In this part of the county there’s very little wetland – so one local patch is looked after by the council’s countryside management service to ensure that this important habitat is looked after properly.
Mar 212010
Jan 102010
Some pictures from a wintry walk along the Grand Union Canal in Milton Keynes. No snow on the ground but quite cold enough for the surface of this shallow waterway to be frozen.
Dec 292009
We’re in the midst of terrible winter blues here. Short days, freezing weather, perpetual rain and gloom – this really is the climate of the British Isles at its worst and we could well have to wait two months for it to break and signs of spring to appear. It hardly bothers to get light before dusk is falling again. Time to plan a holiday…
Thoroughly fed up with the snow, the cold and the grey skies in the east of England, we fled west. A four-day break on Exmoor has given us an abundance of clear blue skies, mild weather and sunshine before we had to return home to the cold and damp and the refrozen slush on the verges.
Dec 122009
People who are interested in astronomy and the night sky are in for a treat in the next day or two as the Geminid meteor shower passes overhead on December 13-14.
Geocaching is catching on again around here. It’s an activity we have a love-hate relationship with – sometimes we want to do nothing but, sometimes it drives us mad, sometimes we desperately want to avoid it and all who sail in it.
Yesterday we visited a corner of the country that’s not often been on our itinerary – Fenland. The reason: to take a look at one of Britain’s most unusual hillforts, Stonea Camp.
Nov 152009
Time for the second of this winter’s conservation activities in our neck of the woods. A particularly appropriate phrase, that last one, since today we will be coppicing some hazel growing in a corner of a local nature reserve.
With autumn well and truly under way, and winter on the horizon, it’s time for conservation volunteering to pick up where it left off last spring. In our neck of the woods this means the arrival of emails from the county council’s Countryside Service listing monthly opportunities to get out into the local great outdoors, help improve the local landscape and create better conditions for its wildlife.