 Hello, thank you for joining me. I'm standing by the middle of Mainline at Air's End Lane, which is between St Albans and Harpenden. I come here quite a lot to watch trains, especially at the moment, because the HSTs on this line haven't got much longer to go only a few more weeks at the time of filming, but between the trains there's a very nice area to walk around. It's called Hartwood Forest. It's got some newly planted forests, we've got some older forests, so what if I do, I'm just going to show you around some of these forestry areas while I wait to see an HST, and then I'll put the shots of the HSTs at the end of the video. It's not really a video about trains, but it will start, it started with a train, it will end with a train. There's just so many different walks you can do here. It's known as Air's End Lane, that's the lane which runs basically along the horizon, along there. So I quite often park the car there, I'll walk around these fields, see the trains, I've done various videos from here before on the trains, but then, as I said, I'll walk around this newly planted forest and I thought it's such a nice place, and it would make such a nice walk. Now what I'm hoping is by the time we get into those woods, the bluebells would have come out. It was one of the last kind of a few weeks ago, you could see the bluebells would be coming out soon, but they hadn't quite come out. So what I'm hoping is to find a nice blue carpet across the woods, and then we'll go and have a look on the other side of this woodland. There's another forest, maybe a bit like this, called the Magical Wood. I saw that on the map and I'm really intrigued to see what they've done. So it's all woodland, trust, land, it's a very pleasant place to come. As I say, I park at Air's End Lane. Sometimes I walk to Sandridge, which is a very pleasant village just north of St Albans. I can get coffee there, there's toilets there. You could also park at Sandridge and walk out into the forest this way. So there's just so many walks you can do, and also not far from here is Wheat Hampstead, which is another very pleasant village somewhere I have gone to for walks in the past. Well actually if you want to see one of my visits to Wheat Hampstead in the past, I've looked at link on screen now, that shows the old railway station at Wheat Hampstead, but right now I'm just going to continue on to this bridal way here, and then I'm going to follow it on up towards the forest. And as for views of railways, there's various different cameos you can get of trains. That's another quite a nice view. If a train came along, maybe I'll make and see an HST here at the end of the video. But let's go across to Hartwood Forest and then I'm really looking forward to seeing the blue bells, seeing them all out. So when you get to here, come through this gateway. It says Hartwood Forest, Woodland Trust, they've even got leaflets. So you can pick up this leaflet, it's got a very nice map. But let's just go and see another train, because another template train. There you go. A good timing to come on one go. Right, I'm going to go up here and find the entrance to the woodland with all the blue bells. So up the bridal way I go and let's go and see the blue bells. I've now come along the bridal way, it came over a little summit, opened out and each side of us is newly planted woodland. That woodland there, that is what I said about is the magical woodland. We're going to go in that afterwards. But first we're going to go in here. This is the blue bell woodland. We did the woodland we saw down there as I walked up the bridal way and looked through the trees. I could see lots of blue bells. So it all looks very, very nice. So we're going to go in here. There is currently a one-way system in place, because they probably are expecting a lot of people and because it's obviously the current times, I don't want people getting too close, but here we are. This is called Langley wood, this one. This is where the best of the blue bells should be found. So yeah, let's welcome to Langley wood. Wow, and look at this. The camera's picking up, I can also hear a train. So never far from the railway. Wow, look at that. There's that carpet of blue and ceiling of green. I'm not sure if their best is yet to come. And it looks so vivid. When I look that way, it looks really vivid, but the camera, maybe it's not quite so vivid on camera. But still, it's a very pleasant walk. I'm just going to stop talking for a moment, let you hear the sounds of the birds and the view of the walk. It seems the majority of the trees in this woodland are hornbeams. Have a closer look. I think pretty much every tree in this woodland is a hornbeam. If I see any others that aren't hornbeam, I'll point them out, but it's a very, very attractive woodland. So I'm just going to let you see a bit more of the view ahead. And then when we get to here, there's a bit of a junction. So I'll see which way. It's said one way along here, whether it's you've got to go on a one-way system and the whole woodland. I'm not entirely sure, but let's see what we see. So there's a clear crossroads here. There's another path