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…

A Dipper on the Kent

A duck family

Swallow

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?

Blue-bell Woodland

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!

Fording the river Kent, it was pretty fast flowing after all the rain and thunder storms!