An Answers For My Blog Buddies.

Some of my wonderful blog buddies have asked me a few questions regrading our beautiful countryside over here in Britain, so I feel that I must explain in a post as it would be fairer and well easier for me to do so.

The first one is what season is it over here?

Now this is a blooming good question, given the summer we have had here this year. At the beginning of Spring, the weather men said that we were in for a barbecue summer hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!, sorry I will now pull myself together.

Not only have we not held a b-b-q, but we haven't been invited to any, the weather is so bad that in general people are holding them spontaneously.
To be fair April, May and most of June were glorious, but by the middle of June the whole thing shifted and it has been very haphazard with some serious rain now for weeks or grey sky's and winds.
Today is a classic example of that, as here in London we have had grey sky and moderate winds, its not cold, just a bit blowy, yesterday and Saturday were beautiful days and we got out to place I call bottle beach, but I will show you more about that on another day. (got photo's and all for you ). The lovely Francis (with an i) is down by the south coast working today and has reported to me that the sun is blazing down there and it's seriously hot, he is only about 50 miles away.

It should now be middle to approaching late summer here, but I barely feel that it started at all this year and as many of you know my camping holiday was a wash out.

One of my buddies also said, that where they live it is a lot greener and that we seem to have more brown in our countryside, I had to look at the photos and realised what my friend meant.

This part of the countryside that we drove through to get to the coast is mostly farming country, in the form of wheat, oats and barley fields and basically the brown fields, we are seeing in the photos are fields that have already been harvested and the yellow brown fields are ones that need to be brought in. If you click on the photo, you will see that there are still a lot of fields to be harvested yet. Some of them may contain winter barley, that is harvested later in the year and use it as an animal feed for the winter months and this would still be fairly brown at this time of year.


In this photo you can just see the top of a brick wall, I should have explained that I was standing on a bridge when I took this photo. We do actually in some areas of this country use stone walls to divide fields, but they are completely different to this type of wall; and are known as dry stone walls, this is because they are held together without any mortar. I will explain this to you all another day, but it is an amazing skill and in the photo below you can see how the fields are divided by the walls and you can also see some walls that need to be rebuilt. This photo is of very small fields that have been divided, but it can be done with much much bigger fields and higher walls. It is a part of our history and traditions that were almost lost to us. Thankfully though there are some people who have revived this tradition and it has seen a resurgence in recent years.

In this smaller photo you can see how by using more regular stones you can get a much neater effect.