Treats In Store

“I’m going into the village to get a paper.” “Hang on Granddad – I’ll come with you.” And that’s how the boys were booted, suited, helmeted and on their bikes quicker than you can say ‘a trip to the sweetshop’. Meanwhile their sister, who had other plans, had presented her requirements in writing.

Sunday’s walk featured something of a false start – I set off heading into the village intending to meet up with the in-laws and the boys, just in case they needed a house key and then perhaps to head in the direction of Woodwell. But when I did meet them the boys both decided to come with me. Fine. All well and good. Two hundred yards along the way however S realised that his bag of goodies had headed homeward with his grandparents and had an abrupt change of heart. We took him home. “Fancy a walk to the Pepper Pot?” I asked his brother. To be honest, I expected that the lure of sugar coated e-numbers would be too great, but I was wrong and so it was that B and I set off on a foray into Eaves Wood.

Before I get to Eaves Wood however, one digression. Many recent walks have been late afternoon and have been accompanied by Starlings and their burbling calls. I assumed that this was because they were gathering for the mass roost at Leighton Moss. But on Sunday morning the trees in the village were full of them again. In fact there was generally a great deal of birds and bird-song. B and I spotted a goldcrest in a tree above us. We didn’t get a very good photo, but we did catch this female blackbird…

B was quite taken with this oil slick rainbow he found in the road, and was keen for me to photograph it…

Once into the wood he took charge of our route finding. We lingered on occasion when suitable trees presented themselves…

He particularly liked this beech, which I suppose must once have been coppiced although not for quite some time. The branches were wet and must have been slippery, but B didn’t mind, and I liked the way the water had run on the bark and made patterns…

And no, we didn’t draw them on despite TBH’s suspicions to the contrary when she saw these photos.

And if I had to wait for B to climb trees, and to hump logs about to make stepping stones across muddy stretches of footpath, then he had to humour me whilst I pursued my latest obsession: photographing trees through raindrops…

 

Here’s the cropped version…

The view from the Pepper Pot was not what it can be…

…with the Bowland hills, beyond Warton Crag, wreathed in clouds.

This hazel still has a few of last year’s leaves alongside this year’s catkins which are filling out and turning yellow with the approach of spring…

Meanwhile the beech leaves which still cling on have turned a paler more delicate brown, reversing in their senescence the change from pale to darker green which will happen again soon in the first few days after the new leaves appear in not too many weeks now.

On and around the pair of fallen beeches which we often visit there was, as usual, plenty of fungal interest…

 

Around those beeches there are many other large fallen trees, I’m not sure whether there are more than there were or whether it’s just more obvious in a leafless winter woodland.

The combined effect of orange beech leaves and silvery dew-drops was quite decorative, but difficult to capture successfully…

These elephant-toed beech roots, mottled with lichens and moss have appeared here before…

..but then if I will keep on repeating the same old walks. Then again, if you go down to the woods today…

…you might be in for a surprise…

…if you look hard enough.

 

As we dropped down out of the woods, the sun briefly came out and made the drop bejewelled hedgerow twinkle…

I can see that this is going to slow my walks down even further!

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In the afternoon we were out again, this time a family walk to the Wolfhouse Gallery via Woodwell.  The gallery was closed, but we had a pleasant walk despite a damp and grey afternoon.

Ivy berries.

The W of the Whimper

This is the way that the blog ends, this is the way that the blog ends,…..*

Well, not quite. We’re still here and we’ve seen off November and emerged victorious once again. Of late it’s mostly dark, or I’m stuck indoors busy. But the boys and I did escape and spend a couple of hours not quite getting to the Pepper Pot (again). We discovered heaps of leaves with a frozen crust…

Somebody’s den deep in the woods…

And lots of fungi on and around the pair of fallen beeches which we often visit…

* Not with the B of the Bang, but with the W of the Whimper.

Belladonna

A lovely weekend with a house full of guests. A house so full in fact that some were sleeping in the drive in their Dormobile. On Saturday we climbed to the Pepper Pot via the favourite yew and the fallen beeches. On the beech roots the mass of Inkcaps had all but disappeared, but these Earthballs were thrusting up through the leaf-litter nearby. It was a dull day with occasional short-lived showers. We walked through Eaves Wood to Water Slack then round Haweswater and back via Bank Well and Lambert’s Meadow. Oddly, there are goldfish in Bank Well. Baby S will probably remember it best for the large cold drops of rain which began to fall at a most inopportune moment whilst I was changing his nappy – apparently the rain was cold.

