Sadly, it seems that our spectacular forest autumn is fading away.

The wonderful golden colours of the autumn forest are starting to look a bit tired, after what I think is the most colourful Forest autumn that I can remember.

It’s time to enjoy the last fading colours before the grim hand of November takes a relentless grip on the glorious treescape and foretells a bleak barren winter. Not that bare leafless winter trees do not have their own stark charm, but the autumn deciduous trees are spectacular and unmatched in splendour.

The journeys to and from Cheltenham days were perhaps the best part of my days of working in the high-powered work of ‘information technology’. . (I have to confess that when I first started working with computers back in their early days in the 1960s, my field of professional work was the mundane ‘computing’, not ‘information technology’, which I had to call my trade as time went by).

I would drive to Cheltenham through the forest, dropping my wife off at Gloucester for her work at the Gloucester Citizen, on my commute to the busy technological Silicon Valley of urban Gloucestershire. I was in business mode on the way to work, thinking of the impending duties and occasional crises of my working day. But on the way home, with the county metropolis behind us and all crises at work averted, overcome or postponed to a later date, we could enjoy our ‘Forest Views’ of Dean scenery. After nearly 20 years of retirement, I can still remember our early evening journey home, work behind us, enjoying the views of river and forest. At first, along the A48 is the Severn Valley. The river is always in one of its many distinctive moods, serene, angry, empty, or busy, with the low Cotswold Hills beyond. And on the other side of the A48, ahead of us was the forest proper, with views of the eastern extremity of the high forest around Popes Hill and Welshbury.

We would drive on through Westbury, which seemed to be in a sort of no man’s area, not Gloucester, not Forest, and not riverside, until reaching the gateway to the forest proper, Elton corner. From there, the journey was past the late lamented pub the Greyhound, the only forest pub to have a dinosaur in its garden, and then climbing through Littledean to the heights of Cinderford. Beyond Cinderford was the Forest proper, via the Speech House, the Barracks, and down to Parkend.

The Forest Views from the Speech House to the Parkend to Blakeney road were always the most spectacular of our journey. In the autumn sunlight the road was a corridor of glorious colours, the trees bright, yellow, orange, the forest at its best. It has just been like that, but it doesn’t last long, of course, and soon the bright colours will be gone, and the Forest will revert to its bleak personality, but memories of our colourful journey in the autumn evening sunlight, the best time of the day and the best days of the year, will survive..