When we rediscovered Norfolk last June, our primary goal being to search for the Norfolk Hawker/Green-eyed Hawker (Aeshna isosceles), we made our first visit to what we now refer to as Guillaume’s petit coin [Guillaume’s little corner]. We’d hardly installed ourselves before an immature example of our quarry came and hung-up in the hedge bordering Guillaume’s petit coin.

Guillaume’s petit coin has gone and done it again. This time, as we were staring wistfully out of a side window, a Migrant Hawker (Aeshna mixta) sniffed about the hedge, chose a spot and hung-up in it about three feet off the ground. It stayed while I extracted the camera.

In what has turned out to be a somewhat disturbed year from an Odo-watching point of view, this constitutes my first Hawker at rest. It was a female and access wasn’t great so I initially snagged a shot through a gap in the obscuring foliage. I quite like the framing effect of the out of focus leaves.

Then I tried to squirm round to get a clearer line up. As usual, I struggled with the lack of light before remembering to use my built-in flash. One day, I’ll think of using flash straight away!

Unlike last year’s Norfolk Hawker, this Migrant had been round the block. Her abdomen was slightly out of true and her left eye was very dented. I’m not sure what causes this but I did read somewhere that the pressure of the male’s anal appendages during copulation might be to blame.

We started our day with a cycle ride to the nearby ruins of St Benet’s Abbey on the banks of the River Ant. Actually, the major ruins are part of the gate house to the abbey rather than of the abbey itself, of which just one small section of stone wall remains. There is, however, a fanciful drawing showing what the abbey “might have looked like”.

When we were up here last year, the gatehouse remains had been surrounded by particularly unsightly fencing and scaffolding, making a photograph of it a rather pointless exercise. Even Photoshop couldn’t have fixed that. We set off to look, despite expecting to see more of the same. Joy of joys, the scaffolding and fencing was all gone so Francine could finally get to grips with the ruins and developing disturbed sky.

In the afternoon with a patch of brightness appearing, we made a return visit to the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s reserve at Alderfen. The first thing we came across in the narrow country lanes leading towards the site was a “Road Closed – Access Only” sign. Fortunately, the road closed barriers were immediately after the track leading down to Alderfen so we made it. Less happily, the bright spell was very short lived and the overcast soon conquered the Norfolk skies again.

Undaunted, we made a circuit of the reserve seeing good numbers of Migrant Hawkers (Aeshna mixta) and Ruddy Darters (Sympetrum sanguineum), with a handful of other species in much lower numbers. Only the Ruddy Darters produced anything like a decent photo opportunity.

Our most interesting find was a very colourful, thumping great big caterpillar. We first of all thought that this might be a caterpillar of the Emperor Moth (Saturnia pavonia), an example of which can be seen here. Our specimen seemed essentially similar in colour and pattern but our only diagram showed that Emperor Moth caterpillars have tufts of short bristles which our specimen lacked. Once we got to grips with our caterpillar reference volume, it turned out that this magnificent character was a Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillar (Papilio machaon). In the UK, the Swallowtail is one of Norfolk’s better known celebrities. Excellent!

So, here we are back in the land of windmills, though the old ones that dot the landscape of the Norfolk Broads are more correctly referred to as wind pumps, their primary purpose being to drain land of water. Norfolk being essentially flat, there is little to hinder any wind so there are, of course, some more modern wind turbines, designed to generate electricity, dotting the land- and seascapes.

Coincidentally, there was an interesting and relevant piece of writing by Christopher Booker in last Sunday’s Telegraph concerning the demolition of Didcot power station and the UK’s power policy. Since I cannot find an on-line reference, I’ll repeat the salient points here.

At the time when the plant’s German owners closed down Didcot A last year – having decided that it was not worth paying hundreds of millions of pounds to modify it to comply with an EU pollution directive – the 2,000 megawatts of electricity it was capable of supplying to the National Grid were only slightly less than the average total of 2,200 megawatts then being unreliably generated by all of Britain’s thousands of subsidised wind turbines put together.

Assuming the figures are true – staggering!

The first thing that made my jaw drop was the “German owners” bit. What on earth have we come to if we let our power generation systems be controlled by foreign interests, for Darwin’s sake? It’s one to address our lamentable shortfall by buying power from the French who, being much more sensible folks than us, invested in nuclear power stations which now create 80% of their output, an output which actually produces a surplus enabling them to sell it abroad. We, by contrast, generate too little to begin with and surrender control of what we do have to foreign interests. The UK has completely lost it!

In the blink of an eye, the foreign interests have lost us the entire output from all the wind turbines, most of them now blighting what used to be various tracts of our so-called “green and pleasant land”. I know Didcot and its cooling towers was never an attractive sight but a power station is a very localized eyesore and there aren’t that many of them. Wind generation risks becoming a national eyesore which will never kick out enough power. I actually think that an individual wind turbine is a reasonably attractive piece of engineering but that opinion changes when dozens of them are scattered across rolling green hills and pasture.

