Today’s walk was lovely.
Myself and a friend have started trying to walk together once a week.
This weeks took us through Sallow Coppice, Stokewood and down past Stokesay Castle.
The blue bells were at there best today (beginning of May) carpets of them covered the ground in Sallow Coppice.
It was a shame that people have trodden the blue bells down at the sides of the paths to make the paths wider. The bluebells do not take kindly to being trodden under foot.
There were also the last of the wood anemones and I found a small clump of wood sorrel ,the first I have found on the Eastern side of Sallow Coppice.
As we crossed the fields to Stokewood we could hear but not see a skylark, and stood listening.
On rounding the lower western edge of Stokewood, my friend spotted a Fox, unfortunately I didn’t manage to get glimpse of it.
Dillie was much better at tracking down squirrels but I think some other smell was getting her interest.
When later we turned back down a country lane the soundtrack of our walk was larks. We stood listening and watching Skylarks Ascending. They were all around us. It was lovely to hear.
Much as I love chiffchaffs, it made a change to be surrounded by a different bird song.
We climbed up to get a view over a footpath gate which had a large stone in front of it covered fossils. Only moments before we had been talking about fossil deposited that can be found in South Shropshire.
As we retraced our steps back onto the road we started hearing larks again, lots, they seemed to be all around us.
We stood listening, we couldn’t see them but had their chorus following us down the lane.
We turned back onto footpaths and started descending back towards Stokesay, enjoying the views.
Back onto Stokesay Lane we passed the pond. There is an old gradually disintegrating horse drawn carriage. A moor hen had built its nest.
We stood watching,one parent on the nest, the other in the watch diving. Every time the diving Moor hen resurfaced we could see little fluffy dots, scurry from under the moor hen sat on the nest, into the water to be fed.
They would climb back up the nest to the warmth of the other parent. The whole process would happen again.
We had a lovely walk. A lot of standing and looking and listening enjoying Shropshire.
The image below shows the route of our walk and the map uses OpenStreetMap whose copyright is acknowledged.
The image used in the header of this blog post is from a photograph taken by Heather Wilde and is used under the Unsplash Licence.
