This Sunday's Walk

It's been a bit of a shock to have such a dull grey day after all this fantastic winter sunshine.  Then it was doubly shocking to discover that the temperature wasn't much above feezing!  Anyway, Mark and I had committed some time to a decent length walk - and it wasn't raining or blowing a gale - so we put our boots on and 'got on with it'...

We started out by walking along some of the lanes to the north of our house.  To create a bit of motivation, we walked a route that we haven't done since the Autumn but it was still horribly like walking in a cloud.  After a while we picked up a lane that we've never walked which took us towards a National Trust dovecote.  We will have to walk the route again when the weather is better so that I can take some pictures.  The dovecote is really pretty but I couldn't get a worthwhile picture today.

We then moved off mossy tarmac lanes onto the seriously muddy stuff.  This is a bridleway so we knew that we were going to get a bit bogged down!

The amazing thing is that these unmade tracks are exactly the same size as the other local lanes - it's just that they've never been covered with tarmac.

After about a quarter of a mile we reached the Salwarpe river and the Droitwich canal.  This is the little footbridge over the Salwarpe.  The rest of the river is channeled into a mill race at this point.  It will be really pretty on a summer's evening!

I took this picture of a swan as we were walking back along the canal bank towards our lunch stop.  He posed for the camera rather elegantly here, I think!  As we got closer we realised that he was one of the youngsters from the swan family that live the other side of the mill.  We suspect that he has just been 'thrown out' to make way for the new cygnets.....

Mark thinks we walked around 6 miles today.  Not bad, considering the complete lack of motivation first thing!