Walk Note 5
13th July 2025
Walk Note
5. 13th July 2025 c.7.45am to 9am
It’s the first morning for what seems like two months with any dew. It’s the day after what I think was the hottest day of the year in this area. There’s mist too, though not thick, and on the edge of the woods there’s a kestrel flying low.
It’s the time of day for moths rather than butterflies and the first part of the walk finds me flicking up a lot of tiny triangular white-grey moths out of the grass.
I take the footpath that, once you cross the stream, leads pretty much straight up the hill, along the edges of a series of farm fields. The first field is full of horses. The second is empty of farm animals but has a few lapwings grazing.
The path curves around the farm and into the lane that connects to the edge of the town. Before it reaches the first set of houses it goes under the old railway line and I walk up the bank and on to this (it’s now a cycle path – see Walk Note 3) to head roughly west. A variety of plants are prominent in the verges: there are 4 or 5 patches of wild raspberries coming to ripeness; there’s quite a lot of what I think is toadflax (a set of yellow flowers with orange dots in the middle trailing up/down a stem); the rosebay willowherb is in half flower. I think of the latter as being one of the plants (or type of plants) that must have inspired fireworks, given that it always looks to me like the flowers burst through the rest of the plant to then fall.
I walk through the sound of nearby allotment chickens and the patter of the dew dropping down the leaves of the larger trees on the higher side of the line.
About ten yards ahead of me, a deer comes out of the bushes on the left. I hear the sound of its hooves clicking on the paved path as – after seeing me – it makes movements first back the way it came, then on across the line. It reverts to the planned path eventually – the grass is tramped down to indicate regular crossings at its entrance and exit points – and jumps the fence into the field below the line to – apparently calmly – get on with grazing in full view of me and the two women who come from the other direction with dogs.
I leave the line and walk downhill into marshy scrub land. The cobwebs here are remarkably thick, especially on the top of thistles. My footsteps trigger the flight of more moths, these even smaller than the tiny ones seen earlier, a type that fold themselves on landing to look very much like grass seeds. And at the bottom of the bank, a crashing through bushes alerts me to the back end of another deer, though I think without the noise of the movement that I wouldn’t have noticed it.
Small brown birds move between the gorse and broom here, too quickly and too frequently for me to even guess at identities (and small brown birds are a particular weak spot for me). The path eventually loops around the back of a very modern and clean pigeon loft on the edge of another set of allotments and brings me back to the road which I follow most of the way home, enjoying a few outcrops of honeysuckle in the hedges, and watching rabbits scattering into clumps of gorse on the field above the road.
