A almost perfect day for an
expedition, a light breeze, no rain and a few sunny spells.
This time we had five explorers, Calum, Fern, Robbie, Rowan
and Zack, with Philippa, Richard L., Sam, Sheila, Sharon and
Simon, as the adult helpers and Ellie and a Hungarian dog
called Huzal doing a lot of running around.
I took a few pairs of binoculars in the expectation of seeing
lots of birds and we saw two swans flying over before most
of the explorers had even got out of the cars. We left the
car park and set off along the beach, with our young explorers
keen to test the efficiency of their wellies by wading out
into the sea as far as they could. The only birds around were
two gulls and two oystercatchers but then a flock of starlings
showed up on Smudge’s field and we saw quite a few birds
after that.
The first hazard was a stream which, in drier weather might
have been no problem but recent rains had made it deep and
boggy and Sharon detected a leak in one of her wellies. The
rest of us made a very careful crossing except for Rowan who
took several flying leaps across. At this point Calum discovered
an old bottle and from then on all the explorers were scanning
the ground for interesting finds. A skull was found which
was defined by one explorer as being from a dragon –
not everyone was convinced.
We continued round the shore and reached a promontory, which
had a small cave and a good lookout point for seeing the whole
bay. Several explorers used binoculars to look at oystercatchers,
gulls and curlew and Calum spotted and identified Tracey’s
house in the distance. As we left the hill we found the remains
of an old wheelbarrow with a lot of cultivation ridges nearby,
a long way from the nearest houses. Shortly after this we
saw a group of geese take off and fly off towards Acharacle.
We carried on round the shore, looking at several bands of
clay and eventually cut across the moss to the river. This
had several large meanders and two places where the meanders
had been cut off leaving low flat areas in the peat. As we
followed the river upstream we saw a deer jump up and run
off across the moss.
This was one of those rare occasions when I forgot to bring
the Tunnock’s wafers, so we had to keep going. We stopped
at the old road bridge for a photograph and then walked back
down the road to the car park, getting back to the Blue Parrot
quite early for a change.
Everyone turned out a good picture this time; I picked out
Calum’s fine drawing of himself finding the bottle buried
in the peat.
John
Dye
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