coming from down there. You get to hear the woodland changes a bit. We've got a few caliphress trees and I just tripped over the tree stump. And then the hornbeam woodland or Langley Woods on that side. Here we have another oak tree. So we're just going to follow our way down here. Once we get down here, we're going to be back near the railway line again. So my plan is not yet to go to the railway, just to follow right around back to where we came in, and then we're going to go and do the magical woodland. So let's just keep going through the blue belt. I'm continuing to follow this circuit around the woodlands. I just come to these trees though. These are really quite cool looking. Look at these. Always nice to see something a bit different. I'm trying to think back to what causes this, whether it's growth within the tree or it's like a bug that's caused it. But if you know why the trees are like this, I think they will look quite cool, but whether it's good for the tree or not. I'm not sure if anyone knows more about why these trees have gone like this. Then do please comment and tell me. I'm now just going to continue to follow the path and soon I'll be back to where I came into Langley Woods, where all the blue bells are. And then let's go and see what that magical woodland has. I somehow think it's going to be very, very different to the hornbeams and the blue bells we have in this woodland. And the blue bells and Langley Woods are behind. This is where we came into Langley Woods. So this is that bridal track. So if you go that way, you go to Sandridge. So like I said, it's worth going down there if you want a coffee or want to use a toilet. I want to park your car if you don't want to park your eggs in there. We're now going into the magical woodland. Now this is going to be interesting because we're, as you can see, this is it. It's a newer plantation and the cherry blossom looks nice on those trees. It says it's planted by the Disney store, so I'm not going to find. So magical woodland and behind us, that's Langley Wood, where we saw the blue bells. So let's go through this new woodland. You can see it looks like during the lockdown, a lot of people from Harpendon's and Albans and Sandridge probably walk along here because it was on their doorstep. And if I lived here, I'd probably spent my lockdown walking around these woodlands. Let's just see where this goes. What's in the middle of this magical woodland? It's all new trees. You can see a lot of hawthorns have been planted various other plants and shrubs. Some young oak trees have been planted. So quite a nice range of different trees and shrubs have been planted. We've got some willows up here. So from looking on a map, it looked like there's like a centerpiece in the middle, which I'm not quite sure how close we are to the middle or not. Hazel, coming and get some hazelnuts. Maybe they probably won't have hazelnuts on them just yet, but obviously we'll be in the future. That's like an unofficial path going off down there. It looks quite nice. There's a lot of more cherry trees down there, so you'll be able to come here and get hazelnuts and cherries in the future. It'd be a great place if you were a squirrel, because I imagine all the squirrels eating all the nuts here. We have another type of willow. So yeah, a real range of different plants. They seem to be probably one of the highest points of the forest. I'm not going to go over there today, but if you go further over, you can actually see as far as Hatfield House from another visit when I parked over at Sandridge. What's this? What did I say about squirrels? Eating nuts. Well, there we go. We have a squirrel eating a nut. Oh, let's see. There's something. I can see some sort of something in the middle, like there's a centerpiece of the, in the middle of the woodland, the new woodland. Look at that. There's the blossom on a young cherry tree. There's some some picnic tables up here. It's interesting looking. It looks as though it's one giant picnic table, if you could have like a banquet here in the middle of the magical wood. Look at that. Interesting idea. Ah, now there's one of my favorite things to find when I go to these woodland places. Sometimes I've seen them at National Trust properties before. A willow tunnel. I've always enjoyed going through willow tunnels. There is, that way, there's like a centerpiece entrance to the magical woodland. So what I'm going to do, I want to get back to the railway to see the HST, so I'm going to put the picture in now. That was what I took on an earlier visit when I just walked past it and actually walked through the magical woodland. So I'm going to continue on now and head on back towards the railway line. As I walked back down towards Air Zenn Lane, I saw this other nice hornbeam woodland. So I came off the bridleway, which runs just to the edge of the woodland along there. I thought I'd walk down through here. So I'm going to go back to the fields now, see a couple of HSTs and then go home. So it's just out here. Basically, I'm getting back to where I started the video. So I'm going to go down there and wait for an HST to come along.