Tuesday Walk

The wind is howling today, driving sheets of rain under a woolly grey sky. When I headed out for my Tuesday walk, I could barely make any headway. I placed one foot in front of the other, my head bent against the buffeting gusts, peeking up once in a while to get my bearings, half expecting to see Pooh and Eeyore sailing by, attached to the string of a red balloon. But look what I found at the market - rows of cheerful flowers waiting to be planted in gardens and window boxes.Tomorrow or the next day, when the winds have died down, I'm going to bring some home to brighten up the terrace.

A week ago today, Tori and I hit the road early in the morning. We started here .. 



.. and drove through this ..



.. so we could get to this ..



And this is where we walked.



Doesn't this stump look a little lost, sitting in the middle of a 10-kilometre-long sandy beach?
I call this picture The Sentry.
There were a few intrepid (crazy) surfers and a handful of people,
but otherwise the beach was completely deserted.
 

Tuesdays in November were spent in college in Wrexham.  The only Tuesday walks I did were to and from the main university car park,  passing the railway station, to the art college and into town at lunchtime.  There were blue skies and some colourful trees to brighten up the drab roads.  There were also the  Christmas decorations in the town centre.



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On the first Tuesday in August I was walking with friends in the south of England, near the city of Bath.  We enjoyed good weather and summer seemed to have arrived at last.  Wild fruits including blackberries and elderberries were ripening and there were many wildflowers including scabious and poppies in hedges and in fields set aside for grazing.  Many fields in the area were gold with ripening crops and cattle cooled off in the river.   It looked a perfect English scene but there was also a notice on a farm outbuilding requesting that visitors wash their feet in disinfectant – a reminder that foot and mouth has just been identified in farms in Surrey.  A highlight of the walk was seeing two wild deer.

Back home the vegetable plot yielded a bumper crop of onions, potatoes and broad beans with the courgettes, tomatoes, leeks and pumpkins ripening but I seem to have lost all the fruit off the trees and bushes.

Already it’s past the middle of July and we’ve only had one warm and sunny day this month.  On Tuesday I had already planned to do a five mile evening walk in the Clwydian Hills so risked the showers and was lucky to have clouds but no rain.  The highest point is Moel Famau which is also on the long distance footpath, Offa’s Dyke,  an earthwork built in ancient times to divide the border between England and Wales. 

To the east, beyond the Welsh county of Flintshire, there is Liverpool and the Wirral.

To the west there is the rural Vale of Clwyd and, when it’s clear, views of Snowdonia and occasionally even the Isle of Man, across the sea to the north.  The path crosses miles of heath land with wimberries (bilberries) ripe for picking, heather in flower and bracken.  Many of the sheep living up here still haven’t been shorn unlike those lower down in the vales. 

Back at home many plants (and weeds) in the garden have been flourishing.  It looks like there will be a good crop of pumpkins and courgettes later in the year and plenty of onions, leeks and potatoes.  There’s no sign of soft fruit apart from a few strawberries which I have to pick before the slugs, mice and insects have a feast.