Glen of the Downs, today’s run — old Bellevue estate forest, now just vertical gain.
A banker built this glen for pleasure once — La Touche, exotic glasshouses, a folly on a platform called the Octagon, and inside it, absurdly, a stuffed panther rigged on springs to leap at startled guests. Seventeen sixty-six. The joke outlived the money.
By nineteen thirteen the family had gone, the house left to itself, and itself is a slow kind of arson — no flames, just damp finding every room in turn, until nineteen fifty, when what was left came down for wheat and a golf course, tidier uses for a fallen estate.
Somewhere in the paperwork the state took what remained for forestry, planted rows where hot-house orchids used to sit behind glass, and called it finished.
Today it’s just gradient — sessile oak and conifer switching back on themselves, a dog somewhere ahead on the track, lungs working through what used to be a rich man’s idea of a view.
The panther’s gone. The springs are gone. Only the climb is still doing its job.
Inspired by Louis MacNeice