Lady’s Spring Wood, North Yorkshire: Sitting close to the River Derwent, it has provided for a castle, a fort and now a town. It deserves better than poo bags and beer cans

It seems to be precisely when February’s sleet and muck threaten to become unbearable that the aeons-old conversation between celestial and terrestrial turns to growth and greening. We’re now past the pagan quarter festival of Imbolc, which honours a goddess of many guises. Of particular relevance here, in the iron age territory of the Brigantes, she was Brigantia. Of her other guises, the foremost was the Celtic Brighid, goddess of springs, of healing and farming, or poetry wisdom and smithing – the stuff of creation.

We pay a family visit to Lady’s Spring Wood in nearby Malton, named for the water that rises alongside the Yorkshire Derwent. Small channels spill in braided rivulets, their clarity a startling contrast to the murky flow of the river. It’s a place that is triple blessed, by topography, geology and hydrology, with elevated ground for security, river clay for pottery, a floodplain for farming, and before that for hunting and gathering, the river for transit and, principally, the springs for life.