Harvest home

I awarded myself a gentle ride around not too many kilometers. I wanted to explore an off-road track while the ground is dry - I don't have the kind of tyres that cope with mud and water. The track is labelled 'Roman Road' on the map so, yes, it's pretty straight, and passes a small hill labelled 'fort' in gothic script 

A local web site describes the hill as "a prime example of how the slow destruction of our ancient monuments by agriculture portends a greater fate for us all"! They also lament the destruction of all evidence of a large Roman settlement that the road served. The agriculture certainty caught my attention today: the hill is completely covered with the purple flowers of borage, along with many tens of hectares of surrounding land; a striking and slightly surreal landscape

It did not surprise me that I also soon encountered beehives (extra). This crop is less than a kilometer from the premises of the largest commercial beekeeping business in Oxfordshire, and borage is a prolific source of nectar, as the tall towers of boxes attest. Incidentally, the extra also shows a classic example of Dutch Elm Disease, to the right of the hives

My pictures of the purple landscape were disappointing - the flowering is coming to an end and the colour is not intense enough to impress a camera. This close up is more effective, catching both the extreme hairiness of the plant and the ragged nature of the visitor's wing-edge after many days of flying