Trees in a field
Suffolk sky
I like this Suffolk landscape, taken in 2009 between Aldeburgh and Thorpeness. The sky puts me in mind of the watercolour skies painted by Norfolk artist Edward Seago.
The house on the horizon is the well-known ‘House in the Sky’ at Thorpeness:
Dungeness again
A few more photographs of Dungeness from my recent visits.
Dungeness, July 2018
Aldeburgh garden
and Buff-tailed Bumblebee
My favourite birds
A game every birder likes to play is naming their favourite birds. Here are mine. My intention was to name my top five, but whittling them down that far proved too difficult.
Hobby
This summer-visiting small falcon is surely the most breathtakingly elegant flier in the whole bird world. It twists, turns and tumbles with the utmost ease as it catches dragonflies on the wing. I defy anyone not to find it thrilling.
Swallow
Another bird with a beautiful flight, fluid and graceful. One of birding’s great pleasures is seeing the year’s first Swallow flicking through the air, with its lovely blue back and long tail streamers. The archetypal harbinger of Spring.
Wheatear
Another migrant visitor to Britain. It’s always a delight to find a newly arrived Wheatear on a headland, with its lovely grey mantle and conspicuous white rump. They fly ahead of you for only a short distance before landing again, always giving you another look. Among the earliest Spring arrivals.
Tree Sparrow
Not an easy bird to find in southern England now, this charming relative of the House Sparrow has declined dramatically in recent times. I can no longer find one in Hampshire, but I know a couple of sites in Kent. The trouble is, they’re so reluctant to let you look at them, flying away as soon as they know you’re onto them and seldom returning until you’ve given up and gone. ‘Little so-and-so’s’ – that’s my name for them.
Spotted Flycatcher
With its muted plumage, the Spotted Flycatcher may not be an obvious choice for a list like this, but its subtlety has a charm of its own. When I was a child, almost every orchard seemed to contain one. Now they’re harder to find. Their insect-catching sally from a low branch is distinctive. One of the last summer visitors to arrive.
Dipper
A lifetime of holidaying on Exmoor made me love this delightful bird. Find a fast-running stream going through woodland, look for a prominent rock standing out above the rushing water, and there’s always a chance you’ll see a Dipper, bobbing up and down like a giant Wren.
Swift
In some ways the most magical of all birds. Their arrival in early May brings the feeling that summer really has arrived, and their departure only three months later is a sad moment. A river keeper on the Itchen told me that if there is reincarnation, he’d like to come back as a Swift. Easy to empathise with that.
Hampshire churches 12 – All Saints, Fawley
The parish church of All Saints, Fawley, is handsome, and prettily nestled among ancient yews, despite being close to Fawley’s giant oil refinery. Inside, the church is surprisingly large and rather bare.
Built in about 1170, it is on the site of an earlier 10C church, according to an information sheet in the church. No booklet was available.
The original dedication was to St Nicholas, the patron saint of seafarers. It was the last church they would see as they left Southampton Water.
The graveyard, too, is large, with an extension below the church to the east.
This church is included in both Betjeman’s 1958 Collins Guide and Simon Jenkins’s England’s Thousand Best Churches. It is described at some length (by David Lloyd) in the Hampshire volume of Pevsner.
