The View from North America

A glorious day! Not just sunny and bright, but mild too. We revisited another one of the walks I checked from the Walking South Yorkshire book, not so very far from last week's but technically in Barnsley. This is the view from the ruined North America Farm to the south of Langsett Reservoir. The farms locally were depopulated when the reservoir was built in an effort to avoid contamination to the drinking water supply. The name came from the habit of calling outlying farms after faraway parts of the world. During the Second World War, tanks used the farm for target practice prior to the Normandy landings. A lot of the conifer afforestation from the turn of the century has now been cleared and the area has been replanted with native species to encourage wildlife.
We didn't see a lot of birds today, although we did spot some redpolls and enjoyed watching a kestrel hunting. The most surprising thing was the number of fungi still fruiting in the woodland, including Fly Agaric and Grisettes.
The river which feeds this reservoir is the Little Don, or Porter, which is one of the tributaries of the Don, my oneriver project.