Scarcely Recognisable

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I frequently concentrate so much on the process of photography that I don’t actually notice what it is I’m photographing. Maybe one day, it will become second nature enough for that to change but for now it certainly remains true.

IMG_9856_Tatty_Dragonfly There we were, pedalling slowly through the marsh heading for La Village sur la Sèvre, when a dragonfly flew aggressively after another, defending its territory. It returned and perched obligingly on its favourite sunny fence post. There are a few exceptions to my general “don’t really notice what I’m looking at” syndrome and one of those is when I’m looking at a particularly tatty specimen with only three wings instead of the usual four. Given the blue pruinosity, it looked a bit like a Black-tailed Skimmer (Orthetrum cancellatum) without a) a black tail, and b) a right forewing. How on earth it got this beaten up this early in the season, I don’t know. We continued.

IMG_9858_Scarce_Chaser Approaching la Sèvre, we crossed a bridge over a small canal where another Black-tailed-Skimmer looking critter was using a bare stick as a hunting perch. This critter actually had a black tail though rather less than I’d expect. I couldn’t approach close through the banks of stinging nettles but I snapped it anyway for the record. At least it was in good condition with a full compliment of wings.

I may have notice things like a glaringly obvious missing wing but what I had failed to see was the tell-tale dark brown triangles at the base of the hind-wings in both these specimens. The brown triangle is diagnostic of Chasers (Libellulidae). Both three-winged and four-winged specimens were chasers. Mr. Three Wings has a broader body and no black segments on the abdomen. He’s a very much worse for wear Broad-bodied Chaser (Libellula depressa). [Ed: I’d be very depressed if I were in that state, too.] The pristine second specimen with the last two segments of its abdomen black is a Scarce Chaser (Libellula fulva) and and constitutes my third new species of the trip. I’d like to find a female which apparently has a rather fetching orange coloured abdomen.

Must keep looking.

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À la Marais

We tend to buy a French newspaper to have access to a relatively reliable weather forecast showing the whole country. This way, we can avoid intentionally driving into storms. We bought one in Luché-Pringé and everything looks set fair at the moment. Fair, that is, from a tourist’s point of view. In addition to looking at the paper’s weather maps, we stumble our way through some of the articles in our school grade French and it seems that it is not only Angleterre that has “enjoyed” a much sunnier and drier than usual early spring this year. Much of France is suffering from a water shortage already and the season is only just starting. The summer proper is yet to come.

I have always regarded the French as masters of water management. Many of France’s rivers are damned in many places creating artificial lakes and reservoirs. 15% of France’s electricity is generated using hydroelectric power driven by much of this water. 80% of France’s water electricity comes from nuclear power, the generators for which are cooled by much of this water. The French tactics may not be the best for certain downstream ecological issues, rather like America’s Hoover dam upsetting the ecology of the Colorado downstream, but they rarely run short of water. When they do, you know something unusual is happening. Not good! Failed crops and uncooled nuclear reactors are a very undesirable things.

We reprogrammed Sally Satnav to “avoid tolls” and told her to leave a very wet Loir behind us and take us to Arçais in the Marais Poitevin where our friends mike and Linda live. “Oh look”, said Navigation Officer Francine, “she’s picked the same route I would have chosen”. Phew! One really doesn’t want two navigators arguing the toss. After a pleasant and cordial journey of about three hours, we arrived in the marais to be greeted by a very welcoming Mike.

A marais is a marsh. The Marais Poitevin is just inland from La Rochelle on the west coast and is an area drained by a network of canals spilling into the [river] Sèvre Niortaise. French gets unusually complex and precise at this point. Not content with just one word for canal, here the French have five words for canal depending upon the size of the waterway in question.

P1010111_Arcais_port Shortly after our arrival, Francine and I went wandering to refresh our memory of our surrounding marsh countryside. We are relatively frequent visitors to this neck of the French woods and this is the first time we’ve ever seen any of the smallest drainage channels completely dry. Quite clearly the water shortage is real. The country certainly needs some serious rain even if we tourists don’t. The main canals are still very wet as can be seen from this shot of the embarcadère in Arçais but the worrying, early signs of drought are there.

P1010137_Marsh_Tourists Fortunately the locally valuable but seasonal work of punting bus loads of tourists around the marsh in barques can go on unhindered for the moment.