Not all our wind turbines blight the land, it has to be said. A strategy I find less offensive is the placing of wind turbines off the coast, out at sea. There is an example here just off Great Yarmouth. The delightfully named Scroby Sands is home to a wind farm of 20 turbines.

Francine has been training her camera on a few of them. The first is a straight shot, the second is a composite of five shots to get a bit more interest in the rotating turbine blades. The second also seems to do reasonable well in monochrome.

Norfolk shares much in common with the Netherlands; it’s flat, there’s a lot of water and there are quite a few old wind pumps (what most folks probably refer to as windmills) that were built to manage the water. The old wind pumps make a very atmospheric photographic subject which Francine is keen to try and exploit. Today being decidedly windy, too windy to make cycling an attractive proposition, we elected to drive around scouting out suitable subjects.

Finding a good subject is less easy than one might imagine. An OS map makes a good starting point ‘cos the wind pumps are marked. The first filtering process is one of access – can you get near enough, either by road or on foot? If you can get there by road, is there somewhere legal to park without causing an accident? The answer to either of these questions is disturbingly frequently, no.

The second filtering process involves condition; largely, are there sails attached? A sail-less wind pump does not make the most interesting picture. Unfortunately, they all look the same on an OS map, so we found ourselves approaching some of the wind pumps that made it through our first filter, only to find that they fell at the second hurdle because they had no sails.

Once you get through the above checks, you’re into checking situation, direction compared to the light, background and foreground, etc., to see if a good wind pump can make a good picture. Photographers are very difficult to please but we ended up thinking that Thurne wind pump might provide Francine’s best chance.

Since the wind pumps are beside waterways – they were positioned to pump water off the land and into a suitable water course – what you really need to gain good access to these things is a boat. We haven’t got one but there are thousands of pleasure boats plugging up and down the rivers linking the Norfolk Broads. Of course, that being the case, even once you’ve found a good wind pump to photograph, the likelihood is that some grockel will park an ugly fibreglass bath tub of a boat beside it and ruin your shot. One of the few traditional Norfolk wherries, such as the one below seen on the river Ant, would actually enhance the shot. A regular sailing boat would be perfectly acceptable. A fibreglass bath tub would be little short of a disaster.

We did check out Little Ormesby Broad as a location and rejected it. We did, however bump into quite a few Odos flitting about the vegetation surrounding the car park and lining the path towards the broad. Here’s a not-quite-fully-red Ruddy Darter (Sympetrum sanguineum) and a Blue-tailed Damselfly (Ischnura elegans), just to brighten things a little more.

OK, we think we’ve got a photographic target. Now what we need is for us to remain sober enough to get out on an evening when the westering sun puts in an appearance. We wait with bated breath.

We’re back in Norfolk again, having rediscovered it last year. This is not our normal camping time of year, it being the height of Satan’s Little Disciple season. We should have been here just before the schools broke up and released the little darlings but family bereavement caused a delay. So, here we are trembling with fear but in search of some R&R.

The first time Guillaume pitched up in Norfolk, we lucked out and found a grass pitch in the far corner of the campsite. From our point of view, this seemed to be the most desirable pitch here, largely because:

1. it was a grass pitch (as opposed to gravely hard-standing);
2. it has only two neighbours, one of which is quite a distance away (great for we antisocial types);
3. it is bordered by a very tall hedge on two sides offering a secluded seating area.

When Guillaume and I returned, sans Francine, for our male bonding trip in late September, I was both a little surprised and delighted that we lucked out again and found our favourite pitch empty once more. Guillaume immediately snagged it and was very comfortable.

On our way up today, I couldn’t believe that Guillaume’s petit coin [little corner] would be free in the height of the season but we crossed our fingers, hoped and set off. With dreadfully disruptive road works on the A11 causing chaos on the main route into Norfolk, I over-rode Sally Satnav and changed our route to skirt that area. We hit had a good journey and hit the A47 round Norwich a little further east. Not far enough further east as it turned out – we got stuck for 25 minutes in works designed to cause even more chaos at a junction on that road. More works that are going on for 72 weeks! Anyone stuck in both sets of road works, a quite likely occurrence, would have been spitting feathers.

Eventually we got through, arrived, albeit 30 minutes later than expected, and checked in. We learned that there is even worse traffic disruption approaching through Kings Lynn – a closed bridge. The planners seem to be determined to cut Norfolk off. However, joy of joys, Guillaume’s petit coin was once again free. We instantly got over our traffic frustration but I was decidedly bemused. Why, on three occasions, have we managed to find what we think of as the best pitch on site free? Hmm, here are a few potential contributing factors:

1. this pitch is about as far away from les sanitaires as it’s possible to get (doesn’t bother us ‘cos we tend to use Guillaume’s facilities anyway);
2. it is grass but a lot of folks seem, oddly, to prefer gravel these days;
3. the tallest hedge. which this pitch is very close to, is to the south and a satellite dish has about as much chance of picking up a signal as there is of finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

Whatever the reason, Guillaume is very happy once again.