On Sunday 30th October I was admiring Jupiter in Dartmoor’s pitch black skies when what looked like a satellite skimmed above the tower of the illuminated church (header photo only viewable in browser).
At first thought it was a satellite due to its steady glide, but then satellites don’t usually burn up in the atmosphere, which is what this object did.
It later turned out that the trail of light was part of the Orionid meteor shower. Above is a photo kindly donated to Wikimedia Commons to illustrate it.
This Orionid was seen outside the peak for this shower. It was even more lucky because the weather surrounding those nights had been pretty much torrential rain and the night sky had been tucked away behind cloud.
The Orionids aren’t anything to do with the constellation of Orion directly, but are so named because they appear nearby and their naming helps people (like me) to locate them. These meteors are actually fragments of Hally’s Comet, which you may have heard of.
Jupiter seen through the leaves of a silver birch tree (Dartmoor, November 2022)
This is a great time to observe the night sky and take in all the night has to offer. Redwings are arriving in their thousands and can be heard even over the most built-up and light-polluted parts of the UK. While the Orionid meteor flashed across the sky, redwings were covering the night sky in their own, invisible but audible way.
A few nights later the skies cleared after days of heavy rain and high winds. This gave a good chance to look at Orion, which was fixed perfectly from the back of where I was staying at the time of viewing:
The constellation of Orion: Dartmoor November 2022
Cropping a bit closer you can see the fierce glow of the Orion Nebula in the bottom right-hand part of the image:
Also prominent and not too far from Orion was the Pleiades:
The Pleiades: Dartmoor, November 2022
I’m using a new camera (Olympus EM-1 MIII) at the moment which has the ability to autofocus stars with a special feature. It didn’t actually work that well for me, though I was taking these photos handheld and may have had the settings wrong. It was a spur of the moment kind of thing, as much as my astrophotography attempts are to be honest!
I was really drawn to this large bright star to the left-hand side(!) of Orion. I need to be better at noting the locations of stars in relation to other constellations. Looking at Stellarium I think it’s either Mars or Betelgeuse.
A walk from Steyning, along the field edge with those lumpy Downs caught in a smoke-like haze. The sun beat over the hilltops, the trees naked, grey and brown without leaves.
The light was low over the Arun valley. To the south the Sussex coast was a band of grey concrete, the horizon between sky and sea broken only by the pale sticks of the offshore wind farms. The Isle of Wight rested out at sea to the west like a great sleeping sloth.
In March I visited Wild Nephin National Park at the Atlantic edge of Ireland, in Co. Mayo. I thought it was called Ballycroy National Park, but the name seems to have been updated.
The mountains here are the Nephin Beg range. There’s a great visitor centre here and a brilliant cafe run by a very friendly couple. I’d seen these mountains from afar for years but this was my first time in the National Park.
The National Park itself is said to be home to golden eagles, which I hadn’t realised were present in Ireland. It’s also where one of Europe’s largest blanket bogs resides, a special type in this region known as Atlantic blanket bog. Great name!
If you want to read more about this landscape I would recommend Sean Lysaght’s book Wild Nephin. Copies are available in the cafe also. I really recommend it, also Sean’s poems.
I’ve tried to work out the names of the mountains but may have some of them wrong. I’d welcome corrections in the comments and will amend.
Here are some images I took during our visit to Ballycroy:
Nephin mountainScree and stream bed on NephinMountain I don’t know the name of with cottage for scaleCroagh Patrick, possibly the most famous mountain in IrelandMulranny view towards mountainsSheep with lambsView of Croagh Patrick from Mulranny, across Clew BayCleggan Mountain Trail (boardwalk just visible on the left) and view towards AchillCnoc Leitreach (Owenduff Hill) I think!The Ballycroy visitor centre boardwalk loopSunny day in BallycroyGorse in flowerInishbiggle mountain (I think)Views towards Nephin Beg mountain rangeLocal farming in BallycroyAbandoned farmstead near Ballycroy. Note the succession of rushes, grasses and gorse onto the green of the ‘improved’ grassland.
