Parc Brook and the River Ogmore

My wellington boots and I had many adventures in Newbridge Fields behind our home; the welcoming Tennis Club woods with tantalising deep puddles and enticing boggy marshes; the spacious open fields with very long wet grass that brushed my bare knees and polished my wellies making them glisten; the parkland with a tempting children's paddling pool just shallow enough to come to the tops of my boots without flooding them; and the challenging meandering murky Ogmore River, normally out of bounds by parental insistence but visited by all the local boys from time to time daring each other to cross without getting a boot-full; but probably best of all was the inviting rippling stream known as Parc Brook which could be walked upstream from the Ogmore River and out into the open fields where we paddled in the glutinous quagmire where the cows had made the grassy banks slippery and muddy, our wellington boots covered right up to the rims in brown liquid sludge would sometimes become entrapped in the sticky mire and we would be left dancing on one leg whist we extricated our other boot out of the marsh, our bare legs getting splashed and smeared with droplets of the persistent mud.

Afterwards, the walk back downstream and through the long grass of the meadow would scour our wellingtons clean again and the adults in our lives would be none the wiser of our mucky adventures - "What have you been doing today" - "Oh nothing much!"

In the 1960s, this little concrete footbridge was in an open field and just beyond is the area where the cows came down to graze creating a boggy area as mentioned in my story above.

Photographed in 2008 the whole area has become transformed with 45 years of growth very evident. The scene has little or no resemblance to the play place of my childhood, only the concrete bridge remains the same! (Photograph M.J. Stokes)