Common spider

Approaching Dowrog Common SSSI, appropriately enough from the direction of the Bug Farm, the way over the electrified fence was 'blocked ' by this beautiful diadem spider hanging in her web, hauling in a captured greenbottle fly. Once she had wrapped it I moved her to one side. The meal is secure and she will make a new web.

The Common, an ancient moor once crisscrossed by the tracks of monks from St David's, remains a challenging area to traverse. The high water table means that clumps of rushes and sedge*, tufts of coarse grass and  soggy reed beds require a sort of goosestepping gait that's very good exercise, if quite demanding,  for the leg muscles. And it's easy to be brought up short by pools and bramble patches that have to be negotiated.

Purple heather and golden gorse made a colourful  backdrop for the more eye-catching magenta spires of  marsh woundwort and the fiery tongues of bog asphodel seed heads. Both these in extras. 

*A useful little rhyme to remember which is which goes: 
 Sedges have edges, rushes are round,
Grasses are hollow right down to the ground.