Some images I’ve been meaning to post for a while from a visit to the Jurassic Coast in Dorset in September 2021. Some of the colouring in the images has come out a bit extreme and though not completely true to life or consistent across the pics it does give some of them more oomph!
The Jurassic Coast is one of the most significant places for fossils in the UK, and a site of many landslips – with one taking place not long after I was there. I remember looking at the area which did collapse and thinking how different it looked to other areas. I first visited this area in 2011, which was the year I launched this website, and my experiences in Dorset inspired me to set it up.
In September 2021, on the way back from a visit to Dorset, I managed what birders call a ‘life-tick’. This wasn’t a case of dropping in on a rare bird to add it to a life sightings list. No, instead it was visiting the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge for the first time in my life.
Many people in southern England will have witnessed Stonehenge’s standing stones as they crawl along the A303 in Wiltshire. But how many notice the many burial mounds?
How many people knew (maybe before they watched The Dig on Netflix) that the stones were a minuscule part of the site’s wider significance? That the site itself is a vast burial ground, with lumps and bumps (as seen above) dotted throughout this part of Salisbury Plain?
I am no expert on burial mounds, more like someone who knows a couple of garden birds when they see them. Burial mounds have different names, often they are classed as a type of earthwork or tumulus. There are bowl barrows, some of which are huge mounds of earth, built up upon the bodies and significant objects or possessions of a person or family. The South Downs have been described as one long ancient graveyard, with mounds evident across much of the 100 mile long ridge. In places like the South Downs and Salisbury Plain, the freshly turned chalk would have stood out for miles in these vast, wide open landscapes. It’s a bit like those of you with white Range Rovers or Teslas sitting on your paved-over front garden in Kensington. It’s a status symbol.
When I drive along the A303, perhaps once a year when heading south-west, I ask my fellow passenger(s) to play spot-the-burial-mound in the surrounding fields while I focus on the road. Stonehenge itself is not only special for its stones, it’s about the wider expanse, either side of the A303.
This place is important to many people, even beyond the tourists like me passing through the turnstiles at the new visitor centre. Along a lane that cuts across the A303, people had camped in mini-buses with flags flying high.
I don’t know why they were there, but the scale of the transport shows it wasn’t a stop of for a quick cup of tea.
One thing I loved about the stones was the life that had developed on them. Here you can see the growths of lichen and smatterings of algae.
Far more entertaining and animated than the lichens were the flocks of starlings sheltering from the gusts of wind (although it was actually quite hot) in the crevices of the stones.
Their behaviour was autumnal, gathering into groups, whistling and clicking. They will have been in this place when the stones were constructed thousands of years ago. Their numbers must have been incredible.
In addition to the starlings were rooks, a crow of ploughed land with a bill that looks to have been dipped in chalk. They will no doubt have found things to scavenge from the millions of visitors who make it to Stonehenge every year. The rook seen here was perched where a stone once was, with the tenon-type part of the rock used to secure the top stones in place when originally constructed.
In April 2015 my good friend Eddie Chapman and I visited the Hortobรกgy in the Great Hungarian Plain, a Unesco World Heritage Site designated as ‘an exceptional surviving example of a cultural landscape constituted by a pastoral society’. Hortobรกgy is a small town in the heart of the Hortobรกgy National Park, three hours east of Budapest by train and a little bit to the west of Debrecen. The area is a magnet for wildlife enthusiasts and we were visiting on our way to Romania by train. The main focus of our visit, being without a car and dependent on public transport, was the fishpond complex known as Hortobรกgy-Halastรณ (Halastรณ meaning ‘fishponds’ in Hungarian). Halastรณ was ‘dripping’ with birdlife. This vast area of water was cut through with a single gauge railway (which we never used) and a mile-long, single file footpath. We saw a long-eared owl sleeping in a bird box, six eagles in the sky at once, marsh harrier at every turn and many other wonderful species. In the town, storks cavorted in front gardens and battled for prominence on streetlamp platforms placed there to support the storks. I had wanted to visit the region for several years after reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s 1934 account in Between the Woods and the Water, as the teenage Fermor travelled from Rotterdam to Instanbul on foot. To see this area of land over ground hid none of Europe’s failings: people living in rubbish, vast areas of land devastated by extractive industries, huge infrastructure projects half built and deserted, rivers channelled, concreted and their banks denuded, and more rubbish, so much rubbish. But we met wonderful people who invited us into their homes and villages and guided us around the lands they call their own. The wildlife we encountered, for an early spring visit, was incredible. I recommend the excellent Crossbill Guide for anyone visiting.
