wildlife than we are today. ‘Inchanters Night-shade… groweth in obscure and darke places, about dung-hills, and untoiled grounds, by path-waies and such like,’ write John Gerard in his Generall Historie of Plantes back in 1597. The plant’s Latin name, Circaea lutetiana, comes from Circe, the enchantress of Greek mythology whose woodland dwelling was on the island of Aeaea. In Homer’s Odyssey, she casts a spell over Odysseus’ crew, turning them into swine. 

Out of the wood I sat on a log by the motorway and ate my banana in the sunshine. Approaching the town my footpath was hemmed in between a whopping 15-foot wooden fence (presumably to muffle some motorway noise) and a chainlink fence running alongside the town’s allotments. The gardens were overflowing with greenness, with raspberries and beans running up canes, onions swelling and bursting from the soil, and courgettes galore. It must be a satisfying season to be a gardener, and today lots of them were bustling around their patches, all men in their 50s and 60s with brown or green clothes and lean bellies.

I meandered for a while up and down the residential streets of this 1960s and 70s housing development. A pensioner was on his knees with a dustpan, brush and large bottle of weedkiller, removing every scrap of life from his driveway. His lawn was an immaculate green rectangle of fake plastic lawn. This was a gentleman who liked order in his garden! I confess that I tried, but rather failed, to find anything of note in all the neat, quiet suburban streets.

So I headed back to the lakes –flooded old gravel pits– to have a mooch around there. Cycling along the gravel path by the lake I passed groups of elderly walkers, professional dog walkers, a few people walking more quickly with headphones, one or two cyclists, a very sweaty jogger, and some parents with toddlers.

And I was certainly surprised when I saw a scuba diver emerging from the murky depths – of 8.3 metres, as he told me happily on his walk back to the car park, dripping in his aqualung and wetsuit. Scuba diving is one of my favourite things to do, though it had never occurred to me to give it a try here on my inland suburban map. The history of scuba diving begins with something called a “diving bell,” with references going as far back as 332BC, when Aristotle told of Alexander the Great being lowered into the Mediterranean in one. And, unsurprisingly, Leonardo Da Vinci also designed a similar self contained underwater breathing apparatus, comprising of a face mask and reinforced tubes (to withstand water pressure) which led to a bell-shaped float on the surface, allowing the diver access to air.

It was good to see people enjoying being outdoors and by water but on a personal level there is something about organised nature I don’t quite like. Perhaps it is the rules (‘No Unauthorised Swimming’), the tidiness and order, or just being around other people. Whatever it is I definitely prefer the rougher, wilder corners of my map to this big lake park.