Summer Afternoon

The weather has finally been warm and sunny during the last week or so and Mr Baggins and I have enjoyed some pleasant walks. I realised when I looked at the photos from this particular outing up the Limb valley that he doesn't appear on a single one of them, most of the time he was out of sight. I can't leave him out altogether as it was really his walk so the photo above was taken on another walk in the same place.


I thought this made a really attractive picture. I'm not sure what the plant is, though it's one of the huge parsley family - I suspect it may be ground elder, should have looked more closely at it, didn't think at the time!


A Comma butterfly (I think) on the bracken, it was there only for a moment or two so I only had the one chance at photographing it. It has the ragged edge to its wings that a Comma has but it's much paler - I'm hopeless at butterfly identification so I could well be wrong about it.


A wooden bridge over one of the many little moorland streams.


The aforementioned stream.


The rowanberries are already ripe, they are always the first berries to colour and signal that autumn is just around the corner.


Eventually the woodland ends and opens out into fields, Mr Baggins is always on a lead at this point until I've checked whether there are sheep grazing up there. He's a sheep chaser unfortunately so I have to be really careful. All was well though so he was allowed off to run again and I discovered this lovely patch of harebells just over a style. The photograph doesn't do them justice, it has faded the colour which is actually a beautiful sky blue. This is one of my favourite wildflowers



Another wild flower that was plentiful was yarrow, a wild herb with great healing properties. It is said that Achilles used it to staunch the wounds of his warriors afetr the Battle of Troy hence its Latin name of achillea. It was used by the Anglo Saxons for the same purpose. Here it has a more peaceful role as a supply of nectar for a Gatekeeper butterfly and its companion. You will probably need to click on the photo to spot it.


This is a lovely walk to do on a really hot day as much of it is in the dappled shade of the beech trees. It takes us about two and a half hours at a fairly leisurely pace to walk up to the fields at Ringinglow and then back down to Whirlow again. The name Ringinglow indicates that this was originally the site of a burial mound.