Day 83

Yet another bit of laziness from your correspondent as I’m adding this over a week after the event due to a mixture of extreme business and general laziness. Anyway, this was a fine autumn morning for a walk. The sky was clear and there was brief respite from the rain of the past few days

Amazingly there is still some colour about with some gorse flowers struggling on although I didn’t manage to get a decent picture. There are also lovely autumn colours in a few of the trees that still have a few leaves – mainly beech now.

It was a fabulous clear day with visibility right to the horizon. Days like this are getting a bit thin on the ground now.

As I went deeper into the forest, there were more bits of colour about. Aside from the ubiquitous mushrooms (I’m having a mushroom-free post today), there was some very mature early holly.

Finally just as I was about to turn off the main access path, I came across this struggling on.

Day 82

This was an odd experience for a walk. We have had a couple of guys around the village on a sort of a quest following a dream of Midhir and Étain trying to find their fairy palace which is reputed to be up on the hill. While my own tendencies would tend to be of the more skeptical persuasion, fair dues to them for following their dream and I can certainly think of more boring ways to spend a holiday. So anyway, I was organised into showing them my route around the forest which I was happy to do.

It was a bit of a mucky day and in honesty I probably would have wussed out if it had of been just me. I did the normal loop but we also took a diversion up a very overgrown lane to what might have been an old quarry but I rarely visit. On the way, we passed this fallen tree root which is slowly but surely losing its battle with the elements.

The dogs enjoyed the extra long walk and the chance to explore a new place. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually taken the dogs up here before.

After the detour we were in a bit of a rush as I had a conference call arranged at two so I put the camera away. We did spot this little guy on the way back.