[EDIT: you can read the stories from my progress across my map here.]

It rained hard yesterday so today the world was clean and shining. The temperature has dropped, fast. My breath balloons in the morning sunshine and there’s a chill on my fingers. It won’t be long until I am wearing hat and gloves again. The fields sparkled with dew and spider webs and the hedgerow blackberries were withered and past their best. A small patch of woodland was strewn with ferociously spiky sweet chestnut husks.

As autumn has approached there has been one thing I have been particularly looking forward to, and today it arrived: conkers. Horse chestnuts, with their mahogany-bright conkers, are the very essence of autumn. Horse chestnut is native to the Balkan Peninsula. It was first introduced to the UK from Turkey in the late 16th century and widely planted. Though rarely found in woodland, it is a common sight in parks, gardens, streets and on village greens.

The flowers provide a rich source of nectar and pollen for insects, particularly bees. Caterpillars of the triangle moth feed on its leaves, as does the horse chestnut leaf-miner moth whose caterpillars provide food for blue tits. Deer and other mammals eat the conkers.

It might the smooth, shiny tactileness of conkers, or it may just be decades of ingrained habit, but I am unable to walk past a horse chestnut tree in autumn without stooping and popping a couple of conkers into my pocket. As a kid I used to love playing the game of conkers, though never aspired to the heady heights of the World Conker Championships. Although the first recorded game of conkers is believed to have taken place in the Isle of Wight in 1848, the World Conker Championships started in Ashton, Northamptonshire in 1965. It was on Ashton village green, surrounded by horse chestnut trees, that the World Conker Championships were first conceived.Things started in a small way when a group of regulars at the local pub were thwarted by bad weather in their attempt to organise a fishing expedition. The suggestion that they play conkers was made and taken up. Over the years there have been entries from across the world. In 1976 the title went overseas for the first time when was won by the Mexican, Jorge Ramirez. In 2000 the first overseas Ladies title was claimed by Austria’s Selma Becker.

There have been many ways of illegally hardening conkers before battling. Methods include: soaking or boiling the conkers in vinegar or salt water, soaking in paraffin, partially baking them for in the oven to harden the case, coating with clear nail-varnish, filling them with glue or simply storing them in the dark for a year. A unique method was described by 2 times World Conker Champion Charlie Bray who said, “There are many underhanded ways of making your conker harder. The best is to pass it through a pig. The conker will harden by soaking in its stomach juices. Then you search through the pig’s waste to find the conker.”

This particular tree’s leaves were prematurely brown and crispy, caused by the increasingly common Horse Chestnut Leaf Miner moth. The larvae of the horse chestnut leaf miner bores within horse chestnut leaves, eventually causing them to drop and harming the tree and leaving it vulnerable. The horse chestnut leaf miner is the larvae of the moth Cameraria ohridella. The adult moths are tiny at about 4-5mm in length. They are a rich brown colour with bright white chevrons edged with black.

In early summer, the adult female lays up to 180 eggs on newly opened leaves. The hatched larvae feed on the leaves, going through several growth stages where it will grow from 0.5mm to 3.5mm. The larvae then pupate and can overwinter in the leaf litter until they emerge as adults in early spring to lay eggs on that year’s fresh leaves. When infestations of horse chestnut leaf miner build up, all of the leaves of the infected tree can become brown and shrivelled as the larvae eat all of the inner leaf material. Over years of sustained infestation, the tree can become weakened.

So far, the horse chestnut leaf miner has spread from England to Wales and more recently to southern Scotland. The first horse chestnut leaf miner record in the UK was taken in 2002 in England. The moth probably originates from natural stands of horse chestnut in its native southern Europe and it was first seen attacking trees in the 1970s. It has since spread quickly, likely through the accidental transport of pupa in dead leaves and leaf litter, and through the transport of moths in vehicles. Some of the bigger jumps in populations have been attributed to imports of infested horse chestnut saplings.

While it doesn’t kill trees, years of leaf miner infestations can leave horse chestnuts weakened. This can leave the trees in a vulnerable state where they are more susceptible to diseases like horse chestnut bleeding canker. There’s no getting rid of this pest either; there might be fluctuations in populations but it’s here to stay.

Some people believe that conkers can keep spiders away. Unfortunately, there’s no proof this is true. The story goes that conkers contain a noxious chemical that repels spiders but no-one’s ever been able to scientifically prove it. There’s hearsay that if a spider gets close to a conker it will curl its legs up and die within one day. Indeed my shed, where I am writing these words, contains plenty of both conkers and spiders.

