Where There’s Muck, There’s Inkcaps and Earthworms

Yesterday afternoon, I took the sprogs for a stroll on Scout Scar. It’s a small hill near Kendal (235m). And what’s more you can park virtually on the top. The limestone strata here are tilted so that on the East side the land slopes gently down to Kendal, but on the West it falls away dramatically in limestone cliffs.

The views can be excellent, but the sky was once again the same flat monotone grey that we’ve been stuck with for days and the higher and more distant hills of the Lakes were hidden in the haze.

When there is a view you can see hills in every direction. To help you identify them, the shelter near the top doubles as a toposcope, with the skyline drawn and labelled on the inside of the roof of the structure. The children were less interested in that than in its potential for climbing and play:

The shelter is known as the ‘Mushroom’. We were to find many more mushrooms on our walk. B was particularly titillated by the fact that, for the most part, they were growing in the centre of cowpats.

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Today we had another family stroll to one of our more usual haunts – Woodwell. The kids were playing with sticks, naturally, and discovered that they could insert them to quite some depth in the soft soil which had collected in the grykes of a limestone pavement on the clifftop above Woodwell. They then experimented with using their sticks to dig and found that they were quite effective and that the soil, and even the moss covering the rocks, was replete with earthworms. B was delighted and of course had to pick them up and show everyone. He even tried to engage them in conversation: ” Hello Mr. Worm….”