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Luché-Pringé

There are two rivers called the “Loire/Loir” in France: there’s the main “La Loire” (female) and the more minor “Le Loir” (male). Le Loir  is a tributary of La Loire. La Loire is the one everyone has heard of; this is La Loire of wine fame and the longest river in France. We are staying a couple of nights on  Le Loir at Luché-Pringé. The interesting thing, it seems to me, about Le Loir is that it is a sizeable river but it is non-navigable. Its non-navigability appears to me to mean that the wildlife relying on it is left pretty much undisturbed. Five years ago when our car was en panne (broken down) at this site, I wasn’t into Odonata which is a shame because, as evidenced by the Banded Demoiselle that greeted our arrival, the banks of the river were alive with them.

There are many things I could not have done with real film or, at least, real film like Fuji Velvia (over)rated at a paltry 50 ASA. (A lot of photographers reckoned it was more like 40ASA.) Don’t get me wrong, Velvia was (is?) fabulous colour film in terms of its quality but flexible, it most definitely was not. I now have my camera set to 400 ASA in strong light and 800 ASA in poorer light. This gives a much better chance of snagging the Odonata in which I’ve become so interested. The other thing I’d never have done with real film is what I did the day we arrived, wandering slowly along the banks of Le Loir; our river bank was seething with damselflies of several kinds and I rattled off a ridiculous 130 shots, equivalent to four rolls of relatively expensive film. Thank Darwin for reusable pixels!

The following (full) day was pretty much the same story. Two days into our holiday and I’d shot the equivalent of eight rolls of film. The stock requirement for an eight-week trip just doesn’t bear thinking about.

IMG_9678_Banded_Demoiselle Most prevalent were Banded Demoiselles (Calopteryx splendens) which were flitting everywhere sunny. These, I recognise almost instantly with no more than a brief pause to exclude the very similar Beautiful Demoiselle (Calopteryx virgo). Every now and then the action would increase as a female zoomed past ardently pursued by a male or two.

IMG_9688_Common_Clubtail My usual approach is to grab pictures as I can and to identify what I’ve shot back at base with the aid of a laptop screen and a book. Just occasionally, however, you know you’re shooting something new. This was the case on our first afternoon when we snagged something unusual. The something unusual was clearly a Clubtail Dragonfly, a Gomphid. Light and position were not great but I could see it was eating something. The something turned out to be a damselfly whose head had already been been devoured but whose abdomen and wings still protruded from the Clubtail’s jaws. “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” This was my first sighting of a Common Clubtail (Gomphus vulgatissimus).

IMG_9766_Western_Clubtail Day Two, a full day, produced more photo opportunities of Clubtails and I fell into my usual self-made trap of assuming that they were all the same species. Not so. Subsequent closer inspection of the pictures showed that we’d been seeing and snapping both Common Clubtails and Western Clubtails (Gomphus pulchellus). This wasn’t new but it was still less than familiar. I was a happy camper.

IMG_9663_Goblet-marked_Damselflies It’s also very easy to be a little dismissive of blue-coloured damsels. Another mistake because there are many similar species. Again, I tend to snap away for later perusal expecting little exciting. Once again I was mistaken. Amongst a myriad White-legged Damselfies (Platycnemis pennipes) and a lone Common Blue Damselfly (Enallagma cyathigerum), I saw something less than usual (to me, anyway). Don’t blame me for the less-than-appealing English name of these creatures but I am almost certain I have snagged a tandem pair of Goblet-marked Damselflies (Erythromma lindenii).

Yikes! Two new species is as many days. It can’t go on, there aren’t that many species available. 😉

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Jeux avec Sally

Our first main target is the Marais Poitevin, ~30m/50km inland from La Rochelle halfway down the French west coast, where we have friends living. It would be a trip of ~330m/550km trip from Neufchâtel-en-Bray which, though perfectly possible dragging Guillaume, is not exactly desirable, especially as we are in no hurry. 🙂 We decided to split the journey around Le Mans and have a couple of nights on Le Loir in a quaint little village called Luché-Pringé. About five years ago, this had been the site of our only travelling breakdown so our fingers were firmly crossed for better fortune this time.

Enter Sally satnav who, just to add to the atmosphere, was switched into giving instructions in French and distances in kilometres. What we had not done was tell her to avoid tolls, so, being set to find the fastest route, it came as no surprise when she wanted us to hit the autoroute just after Rouen. We’d been expecting this, ignored her instructions and followed Navigation Officer Francine’s route. “Calcule encore”, said Sally, as she searched for the next junction that would get us back to her autoroute and increased her ETA. This pattern was repeated as Evreux and Dreux fell behind us: “calcule encore”, repeated Sally as she increased her ETA yet further and tried to convince us to hit the autoroute. Even as we were nearing Le Mans with our destination lying to the south east of the town, she kept trying to get us on the autoroute to the north and west of Le Mans. By now, her ETA had increased by about 30 minutes.

