Swallows and Amazons

Looks like summer has ended and the monsoon seasons is just ramping up! After a couple of weeks of superb dry sunny weather (which luckily coincided with a series of bank holidays allowing us to get out and about climbing in the Lakes) we have now returned to more normal British summer weather; heavy showers! We’ve even had some pretty amazing thunder and lightning most evenings this weekend. 😮

So, the weather stopped play climbing-wise, but we did get out for a walk that delivered a few pictures worth sharing. Not exactly prize winning wildlife photography, just a few snaps…

And after spotting the swallows I spotted this rare Amazonian that gave me the title of the post…

We passed through the most amazing blue-bell wood, every single square centimetre (except the very few narrow paths where people had walked) was covered with blue-bells! Amazing. In just a couple of weeks they will all be gone and as the tree canopy fills with new leaves the woodland floor will become quite bare and brown. I wondered, it’s illegal to dig up blue-bells (or any wild flower for that matter) but not so many years ago all of lowland Britain was covered in woodland and would have been equally covered in blue-bells. So all of the grassy fields we see have been dug up and cleared of flowers, were the farmers who did that prosecuted?

To get back from our walk, without a many-kilometre diversion, we were forced to ford to the river Kent. We took our shoes and socks off and waded in. It was cold! 😯 But it was great fun too!