Yes indeed BWW keep em coming, as I always say Variety is the spice of life.
Can't resist an invitation.
Many on this forum may guess my fascination with walking, in my later life, revolves around questioning the Definitive Map and relating its veracity and effectiveness with topography. Forgive the long words but this is the best description I can come up with in as short a sentence as possible.
Autumn is the time of year we share the countryside with game shooting, which is one of the main underlying reasons why landowners wish to keep visitors out of their countryside. This may not be directly the reason given because it is so often cloaked in the disguise of 'conservation' and 'land management'.
The search for special places of beauty or interest has taken me off piste, the word trespass may be used to to describe this activity, but like those climbers who forced routes up rock faces previously thought unclimbable, I like to think of this as exploration.
This photo shows a moment, when I chose not to go of piste, to my front is a wood marked, on a map marked as open access, clearly dissected by neatly cut rides but which might give me access to its farther side from where I would have to launch myself 'off piste' and visible exposed into a broad valley before I could intersect with a right of way.
Ragged volleys of gunfire were the reason why there are so many birds in the air, ten buzzards and one kite is a fair indication that they are plentiful in this area and the extended volleys were a sign that many pheasants were being driven over 20 guns or more. At £46 a bird serious money was dropping out of the sky provided the marksmanship was up to scratch.
A shoot managed by those, who do not think it necessary to kill birds of prey, is a good sign, perhaps not the day to go off piste and the pheasants disturbed by my presence were flying away from the action. Not a way to share the countryside, even if there were a right of access.
But a little more about the picture because it is not a genuine photograph. I could not take all ten buzzards and the one kite in a single shot, not because that shot was not possible to get into the frame, but because of the high hedges on either side of the road. On one hand conservation activity has cleaned up the act of gamekeepering, it is questionable that hedge management has been influenced to the better by conservation. Together with 'White Van driver, agricultural vehicles the same width as heavy haulage, country based commuters, the over high hedge makes the roadway a less attractive place to walk than in the days of better hedge management.
I don't suppose there are many today, who can remember a thorn hedge so closely latticed with thorns that a magpie could could perch 10 inches away from a sitting blackbird safely brooding her eggs.
Thinking of Crab apples and pheasant I googled a recipe,
For Crab Apple jelly and Pheasant click.and
a real interesting Normandy Pheasant recipe'And for the photo I had to import a few extra birds from elsewhere.