“Well, you did ask for the quickest route”, I hear you say, and you’d be quite right. However, here’s my surprise. As we got even closer to Le Mans, Sally finally got the point and abandoned her autoroute fixation; she picked a sensible cross-country route whereupon her ETA now fell by 20 minutes. I’m quite sure that, at several of her previous “calcule encores”, a cross-country route would have been quicker than her beloved autoroute.

We arrived at our campsite beside Le Loir and were greeted by a Beautiful Demoiselle flitting across our chosen pitch. “That’s promising”, I thought.

You really can’t beat a Navigation Officer.

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Disorganised Departure

You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m a novice at this travelling game. Preparations seemed to be going well. Two days before our departure I went a fetched Guillaume and gave him his traditional pre-departure bath. I was obviously keen because he got a very rare waxing as well – even his roofline got waxed. I changed over to the lightweight gas cylinder and re[aced the large waste water container with the smaller one, largely to make space for a sunshade base. Guillame was ready.

We’d been down to Halfords and secured some necessary supplies, including headlamp deflectors which were on special: three for two – pairs, that is, clearly we don’t have three headlights to correct. We’d also decided to get a set of euro registration plates to obviate the need for a GB sticker. Good old Halfords; not only were they running short of letters and numbers but they had run out of euro-plates anyway. Darn! Back to the trusty old method, then. I washed the car and began loading it.

Sunday morning arrived. I finished loading the car with those inevitable last minute things whilst Francine packed Guillaume’s fridge with a few days supply of food to get us started. We finished putting the house into long term storage, hitched up and set off.

Having covered about half a mile, I suddenly realized that I’d forgotten the headlamp beam converters. [Mutter, mutter.] Flipping a U-turn with Guillaume on the back is at best très difficile and occasionally impossible. I made an irritatingly slow circuit of a 3-ile block and returned to retrieve them.

I practiced reversing with Guillaume on the back and we were off again. We had left quite early so there was no time pressure, at least. Phew!

About half way to the ferry, whilst staring at the back of a fellow holiday maker, I realized with self-flagellating annoyance that I had also forgotten to a-fix our magnetic GB-plate. I think I’d psyched myself up for a smart new set of euro-plates which had not been available, and swept it out of my mind. What a tidy little thinker I am. Unfortunately my thinking was of course. Drat! Double drat!!

Despite the M20 being closed in addition to our false start, we arrived at Douvre in time to be loaded onto an earlier ferry. [Ed: Excellent!] Another two hours of driving on the blissfully clear French roads got us to our favoured in and out campsite at Neufchatel-en-Bray for our first night’s stop.

Not quite the mark of a seasoned professional with about thirty years experience. ❗

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Last Day of Bliss

Our last day in the New Forest and it was a wonderful start: yet more clear blue skies and little in the way of wind. Our legs had recuperated and our bike wheels were hopefully now protected against any further deflating experiences, so Francine searched our maps for a suitable ride. It’s the weekend again so everywhere would be busy but harbours are usually interesting so we headed for Christchurch Harbour.

IMG_9597_Airfield_Memorial On another mixed outbound route of forest tracks and quiet country roads, we came across what I thought was a particularly tasteful memorial to all the second world war airfields in the New Forest. Naturally, being on the south coast, this area was in the thick of it.

IMG_9602_Crabbing Our eventual target turned out to be something of a trip down Memory Lane for Franco ‘cos we ended up at Mudeford Quay. In fact, the “memory” part of Memory Lane was sadly lacking ‘cos it was far too far back in mists of time that, as a child, I had been brought here by my parents. I can remember their telling me but, when I arrived I had no recollections of the place at all. I did remember from the stories that it was a hotbed of recreational crabbing for children. Nothing had changed, clearly; the quayside was lined with people hopefully dangling hand lines to yank out the poor, unsuspecting crabs.

Much more interesting was a display of the unhurried launching of the local life boat. I was looking forward to it sliding down the slipway and crashing into the water with an accompanying dramatic splash. In fact it was a very gentle, measured affair controlled by an odd-looking tractor device with the life boat still in some form of launching/recovery cage. Steering the whole outfit down the not-much-leeway-for-error launching ramp looked like a challenge requiring keen concentration.

