Pottery Pond

We had to go to Bovey Tracey twice last week for wedding-related things. The place we were going was on a road we hadn't been to before and we were pleased to find a large pond that we hadn't previously visited.


Although it was drizzling we had a lovely walk around the pond (we did not make it as far as Hay Tor!) and met a friendly family of geese who were bent on the destruction of some flag iris:

We then proceeded to Little Bradley Ponds - one of my favourite nature reserves because it is such a good spot for dragonflies. There were few dragonflies about on such a cloudy wet day, but I was very excited to see a snake, or at least the tail end of a snake as it slithered very quickly into some gorse as I approached it. Needless to say I spent the next half an hour searching for another, but it was not to be.

Although I only saw a pair of chasers, damselflies were more abundant:

A walk from Sowton village

Now that summer has arrived I have so many things to blog about, but with our wedding only a month away and the garden and house requiring a lot of attention there seems little time for blogging.

Last week we drove to the village of Sowton - just on the other side of the motorway from our house. Unfortunately an entire row of thatched cottages were destroyed in a fire there only last month.

This photo, taken from a distance, was the only one I took because some of the owners were there moving furniture out and I didn't want to be insensitive. You can't really see the scale of the destruction here, but it shocked us both. The whole area still smelled of burning.

Our walk from Sowton took us past Bishop's Court, home to 20 Bishops of Exeter over a 300 year period before it was sold in 1546. I'm not actually sure how old the house is:


The thatched gatehouse:

We saw our first ladybird larva of the year in a hedgerow:

A beautiful field of barley:

This Ephemera species of mayfly was near the river Clyst: