Bank Holiday Scenes at Bretherton and Brockholes

We spent a convivial afternoon with family on Sunday exploring gardens open to the public under the NGS.  We paid £5.00 each for entrance and additionally for refreshments knowing that, although the tea came in a rather miserly amounts, the proceeds were all going to charity.  

Most of the visitors were a decade or so older than us and still active and knowledgeable.  We saw ponds, water features, veggie plots, shade gardens and sunny spots.  We finished the tour at the former smallholding that gets our vote for the best garden.  Here a field at the rear was being replanted as native woodland.  We sat down beside a damson tree and looked through a gap in the boundary to sheep grazing and Winter Hill in the distance.  The wind moved among the willow trees.  

After stopping for the aforementioned refreshments, it was a warm walk back to the car and a drive of ten miles either way to our respective homes.

Monday's weather was initially cloudy and cool, so we got out our bikes and set off for Brockholes, a local nature reserve built around excavations close to the river and to the motorway.  Entrance is free for bikes and £5.00 for cars.  This charge is assigned to the upkeep of many acres of wetlands and woodlands.  I wore a helmet for the first time, as promised, and rode a mountain bike that had belonged to my niece.  The route was largely on dedicated cycle paths and our city's cyclists were out in numbers.

We arrived at Brockholes' 'floating village' by lunch time and ate our sandwiches and cake.  The majority of the visitors were a generation or more younger than us, except for those frailer ones being escorted by their families.  Small children were drawn to the ducks and the ducks were drawn to the visitors in the hope of a snack, although, as the notices reminded us, bread is a most unsuitable food for wild fowl.

I drank my home-made 'energy drink', we shared our coffee from the flask and although tempted by the ice-cream remounted our bikes for the trip home.

The steep sides of the wood were as challenging on the ascent as the descent and I had to slow my steps considerably in order to gain the top.  Then we circled back via a former railway line, a linear park by a brook and the boundary of the golf course to reach our starting point on the Guild Wheel.  The sun came out and it was extremely warm under the helmet.   We had made a circuit of approximately ten miles.  

The sad postscript comes from this morning when we noticed a hearse and funeral car proceeding down our avenue. This is not uncommon here.  These vehicles stopped out of our sight but when we saw them on their return to the junction we noticed that a whole phalanx of cyclists, in their club colours, were acting as escorts for this final journey on earth.

Carrots under covers

We celebrated part one of my husband's birthday with a local trip out.  In years gone by we would have ventured north - Arnside is a particular favourite - but this August the weather has been so wet and indeterminate, autumnal and blustery, that we went south as recommended to the Ribble estuary and true to my usual navigational habits described a circuit from Tarleton to Banks returning via the Shore Road to Hesketh Bank.  We will do the four mile heritage walk at a later time and perhaps I will post the history of the now disused railway, the brickworks and the harbour on the Douglas.

As we drove on raised narrow causeways above the former marshlands there was some evidence of the heavy and unseasonable rainfall bearing out what we had heard on local radio that farmers were having problems harvesting their salad crops and also re-sowing. We know a family who farm at Hesketh Bank and it has been a difficult year for them.  

Fortunately it is not a matter of economic life or death for us that our runner beans, for example, are approximately a month late but the experience of adverse weather connects us to those whose lives are bound up with the soil both at home and abroad.

In the meantime we have sown carrots.  Carrot Autumn King was on sale at the local bargain store for 10p along with Little Gem lettuce.  A bargain too good to miss.  My husband has covered the raised bed with a cut down roofing panel that our neighbours donated a couple of years ago. Warm under this the inundated carrot seed, intersown with last year's Spring Onions is at last beginning to germinate.  With a fair September we may hope for an autumn harvest.