The Great Hungarian Plain or ‘Puszta’ is known for its flatness. The phrase Puszta was created after the Magyar (Hungarian) population was decimated in the 1200s by Mongol invasion and then the black death. It refers to the emptiness of the landscape after those devastating events. The Magyars settled in the Great Plain at the end of the 800s and they are seen as the founders of the land we now know as Hungary.
230-140 million years ago the Plain was covered by the Tethys Sea, which is described as โthe motherโ of the Mediterranean. Later, the Pannonian Sea was created with the formation of the Alps and Carpathian mountains surrounding it. The eventual draining of water from the landscape led to a unique mixture of soils, namely loess and clay, the former created when glaciers grind down underlying bedrock. As a student I read Anton Chekhovโs The Steppe and other stories and fell for these endless landscapes and the people (in Chekhovโs case Russian) who had to live from them. Chekhov didnโt miss their wildlife though, his short story The Steppe reveals its hidden life, death and beguiling beauty. As in Chekhov, first impressions of the Great Plain give the sense of a deserted landscape. In reality it was alive with wildlife: white stork, buzzard, roe deer, corn bunting, butterflies, wildflowers, boxing hare, red fox. These were only the things we could see. We missed the steppe tarantula and ground squirrels.
In the town of Hortobรกgy white storks were a common sight. They arrive in spring from their wintering grounds in Africa, building their famously large nests on platforms erected to support them. We saw tens of white stork in the town itself, some seen at dusk walking around in front gardens, sometimes in very small spaces. From a distance they looked like people, blurred either by heatlines or crepuscular light. We noticed that house sparrows were building nests of their own underneath the mass of twigs put together by the stork. There was tension between the storks with a number attempting to intrude upon the scene pictured above. The birds are silent but for a bill โclackingโ gesture, evidently territorial.
Yellow wagtail is a spring migrant to Europe which is in severe decline in Britain. There were a good number of them on the Plain. Being bright yellow with a grey head, itโs easy to mistake the more urban and common grey wagtail for this bird.
The only way for us to get around was to travel by train, the only time that we were really able to mix with local people. For the untrained, Hungarian is a pretty inaccessible language, with no relation to Latin or Western languages, it descends (or ascends) from Finnish. We tried our best but could only really master egรฉszsรฉgedre (‘to your health’ or ‘cheers’) after a week in Hungary. The railways were typically post-war Communist, pumping out black fumes and chuntering along. But they were always on time and provided a lifeline for people who had no other means of transport. No one gets around on horseback like they did when Patrick Leigh Fermor visited in the early 20th century, when ‘carts drawn by horses and oxen easily outnumbered the motor cars’ (p.44).
Both Eddie and I were struck by the struggles of people in the places we visited. It was at times impossible to see the trip as a holiday, particularly because of what we saw from the windows of our train as it passed from Debrecen over the border into Romania. I like old buildings crumbling around and lament their loss from London (I know there is a housing crisis) and took a few photographs of some that were around the Halastรณ station.
