Walking to meet the King of the Wood...

 Would you like to join me for a walk? It might be a long one mind!
 With the lovely fair weather we've been having lately we have had lots of soft summer evening walks before the children's bedtime... off through the woods and fields behind our house. The children have been in their element chasing sun-shadows beneath the leaves! Its done us all good.
This particular walk  happened on a rare afternoon off while the children were at school. We took a picnic and a flask of tea and headed off over the garden wall...

 Our new home seems to be all about Oaks... we have a younger Oak at the bottom of the garden, while the field we look out onto has entire clans of grand old Oaks striding across it. I love them! In this picture below you can just see our little house between the trunks...

 I love their twisting expressive gestures and the writhing textures of the bark...

 Across the fields and through the shimmering sea of wheat crop, eddies of sun shining on the swell of the breeze making the field sway in a constant  motion like the land's very breathing...

 And down into the leafy shade of our 'Badger Lane' - not its true name but one we like to call it by for the large neighbourhood of badger sets in its banks... I love the unfurling of fern fronds glowing like green candles in the sun...

A squirral's dinner table

 Come now into the woods... we walk all along its green feathered edges...

 ... and spy a tower through the trees...

We watched crows flying in and out of the small holes going up the tower's stem and could hear the rasping croaks of the young birds cawing for their parent's meal.

 This tower, a Victorian folly put up by the Lord Hilton of the time, reminds me of a tale and an illustration in a book of Grimm's fairy tales I had as a child, where to thwart some prophecy of disaster a King bricked up his daughter with only her Lady in Waiting for human company inside such a tower. Of course in the way of such tales when finally a passing hero broke open the tower, generations had passed and although she hadn't aged, the Kingdom of her father had crumbled and fallen to dust, his attempts at avoiding fate failed. I can't remember all of it or what it was called, but the picture of her emerging in bewilderment from the broken prison of her tower, dismayed at all that had passed to dust, stays with me still.
We just learned this week from a customer that a wealthy builder's merchant who once lived in the next row of terraces to ours, had at the time this tower was built by Lord Hilton, built one of his own that no longer stands today, just to outdo the Lord he made his tower taller and had a tea room underneath!

 Here's where we stopped for our picnic beneath a magnificent mighty Beech just beyond the Tower... would you like a cup of tea?

 The view across the valley from here is so peaceful, I'd like to come here alone to write sometime...

 Then home again through the birch wood, a gleaming net of sunlit leaves for a roof where a hushling leafsong whispers and sighs...

 On the way there is a true King of the wood, I was staggered when I first saw him, such ancient strength, such power of root and limb. This one below seems to me to have arms raised in some incantation or wild gestulation...

 And open armed, a powerful Monarch addressing his woodland subjects of Ash and Birch...

 At the top of this track (pic below) on the wood's edge we paused to look back down over the valley and watched a Kestral hunting below us. She took her kill to a treetop, when to our amazement a massive splay winged bird sliced into her skyspace to try to steal her kill... the sun flashed along a deep red back and there was no doubt that this was the enormous Red Kite that flew over our house when we first moved in!
But not to be outwitted, our tiny Kestral furiously mobbed the Red Kite with such tenacity that she actually saw him off back to the woods... just goes to show...!

 I hope you enjoyed coming along on our walk... thanks for joining in - it was too nice not to share, and we have a whole summer more of walks to look forward to and lots more picnics too!