Back home

What a splendid weekend of weather it was with wall-to-wall sunshine pretty well all the daylight hours. I had expected to be working for some of the time as I had been warned that the new fruit trees planted in the Pond Field had to have protection from the cattle. This would have involved constructing a fence around each tree - all 18 of them so far - but the ground is so hard that it would have been almost an impossible task to knock the posts in. So we left it for another time when rain has softened the earth.

On two evenings my cousin-in-law and I went on bat hunts. C-i-l is very interested in ecology and there is a roost of the rare greater horseshoe bat in nearby Brockley Hall. These creatures apparently follow well-defined routes when they leave the roost at dusk and their route takes them down the garden. Armed with a bat detector - a machine that converts the high-pitched "sounds" the bats emit when hunting - a bit like radar - into something that can be heard by the human ear. We weren't too successful on the first occasion as we had left it a little late, but on the second evening we saw and heard a good number.

It was quite an international weekend as well. I was walking a couple of the dogs (at that time there were four springer spaniels in residence) across one of the fields when I met c-i-l's elder brother who lives nearby. He had with him not only his wife, who is Dutch, but their four guests - two Dutch and two American. Then on Monday two other friends of the cousin and her husband arrived - one French and one Spanish. Quite an international gathering for a quiet corner of deepest Somerset.

I took a few pictures which I will post on Fern's blog.

We got home yesterday in the late afternoon to be greeted by our blackbird singing lustily from the sycamore (and he's back again this morning). But perhaps he has been singing all weekend and he wasn't really greeting us. Funny how, no matter how comfortable the beds when one is away, it's always good to get back to one's own bed.