Having travelled in the Czech Republic and Poland, Iโm not a big fan of what communism has done to the landscape. The former Soviet Union has also contributed greatly to global warming with its industrialisation of much of rural Europe. Its architectural merits are also lost on me. Iโm not a fan of what modern capitalism is doing either, via agricultural intensification, oil and fracking. But agricultural intensification is something that communism welcomed with open arms, rounding up the smaller farms and destroying millions of hectares of natural grasslands, woods and rivers in the process. Today agricultural intensification is the biggest threat to the steppe grasslands of Europe and Asia, making them some of the most threatened habitats on earth.
This was the door to the station building, now housing sparrows. I should say that dilapidated housing and other buildings do not mean people in the area are suffering or unhappy. Here people seemed perfectly content with life on the surface. No one was homeless and the National Park appeared to be offering good support to the local community through ecotourism.
More charming for the outsider were the individual thatched cottages dotted across the landscape. The evidence of how inhospitable this landscape is for trees can be seen by the two here sheltering next to the cottage. Whether this was used to shelter livestock or dry hay is unclear to me.
We arrived at the Halastรณ fishponds on foot. The reeds from 2014 were being cut and piled into these pyramids, neatly put in rows. The thatch from the cottage in the previous image will likely have come from the vast reedbeds of Halastรณ. The reedbeds supported an amazing array of birds, this even before the spring migrants had arrived.
Marsh harriers could be seen at every corner of the landscape, flying low over the reedbeds in search of food. Upon leaving, we were shaking our heads at the sheer number of these birds of prey. We missed them when we’d left.
Another bird of interest for us was the pygmy cormorant, relative of the great cormorant which I know from the River Thames in London, and most waterbodies, really. Seeing these birds perched on branches low in the reeds was like looking back into the prehistoric swamps of Europe.
A line of dying trees at the edge of the fishponds were fitted with open bird boxes. The boxes were a form of social housing for kestrels, what I later found to be lesser kestrel (thanks to Nigel Spring for pointing this out to me), a separate species to the common kestrel we have in Britain. There were several more kestrels out of sight but my lens couldnโt quite capture the scene.
Perhaps the biggest source of amusement for us was from this long-eared owl which was roosting in the same box three days running.
Ever since reading the poems of Anna Akhmatova and the film The Cranes are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957), I had wanted to see cranes. They are returning to England as a breeding bird for the first time in 400 years, once being a common species of marsh and fenland before their habitat was drained for agriculture. These birds were often eaten by royalty in England. The Latin name Grus grus points directly to the noise they make. These birds flew over our heads as we watched the kestrels and sleeping owl.
For wildlife to be protected successfully in the long term there has to be some benefit for humans as well. Fishponds have been present in Eastern Europe since medieval times and were created for royalty. Today they have a much more wide ranging commercial value and there is conflict to be found between those who like to pull fish from the water and those who like to watch birds pull fish from the water. Here we happened upon workmen extracting fish from one pond into the back of a lorry.
Climbing up one of the lookout posts, Eddie happened across six eagles flying on thermals over the fishponds. I managed to get this photo of what we think are mainly white tailed eagles with a possible lesser spotted eagle, though that may have been out of the picture. Later we saw a white tailed eagle sitting in the mudflats of a drained fishpond, taking to the air with deep wafts of wingbeats.
The sunsets of the Puszta are famous. We encountered this scene on our first day walking back from the fishponds. At this point we were turning back and forth between the setting sun and a pristine red fox trotting along the edge of the path. Corn buntings flocked and roe deer attempted to escape our view with nothing but the blur of the horizon to disappear into.
Evening meadows, Farthing Downs, London, June 2015
It’s that time of year when the meadows are reaching their height. Here you can see the yellow rattle in flower, soon field scabious will appear to be fed on by burnet moths and bumblebees.
Please click through for more of my pictures of Farthing Downs on Flickr
I am walking the North Downs Way back to front, upside down and inside out. This is a view to Chevening House, where the British Foreign Secretary resides, currently Conservative Phillip Hammond. I’d rather be on foot.
Click through for my album of North Downs Way pictures on Flickr.