Saturday was grand despite the weather, but Sunday was fantastic with clear skies and bright sunshine as well as the fabulous company. We were back in Eaves Wood but this time heading for Far Arnside and a coastal route to Arnside. In the woods there were lots of Speckled Wood butterflies about again. Near Far Arnside this Red Admiral was basking on a wall…

Ivy growing on the wall here was loud with bees, many of them clearly already heavily laden with pollen…

We stopped by the shore while baby S had a nap. The adults enjoyed the sunshine the kids dashed about on the rocks and collected tiny crabs. The tide was right in, scuppering our envisaged play on the beach, but it didn’t seem to matter. The walk around the cliff path to White Creek was unusually busy. With the tide in we took the most direct route to New Barns and stopped again for a late lunch in Grubbins Wood…

The small meadow in the wood was well stocked with late summer flowers, the names of which elude me at present…

S decided to walk from this point which slowed our already very moderate pace to a crawl. Particularly when he and his brother decided to try to climb into some rabbit holes…

 

In the shingle of the river’s edge nearby some large herbaceous shrubs…

 

…covered in berries with an attractive purple ruff..

These berries are apparently sweet, or so I read, which is unfortunate since they are Deadly Nightshade, or Belladonna, ‘the most poisonous plant in the Western Hemisphere’. I’ve seen them flowering near here before, but not the berries. Apparently a single leave or about 20 berries can be fatal to an adult, and the roots are more toxic still.

We opted for ice creams in Arnside instead to round off an excellent day.

Grubbing Around

Out again in the sunshine with the boys. Their avowed intent – to walk to the Pepperpot, a 15 minute walk at a brisk adult pace. We spent a couple of hours not quite getting there. There was just too much to see and do on route.

The first distraction was the presence of a number of Speckled Wood butterflies, although to be honest I was more interested than the boys. They were more engaged with the tiny frog that S found in the grass by the path…

Both boys have quite an eye for small creatures in the undergrowth so having them along is a real advantage. Unfortunately they have an atavistic response to the wildlife they find. S was determined to stamp on this poor froglet, and when I persuaded him to stop that, his instinct was still to poke and squeeze. The next frog S spotted was already beyond harm – dead and dried out. B was fascinated and picked it up to take home to show his mum – eventually giving up on that idea when the frog hampered his climbing in a favourite yew.

Close to the yew, a couple of large fallen beeches beckoned – B remembered them from previous visits and was keen to clamber over them again. I was interested to see how their decay had progressed. They were covered in fungi. The soil is thin here and the roots spread wide, hewing out a large but shallow shave of soil and rocks when they fall. On both trees, both sides of this root island were hidden by an outburst of some kind of inkcap.

In different areas the toadstools were in different stages of their fruiting…

…nubs of newly emerging mushrooms….

…more mature specimens…

…beginning to fray and deliquesce at the margins…

…and twisted, blackened cups near the end of their lifetimes.

Elsewhere there were slick and shiny jellyfish marooned in a woodland wreck…

Around these coral forms, and all over the tree, the bark was covered in tiny nodules…

…I’m not sure whether of fungi emerging or having dried up and finished.

There was Jew’s Ear fungus…

…and these tiny but startling alien forms nestling in a crack in the bark…

It was another gloriously sunny day. We were screened from direct sunlight by the trees, but there’s a dappled quality of light in woods in sunshine that I love.

It’s hard to know how to capture that quality except in the strong contrast between the deep shadows and the bright pools of light. This time I was struck by sharp shadows on the trunk of a beech…

Something I think I will pursue when the opportunity arises again.

The boys had other interests to pursue….

…scratching around after a centipede in the dirt.

Nature’s Playground

Took the kids into Eaves Wood today. They balanced on fallen tree trunks, climbed in a favourite yew, played in a hollow behind the yew – which Amy christened Macca Pacca’s house – waved sticks about, drummed with their hands and feet on the fallen beeches I found last night, and stopped for a snack in the in the root hollow left by those beeches.