IMG_9607_Life_Boat_launch IMG_9612_Life_Boat_launch IMG_9615_Life_Boat_launch

Apart from Franco missing a turn and noticing only because Francine never caught up, the return trip was blissfully uneventful – no nasty flint punctures (but it’s early days). The promised cloud later in the day arrived and the temperature dropped acccordingly for our packing in preparation for tomorrow’s departure. What a very welcome stunning week and a half this trip has been; we could not have asked for anything better.

Now, what next?

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In With Flint

Or was it “In Like Flint”? How time dulls the memory. [Ed: And alcohol!] Anyway, yesterday something like a flint went into my bicycle tyre. So, today it was in with flint protection.

Cycling may be great fun in our view but the ever-present risk of punctures due to pneumatic tyres occasionally rears its ugly head and bites us. My puncture repair using tired rubber solution at the pub in Bank yesterday seemed fine in that it got me the eight miles back to Guillaume successfully. However, this morning my rear tyre was once again as flat as a crèpe.

There are various technological deployments marketed for protection against punctures. There are inner tubes pre-filled with supposedly hole-sealing slimy goop. (What kind of spell-checker doesn’t understand “goop”?) When you get a puncture, the leaking slimy goop, which, if the pictures are to be believed, is a tasteful radioactive green colour, is said to congeal in the hole thus sealing it. I didn’t fancy this approach because of the mess it might make of the inside of the tyre and because, if it didn’t seal, the slimy goop residue might make any subsequent old-fashioned repair très difficile. More appealing were bands of plastic armour which are to be inserted into the tyre to protect the inner tube. Though “guaranteed to work” (yeah, right), these armoured bands ought to enable a return to traditional puncture fixing should the need arise. Worth a try – we bought some. Incidentally, the bands are also radioactive green. What is it with vivid green and puncture protection?

I’m always leery of items that say things like, “easy to fit”; if they have to make such a claim then it’s rarely true. Here we have the wheel off the bike with the tyre half-off (one bead off) the rim. Given a 26 inch wheel, one now has to juggle a loose-fitting 84 inch/7 feet/2+ metre (the ends overlap) band of plastic armour into the correct position within the tyre (inside the tread). One how has to support the wheel and keep the band in place while you finagle the inner tube’s valve back through the hole in the rim and tuck the inner tube back in place all around the wheel. The wheel, of course, is on its side, pivoting on the hub, and gravity is attempting to reposition the band every time you let go of it in order to free a hand to insert the inner tube. There are several jobs on this planet for which two hands do not come close to being adequate. Darwin please take note. Eventually, I juggled the protection in at the rate of one beer per bicycle.

IMG_8578_Grey_Wagtail_750 We had a very brief ride around the site just to make sure that all was back together correctly but the ol’ legs were feeling yesterday’s Bank excursion. Added to this, Francine has managed to damage one little piggy – the left one that went, “wee, wee, wee, all the way home” – by delivering poor Guillaume a swift drop-kick so her foot is bruised and sore. I left her soaking up the last rays of the afternoon while I took our favourite local wander down to Tiptoe to see what critters I could find. What do you know, the elusive Grey Wagtail (Motacilla cinerea) was dipping around on one of the stream’s shingle banks. Not the greatest of shots (Wellington boots in the stream, still relatively distant and cropped) but it shows the main distinguishing features: grey back, yellow rump).

Another one for the collection. 🙂

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Cycling Gauntlets

At first glance, cyclist appear to have been well catered for in the New Forest. Choosing my words carefully, there are quite a few purpose made cycle tracks around various areas of the National Park. For casual cycling round and round, going nowhere in particular, cycling just for the sake of it, these are perfectly fine and certainly are capable of producing some interesting rides. Upon closer inspection, particularly if one wants to get from A to B (or, in our case, from Sway/Brockenhurst to Bucklers Hard), it soon becomes clear that the various sets of tracks are not adequately linked. The cycle tracks do not form an interlinked network that readily get one from many As to many Bs. Someone should have studied the beautifully interlinked set of cycle tracks for the Châteaux à velo network near Blois in France.

