A neighbour paying a visit

I've had a disjointed sort of day, with lots of catching up with council affairs, searching my photo archive for images for Stroud Preservation Trust's imminent exhibition and its Annual Report, as well as phone calls out of the blue. Our guests went to town to meet Helena for lunch after her job finished.

When they returned and we'd had a cup of tea, I noticed the cows who spend the summer ranging across the meadows behind our house in The Horns valley, were on the ridge opposite out garden. I though a blip might be possible, although it was very grey under the overcast sky, so I wandered down to the end of the garden, where I could get a view across the valley, above the tall trees growing beside the banks of the Lime Brook. The cows are brought onto the fields and meadows in May each year and then they are removed by November, presumably having become well fattened. This is a traditional way of rearing animals in wooded pastures, because there are few barriers between the grass, the encroaching scrub and the old woodlands. The cows go around and around gradually trimming back the vegetation and preserving the ancient landscape in the traditional way.

At the end of our garden, the land drops extremely steeply down towards the stream about fifty yards away on a bankside called Powers Hill as marked on the old Tithe map of 1840. It is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (an AONB), where any development is severely restricted. I have remarked before that it has several sites dating way back in time, with some roman remains having been found in several places. I like looking out over the valleys, and I have been thinking that very soon when the leaves all have fallen, we will get our wide view back which is one of the benefits of autumn, winter and early spring, as the view suddenly extends much more widely.

As I snapped the cows through the tree branches on the ridge opposite, and about 150 yards away, I heard some crunching and scuffling quite close by. I looked down and saw this chap about ten feet directly below me, busily munching on the branches of trees and the scrubby undergrowth of nettles, blackberries and bindweed. He was a bit startled to see me too, but not enough to interrupt his meal.

When I first started blipping, and had just bought this camera, I blipped another cow a bit further away from the hedge. It gives you a much better sense of the landscape which I've been describing. Bomble was also featured as he was keeping guard on the big sycamore tree that forms part of the old hedge boundary, and which was marked specially on that old Tithe map, as a boundary marker.