June 13th – I’d been in Tyseley for a meeting, then hopped back up the Cross City Line to make an appointment in Lichfield. Cycling back, the weather, which had been pretty agreeable, turned quite grim and it started to rain. The countryside looked so green, and the views were unexpectedly cinematic with a sudden rain-haze softening outlines and changing the sky to darker and darker shades. Luckily, I got home before the heavens really opened.
Can we please have a bit of summer? Just for a bit?
Jun 12th – Chasetown Memorial Park is a place I hadn’t noticed before. Passing at 6pm on a dull weekday evening, I caught the sight of a bowls match in progress, and stopped to take a shufty. I love watchig bowls, and I think its decline as a sport played in municipal parks is terribly sad. Like village cricket, it’s a gentle, genteel thing, and very relaxing to watch. This seems a well kept green and I did like the Memorial Park. The war memorial itself is sombre, as you’d expect, but beautiful. Chasetown is often a place ignored passing through, but there are gems here, and I’m sure, more I’ve yet to discover. Right next door is the wonderful former mining college, now community hub, and a fine facility indeed. Inside is a small but touching display of mining mementos and ephemera.
If these photos seem a bit… odd, it’s because my camera battery went flat and died, so they were taken on my phone.
June 12th – I believe this delightful yellow flower to be a flag iris (although I could be wrong). At this time of year, they flourish on the water margins of canals, ponds and reed beds, bringing a dash of yellow to the waterscape. I love these flowers. This patch, near Anglesey Bridge on the canal near Brownhills, seem to get larger and more impressive every year.
I can’t seem to be able to free myself from that pile of work brought from Poland so all the running & cycling escapades are whimsical and unplanned, occurring when I happen to finish something or am too annoyed to work anymore. Anyway, it has got its merits as there are more things to…
Warsaw => Walsall: Cycling along the canals: Walsall-Wednesfield-Darlaston-Walsall
June 11th – Summer’s cauldron continues to simmer. I noticed whist climbing the Black Cock Bridge in Walsall Wood that the wild honeysuckle – or woodbine – I talked about choking the lupins was growing over the guard rails on the souther flank of the bridge. A riot of colour, these gorgeous blooms, when fully open, will smell wonderful. I never thought I’d see such a thing growing wild in this post-industrial landscape.
June 11th – It was spotting with rain as I came back through Walsall Wood. I stopped off to take in Jockey Meadows, between Shelfield and Walsall Wood. These fields, now a notified Site of Special Scientific Interest, are classic, marshy, undisturbed wildflower meadows. It was peaceful, and bullfinches and jays went about their business. I must come back to explore these on a sunnier day.
June 10th – Grainy, and very long range, this is a red deer hind and her young fawn. The females should at the moment be with young, or preparing to give birth, for which they tend to split from the main herd and search out protective cover. This lone mother was on cuckoo bank in just such conditions, and was very nervous and twitchy for her offspring. A wonderful, summertime sight, with births occurring up until mid-July.
June 10th – Whilst at Chasewater, I played with the sweep panorama function on my trusty Panasonic TZ30 camera. It’s a great piece of kit of which I’m very fond, and a huge step on from it’s predecessor. The panorama function, however, has been a disappointment. Not as reliable as the one on Sony pocket cameras, it seems to have trouble with synchronisation, and can generate poor images. Hoping this will be fixed in a firmware update, it does work best on sunny days like this, and these results weren’t bad.
June 10th – For the second time in two days, I hit Chasewater. I was going on to ride the Sherbrook Valley on the Chase, but couldn’t resist a spin around the park in the sunshine. The weather was warm and soft, and I was in shorts and shirtsleeves. The boating pool was, as usual, a cloudy soup of mallards, canada geese, swans and coots, mingling with bird waste and discarded bread, but the waterfowl seem happy enough. Unusually, a mallard had her ducklings on the lake, including this rather fetching yellow one. A lovely thing indeed.
June 9th – Chasewater is rising. In all the rain, the only benefit is that the waterline is slowly, almost imperceptibly enlarging. A landmark occurred this week; the ‘pier pool’ left stranded from the main lake, has rejoined it once more. Curious spits and islands have developed. You can see the ecology shifting day by day. But don’t be fooled. The next meter in depth will increase the surface area of the reservoir hugely, and take a massive amount of water. That, sadly, means a very, very wet summer. A terrible dilemma…
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