Melisseus

By Melisseus

Drink it in

There are a lot of flowers here that not only can we not identify, but when we consult the internet, we have never heard of them. Between us, we got corn marigold, ragged robin and purple loostrife; I'm vaguely aware of tormentil, but had no idea what it looked like. But we were completely lost with 'small restharrow', 'sea centaury' and 'marsh woundwort' - all of them beautiful. The last one looks very similar to a marsh orchid, so we thought we had struck gold, but the app was very sure of itself

The patch of yellow in the corner of the picture is (mostly) wild antirrhinum - snap dragons - which we did get, and are abundant here*. I was trying to include at least something close to me, in addition to the other layers in the picture - trying somehow to give an impression of the vertiginous sense of space (and danger) that clifftop walks create 

Like my description yesterday, the sea is 50 metres below. The rock on the left is bare and exposed because of recent rockfalls - maybe including those rocks below. The narrow, rectangular inlet, only 40 or 50 metres wide - must be a fault-line or a band of softer rock, getting eroded faster than the surrounding cliffs. The coast bends around through 90 degrees to become visible again in the distance - 2km away. There has to be at least one clifftop photo on this trip, and I thought this one was rich enough to justify its place

The extra is an insect impersonating an old English sheepdog. Again, I had to ask the internet. It is a drinker moth. Delightfully, it gets its name because it has a taste for dew drops

*or, more likely, common toadflax, I'm reliably corrected

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