On the path out of the village a massive Alsatian dog trotted up to me then barked fiercely. I jumped out of my skin. A lady chuckled a token apology. I continued on my way, past the burned remains of a joyrider’s motorbike. The tiny hill I stood on offered disproportionately distant views across farmland strewn with pylons towards the marshes and the wide water of the busy estuary. A man held a flag on a golf green whilst his opponent putted for par. Crows landed on a distant field of harvested stubble, not yet ploughed for winter wheat. I don’t know this corner of my map well and it took me some time to get my bearings, to match up what I was seeing with grid squares I’ve visited over the year. There is always so much to take in on each grid square. It feels like a slowing down season out on the farms, after the mad growth of summer and the busy tasks of harvest.

Looking over a semi rural landscape such as this, it is striking just how many electricity pylons and telegraph poles there are. According to The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society (for which life membership costs £9.99, “There is no reason why a properly treated pole shouldn’t last 100 years. We know of one that was “planted” in 1908 and is still not even classed as decayed. They are tested first at 12 years from new then on a 10 year rolling cycle of inspection. The inspection is often scurrilously described as the pole being whacked with a hammer and the inspector listening for the dull thud of rot. However, proper inspection requires a sample boring remote from the ground line. Since 1964 telegraph poles have been affixed with a testing cycle sign.

The doby mark or the 3 metre mark (details branded into the pole including pole owner BT, date of manufacture & pole size) is 3 metres from the bottom of the pole. A pole should be planted approx 1.8 metres in the ground which would then put the 3 metre mark at a height of 1.2 metres from ground level. New poles do not need “testing for the first 12 years and hence after require testing by a “pole tester” every 10 years. If a pole is “out of test date” then you are not allowed to climb it and must use a platform elevating.”

I cross the busy main road that leads into town, walk down a bumpy and potholed farm track with grass growing up the middle, and past an old caravan slowly being engulfed by brambles and elder bushes. A footpath led me round the back of a row of garden sheds and into a silent development of bungalows and small postwar homes. The parallel residential streets backed up against more farmland. A farmer raised a hand in greeting as I walked a footpath across a field, towards an incongruous cluster of Scots Pine trees and the clanging assembly of a large white wedding marquee.

The path ran alongside a tiny trickle of a stream, its gentle tinkling sound a rarity on this porous, chalky landscape. I was heading in the direction of the square church tower and the steep red roofs and brick chimney stacks of an old village. The path behind the church bore a sign saying, ‘Prohibited, all vehicles except handcarts, perambulators, invalid carriages and pedal cycles pushed by hand.’ I poked my head briefly into the church. A quiet prayer service was taking place in a side chapel. I think it is the first time I have encountered anyone in all the churches I’ve visited on my map. I paused to appreciate the stained glass windows given ‘in thankfulness for the beauty of the ever changing seasons’.

I passed a dignified cat in the church yard and walked into the village. An obsolete red telephone box stood on the village green, a relic of past technology as many of the nearby telegraph wires will also be before too long.

The first standard public telephone kiosk introduced by the United Kingdom Post Office was produced in concrete in 1921 and was designated K1 (Kiosk No.1). The red telephone box was the result of a competition in 1924 to design a kiosk that would be acceptable to the London Metropolitan Boroughs which had hitherto resisted the Post Office’s effort to erect K1 kiosks on their streets. In 1935 the K6 (kiosk number six) was designed to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of George V. It was consequently sometimes known as the “Jubilee” kiosk. It went into production in 1936. The K6 was the first red telephone kiosk to be extensively used outside London, and many thousands were deployed in virtually every town and city, replacing most of the existing kiosks and establishing thousands of new sites. In 1935 there had been 19,000 public telephones in the UK: by 1940, thanks to the K6, there were 35,000. The K6 has since become a British icon, but it was not universally loved at the start. The red colour caused particular local difficulties and there were many requests for less visible colours. The Post Office was forced into allowing a less strident grey with red glazing bars scheme for areas of natural and architectural beauty. Ironically, some of these areas that have preserved their telephone boxes have now painted them red. The paint colour used most widely today is known as “currant red” and is defined by a British Standard, BS381C-Red539. 

In January 1985, Nick Kane, the Director of Marketing for BT Local Communications Services announced that the old red telephone boxes would be replaced because they “…no longer meet the needs of our customers. Few people like to use them. They are expensive and difficult to clean and maintain and cannot be used by handicapped people”.

I was delighted to find a village cafe, though the owner was worrying about how quiet business was today, perhaps due to the latest national mini drama of a panic-buying petrol shortage. I ordered a mug of tea whilst she told me about how delicious their almond milk hot chocolate was. “That’s the trouble with working here: all the cakes and sampling the products.”

I sat for a while enjoying the hot drink, fingering the smooth conkers I had gathered during the walk (I planned to take them home and scatter them around my shed), and appreciating for myself the beauty of the ever changing seasons.