Ben is surprisingly fond of woodlice and so was thrilled when we managed to pull some bark off one of the trunks:

At the edge of the new clearing created by the demise of these beeches are two more beeches which I imagine must look pretty similar to the way that the pair that fell must have looked:

I was standing close to an ash tree on the edge of the clearing when the earth moved. Angela says that she saw me jump. It was another bright but very windy day, although here in the woods we could hardly feel the wind. Standing back a little we watched as the movement of the upper part of the tree made the ground around the roots gently rise and fall as if the earth were breathing. One of the roots of was lifting clear of the ground and a crack appeared alongside the trunk. The soil here is very thin and the wood is full of large trees that have fallen.

Sycamore’s seemed to be my favourite trees today. Firstly we saw leaves spotted with tiny red lumps:

I think that these are the eggs of some insect, and I remember that when we were kids we used to call them spangles, but I don’t suppose that’s a proper name.

Many of the sycamores in the wood have this bright orange lichen on their trunks:

The seeds of the sycamore are hidden away under the leaves and could easily be missed:

Having said that, my favourite trees in Eaves Wood are really the mature beeches (even better standing up then lying down!):

At Cynthesis you can find posts enlivened by photos of heart-shaped leaves, stones, shadows…etc. I’ve been on the look out for hearts in our woods and beginning to think that either the woods are deficient in hearts, or that I’m just not looking in the right way. Finally, today I came across a heart-shaped tree-stump. Unfortunately, the photo I took was a bit of a dead loss. But shortly after the tree stump I noticed this ivy leaf on a dry-stone wall:

What do you think? Almost there?

A Time of Gifts

A bright and sunny day today, but very windy. I took a late stroll this evening into Eaves Wood. The woodland floor was littered with leaves and the occasional branch. In a new clearing close to the path lay two large fallen beeches. The trees must have been virtually twins and now lay away from each other but with their roots making two walls sheltering the single hollow that their fall had left.

I thought that perhaps the trees had fallen today, but then realised that the branches carried leaves, but that those leaves were brown and dried, suggesting that the trees have been down for some time. Also someone had used logs and large flakes of bark to build a crude roof to finish off the natural shelter between the roots.

The bark was cracked, like flesh wounds…

,,,and had lifted slightly away from the trunk so that when I tried drumming on it I found that it made a wonderful drum.

I couldn’t see the sunset – surrounded by trees as I was – but the colours in the sky indicated that it must have been stunning.

On my way home through the dark woods I heard an owl or probably a couple of owls calling, it seemed from somewhere very close by, but try as I might, I couldn’t find them in the trees.

The dark shape of a roe deer skittered across the path in front of me.

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Amy has a few days of school, so what does she want to do? Recreate school here at home. This afternoon she made us all sit down for an Assembly and proceeded to give out certificates to each of us for achieving our Next Step. Mine was for learning to use my new camera. Unfortunately, Amy has difficulty with b’s and d’s so I appeared on my certificate as ‘Mark – bad’. When Angela noticed this she got a bad case of the giggles, which started me off and I ended up spilling half of a cup of tea down my shirt.

I also discovered today that Tom of Wigger’s World had chosen to award me this:

Thanks Tom!

Apparently these are the rules:

1) Award and Link to 5 blogs that make you think and/or make your day.
2) Acknowledge the post of the award giver: Tom’s Make My Day Award Post

3) Tell the award winners that they have won by commenting on their blogs with the news!

In thinking about which Blogs to pass on an award to (a pretty tricky decision), I thought about when I open google reader and which Blogs I look for new posts on first.

One of those is most definitely Wigger’s World, where the award came from in the first place! A link from Tom’s site, whether it be a recommendation or participation in Skywatch always guarantees a significant increase in traffic to my blog. This is a testament to the popularity of Tom’s blog and the camaraderie of the community of bloggers that gather there. It’s fair to say that Tom regularly makes several peoples’ days, because of his posts and his generous and thoughtful comments on other blogs.

My friend Andy has a theory that as soon as he has discovered a product that he really likes, then it is discontinued and disappears from the supermarket shelves. He could undoubtedly give lots of examples, but the only one that I can recall is individual rhubarb pies with a layer of custard inside them. He seems to think that there is a link between his patronage of a product and its almost immediate disappearance. As paranoid conspiracy theories go, it seems both unusually trivial and personal.

However, I’m beginning to see how he feels because it seems that many of my favourite bloggers are taking (hopefully) temporary breaks. So I make these awards in the hope that each of then will soon once again be making my day. In no particular order they are:

• Walking Fort Bragg
• Cynthesis
• The Solitary Walker