On one of the roads out of Brockenhurst, there is a glaring example of cyclists not being considered – in this case,  being ignored completely. Some body, presumably Hampshire Council, though it could be a more local body, has seen fit to install several chicanes, so-called traffic calming measures. These chicanes constrict the width of the road to a single lane. Chez nous, such chicanery is almost invariably installed with due consideration to cyclists, namely a straight-through route, wide enough only for bicycles, on the near side, i.e. in the gutter. These bicycle “bypasses” enable cyclists to continue their journey unhindered without the need either to slam on their brakes or to swing out, in life-threatening fashion, into the main flow of what is general inconsiderate motorized traffic. (The highway equivalent of “sail before steam” appears to have been largely lost in good ol’ Grande Bretagne, these days.) Are there any bypass tracks for cyclists at these chicanes on the Brockenhurst road? Absolutely, not – not a single one. In the environs of Brockenhurst, cyclists must run the gauntlet by moving out and holding up impatient drivers approaching from the rear (the chicane is wide enough only for a single car) or occasionally be forced to stop their already difficult uphill progress in order to make way for an opposing car bulldozing its way through the chicane in the opposing direction. “Me, give way to anyone? Never!” Tourists are encuraged to rent bikes, here. Why no simple straight-through route in the gutter for bicycles, especially for these occasional (i.e. inexperienced) cyclists?

Stone age man was well acquainted with the benefits of flint. Stone age man knew that flint was amazing stuff. By “knapping” flint, i.e. skilfully smashing it with another stone, slender razor sharp shards of flint could be produced. When such slender sharp shards were bound onto the tips of wooden shafts, spears and arrows were made capable of killing either a passing deer or even another stone age man. Flint produced some very useful ancient weaponry. Another genius, perhaps the same one that designed the cyclist-unfriendly chicanes around Brockenhurst, thought flint would be a good material to use to “pave” the not-quite-interlinked cycle tracks around the forest. Without question, flint is hard-wearing. Tons of flints are probably loaded onto lorries/trucks, then dumped from said trucks onto the forest tracks before being bulldozed (this time by a bona fide bulldozer rather than an impatient car driver) along the tracks to form a reasonably durable surface. This imagined sequence seems to produce at least three processes that might cause the flints to bang together: loading, unloading and bulldozing. They may not be intentionally or skillfully banged together as in knapping but the law of averages suggests that, eventually, some will bang together in such a way that, just by chance, a slender sharp shard resembling a stone age arrow head might be formed.

IMG_9593_Pub Today, our legs had recovered from Bucklers Hard. On yet another pleasant, sunny day in the New Forest, we decided to take a trip out on our bikes to a painfully cute pub at a village intriguingly called Bank. Francine did what she could to join together as many unlinked cycle tracks as possible and designed a route. One of the roads required to link together some of the disjoint tracks was the chicane-rich road to and from Brockenhurst. Battling a fearsome headwind, we survived the cyclist-unfriendly chicanes. Eventually, after 12 miles of a variety of surfaces, we arrived at Bank where the pub, mercifully, was still open for a pint of refreshment. My heart soared as I noticed a barrel of Gales HSB behind the bar. Marvellous, unpressurized beer straight from a tap driven into the barrel. No better way of serving the country’s finest beer.

Suitably refreshed, we left the now closed pub to commence our return journey. Two other sets of cyclists arrived expecting refreshment. I informed them that the pub had stopped serving. Rule Britannia! We returned to our bikes only to discover that poor ol’ Franco’s bike’s rear tyre was as flat as a crêpe. Merde! Encore merde! I upended my bike, went through the mucky process of removing the rear wheel and started searching the tyre. “Ah, je le trouve!” The culprit? A slender sharp shard of flint that would have made any stone age man consider himself well armed.

IMG_9595_Franco I had two puncture repair outfits. Sounds like a case of belt and braces. Rubber solution goes off in time and I had yet to replace either of these this season. The first tube of rubber solution was completely desiccated. Hopefully this was the older of the two. I tried the second kit and mercifully found liquid rubber solution. After a heart=stopping while or two, Franco was on the road again, albeit grubby from a pub-side emergency repair. Front wheels are so much easier.

This is actually the second flint-induced puncture I’ve suffered in my New Forest cycling career. I’d like to meet the genius who thought flint was a suitable material where pneumatic tyres are prevalent and shake him or her warmly by the throat. Actually, I’d like to have a serious talk with whoever is responsible for bicycle planning in these parts.

