[This is a guest contribution to our blog by nine year old Rose, who is staying here with us this week.]
It was about 5:00 pm yesterday when this happened. Poppy (our brown cocker spaniel) was barking away outside the cottage. My dad went cautiously to see what was the matter. A prickly hedgehog was curled up hibernating, intimidated by the noise.
“It was a shady spot under a Holly tree, the peaty earth was bare”, reported Daddy “and Poppy was standing in an angry pose, muzzle pointing down, barking aggressively at a small spiky ball”. This was all because Poppy had dug up his home!
Daddy took Poppy away and checked that she wasn’t hurt. Then he and Ian placed a stack of logs over the area to protect it from more attention from Poppy.
The floodlit photo below shows what the area of the garden looked like a bit later that evening and was taken from the loft of The Larches.
There’s been plenty of rain around in January but it has only stopped us from going up on the cloud covered high tops. There’s lots else to do!
We’ve been delighted to see that the snowdrops are well out already in the garden and on the lane running up to the cottage. These ‘harbingers of Spring’ as Wordsworth called them – have come really early this year and there are even daffodils appearing in the road to Thornthwaite off the A66.
Out yesterday in the late afternoon, I surprised myself how quickly I could get down to Bassenthwaite’s shoreline. Just 25 minutes walking from The Larches and I was looking across to Ullock Pike and Dodd Wood and facing a stiff wind from the NE, which was furrowing the lake’s surface and throwing up threads of plume as the waves hit the shore. A friendly greeting from a kissing couple was all but lost on the gusting wind.
Yes, you’ll have guessed that we are talking about the ospreys, who returned this year to the Derwent Valley in April. Since we built the Belvedere three years ago with its wide range view across the marshes, we’ve been keeping an eye out for the ospreys. In 2008 they moved, conveniently for us, to a site in Dodd Wood which was visible from the Belvedere, though hard to see in any detail as over 1.5 miles distant.
We received news however last week from Lee Gretton who was staying at The Larches in August. He confirmed what we thought: “The osprey’s nest is easy to view from the Belvedere. I spent quite a lot of time with the binoculars watching them flying across the marshes”. The photo at the top shows the view through the binoculars of the bare tree with the nest. The site is indicated with a grey magnifying glass at bottom left of the photo.