WHAT A FIND ON THE RIDGEWAY!

After a great service at Church - with an excellent sermon and some good hymns - some of them quite old - we went out for a drive.  We don’t go far these days because of the cost of petrol, but it’s still good to get out into the  beautiful Wiltshire countryside and there is plenty of that quite near to where we live.

Mr. HCB thought it would be good for us to eat our picnic sitting looking out over The Ridgeway, so off we went.  We sat in the car - and ate our sandwiches - Mr. HCB admitting that he hadn’t even thought about putting our folding chairs into the boot - with the windows open,  listening to the birds singing and the bees buzzing with the occasional light aircraft overhead.  You can’t beat the Wiltshire countryside in mid summer.  

The first shot at the top left of my collage is a wonderful cornfield with some great, fluffy clouds in a very blue sky.  At the bottom left is a shot looking the same way - complete with my handsome model - but there is quite a difference in the sky just half an hour later and in fact, we only just got back to the car before there was a quick shower of rain.

We saw lots of wild flowers.  Salsify or Goatsbeard, which looked like a very large dandelion head, and apparently is part of the dandelion family, the root of which can be eaten when young in a salad, or boiled. 

Black Horehound, on the left in the second row, is a herb that can be used for nausea, vomiting, spasms, coughs and also as an aid to digestion, by steeping the leaves in boiling water for 5 minutes.  I’m not sure I would be happy drinking that sort of potion, especially if I didn’t feel well anyway!

We didn’t see any poppies in amongst the corn, despite walking quite some way along The Ridgeway, but found the one in the middle near Liddington Hill, on our way home.  The pretty little flowers next to the poppy are Geraniums or Hedgerow Cranesbill and we saw literally hundreds of these along the roadside verges too. 

On the bottom right is a Cirsium or Plume Thistle and these had lots of hover flies and bees buzzing around them, so there is obviously lots of nectar inside the flowers.

I should mention the lads on their bikes - it was good to see they were all wearing helmets as the path is quite rough in places and a lot of damage could be done if they took a tumble although they did look seasoned cyclists, I must admit.  

According to a large noticeboard, near to where we parked, “The Ridgeway Path, starts impressively in the Avebury World Heritage Site,  and much of this still follows the route over high ground used by our ancestors.  This section is a broad track along the edge of rolling down land in the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, one of the largest tracts of chalk down land in southern England.”

This brings me to my last find - and something neither Mr. HCB nor I expected to find on this Ridgeway path - an old “cats eye”.  This was well embedded in the track and had obviously been there a long time, but I doubt since 2400 BC when the Avebury stone circle was constructed, but that’s something we will never know!

Both Mr. HCB and I feel just like this and couldn’t have expressed it any better:

“I’m enjoying the most perfect tranquillity, 
     free from all worries, 
          and in consequence 
would like to stay this way forever, 
     in a peaceful corner 
          of the countryside like this.”
Claude Monet


P.S.  You can find out more about cats eyes here.