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Very Lou Reed

Perfect Day’s do not come much more perfect than this. There hasn’t been even a hint of a cloud in the sky from dawn ‘til dusk and the unbroken sunshine has not been accompanied by any chill wind. In fact, there was very little wind at all. Today was cloudless, shirt sleeve weather – utter bliss.

IMG_8523_GSW The local wildlife seemed to be enjoying the conditions, too, starting with a Great Spotted Woodpecker visiting us for breakfast. Shooting through a perspex window doesn’t help but it looks reasonable with a little contrast and colour adjustment. 😉

IMG_9570_Wood_Anemone Having put our winter-weary legs through a 27ml/43km slog yesterday, our muscles were feeling the effects today so we decided to give them a bit of a rest by wandering down to a hostelry in Sway for a bite of lunch. It’s about 4 miles there and back. Francine came expecting a bit of a spring flower fest but has been a little disappointed thus far. However, on the way she did spot our first Wood Anemone of the season.

At the pub, we munched some very enjoyable whitebait while watching what I assume was some kind of survey plane flying very straight lines back and forth in the crystal clear sky. Each pass was just a little displaced from the previous track so I believe it was taking aerial photographs in strips. Maybe our lunch will end up on Google Earth. 🙂

IMG_8529_Newt Since neither of us is very good at sitting doing nothing, even in stunning weather, the later afternoon called for a swift check on the wildlife at Tiptoe. The water is very clear now and we spotted some kind of newt lurking on the bottom. The choices are limited, there being but three British newts but I don’t know which this is. The water is a little more difficult to correct for – should’ve used the polarising filter but I was too hurried– so the shot is a little murky but it’s worth sharing.

IMG_8528_Pond_Skaters We snapped several Pond Skaters, too. It’s amazing how little I seem to notice when concentrating on getting a shot. I was particularly surprised to find, when loading the pictures on a the computer, that one Pond Skater was actually a mating couple of Pond Skaters. Now how did I miss that?

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Bucklers Hard

With a another fine day in the offing, this one with only a very light breeze, things were looking good for a bicycle trip. Yesterday, after our visit to friends, we called in at Beaulieu, home of the National Motor Museum of Lord Montagu fame. Our stop turned out to be little more than an excuse for another ice cream. There was, however, a footpath covering the two miles to Bucklers Hard. Had the day been less advanced, we’d probably have wandered down but we left it for another day.

IMG_8507_Brimstone Today, Bucklers Hard looked like a fine target for a bike ride, looking a little over 10 miles from our campsite. Navigation Officer Francine selected a route combining some of the New Forest bike tracks and quieter side roads and country lanes. We set off and, after a very pleasant 12 miles, arrived at Bucklers Hard at 12:15 PM in excellent time for a spot of liquid refreshment or two at the Masters Arms, the local hostelry. En route I counted at least half a dozen Brimstones and what I suspect was a Small White. Spring is definitely here when the butterflies are back. Just for the record, here’s my first butterfly snap of 2011.

“What is Bucklers Hard?”, I hear you ask. Well, these days it is little more than a very pleasant waterfront tourist attraction, though it does have a marina for big boys’ toys on the Beaulieu River upon which it sits. What it was was a late 18th and early 19th century shipyard. It is not enough that we Francophiles come here and wear Wellington boots that daily remind us of defeat at Waterloo but we also set out to visit the birthplace of several of Admiral Lord Nelson’s ships of the line that smashed the combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar. Mon Dieu!

There were several slipways for ships at Bucklers Hard which, given its proximity to the New Forest, was admirably situated for wooden shipbuilding. I’ve read elsewhere that the larger wooden galleons required some 2000 oak trees to construct. Perhaps this explains why sizable parts of the New forest are now devoid of trees? Apparently, the shipbuilders liked to construct one large and one smaller ship in adjacent slipways so that timber off cuts from the construction of the larger ship could be used in the construction of the smaller ship. Clever, no?

Bucklers Hard is not alone in this neck of the woods – there are a few other “hards” nearby. Thanks to Francine’s 3G Kindle, which which actually works down here, unlike Franco’s O2 mobile broadband dongle, we now know that:

Hard = a road leading down across a foreshore.

IMG_9566_Bucklers_Hard IMG_9567_Bucklers_Hard How’s that for educational? Here’s a couple of shots of Bucklers Hard showing what they might mean.

After a couple of pints of the excellent local Forty-Niner (4.9%, a decent strength, thankfully), we wound our reluctant legs back up for the return 14 miles route.

Another good day. 🙂

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