Winter 10

The birds think love is in the air.

Sunday 28th February, 2016

The chaffinch has been singing in the cherry tree every day and three robins have been hopping around under the feeder all week - socialising.  Two appear to be a couple because they keep giving each other sidelong glances - a mixture of interest and suspicion.  I think the third one is trying to get rid of the rival male because he is behaving in a more threatening manner.  But this is just a guess because I can't tell them apart . . . they all look exactly the same to me.

Monday’s walking route should have been planned better.  I underestimated the mud on the footpaths, forgot to take a spare battery for the camera and even forgot to check the tides.  The idea was to walk down the glen as far as Milntown Lane and then continue along the footpath behind the golf course and above Claughbane until the Hairpin bend on the TT course. After crossing the road, we could continue along Claughbane Walk to Ballure and then take a footpath down to the Ballure River and on to the shore.

The first field that we crossed wasn’t too bad - just a bit soggy - but the mud got progressively worse.  Every time I thought that we had passed the worst, we came across an even worse patch.  The last time I walked along the path to the Hairpin was in June 2014 when I went this way with my son to photograph the bikes during the TT races.  It was summer and the path was more or less dry.  The only change that I noticed, apart from the soggy conditions underfoot, was the missing roof on this old barn at Crossags Farm.

I stopped near Ballure Road to take a photograph of a magnificent yew tree in the garden of Ballure Cottage.  

I suspect that it might be the actual tree that gave this part of Ramsey its name.  I couldn’t find confirmation on the internet but I came across this unattributed opinion:  “Feltham wrote in 1798 that "Yew trees, which are generally found in our churchyards in England, are not to be found in those of Man." There is however a reference to Ballure Cottage, in the garden of which is “a very large, old yew tree from which Ballure got its name (Balley Euar - Home of the Yew).” Another reference notes that “At the beginning of the last century some old Yew trees were to be seen standing near the Chapel yard. This is interesting, as the name of the Treen, Ballure, or, as it is in the Manorial roll, ‘ ‘Ball-y-ure," means "the place of the Yew."As this tree lives to a great age, it is not impossible that these were the last of the number from which the name had been derived before any building had been erected on the ground now occupied by the Chapel.” It is not clear whether the Chapel Yard and garden of Ballure Cottage are the same place.”  I doubt whether they are the same place because, according to the gmap-pedometer site, the old chapel (which is no longer a chapel) is at least three hundred yards from the tree in the cottage garden.

We turned down from the main road to walk along a little footpath to the shore.  There are steep steps down to the Ballure River.  I hadn’t considered the aftermath of the winter floods and we had to negotiate a lot more mud as well as fallen trees . . .

. . . and a flood damaged path along the river bank.  Eventually we approached the arches leading to the shingle beach . . .

. . . and discovered that the tide was too high to a walk along the beach to the Queen’s Pier.  I ventured a few yards along a concrete ledge just above the water to take a photo of the pier.

The very last thing we wanted to do was to retrace our steps but we were lucky.  Miraculously, the little footbridge across the river had survived the floods and we were able to cross the river and walk up the path to a little park between the top of the cliffs and the tram lines - Ballure Walk.  The cliffs keep eroding and the fence at the edge of the park has been  moved back for safety reasons.  Now there are shrubs and brambles outside the fence blocking the view across Ramsey Bay.

After a circuit of the park, searching in vain for better views, we returned down Ballure Road and took a short detour into Ballure Grove so that I could take a quick photo of Number 8 - the house that we rented when we moved to the Island.

We lived in this area of Ramsey for ten months before we bought our home in the glen. I spent many happy hours taking Chrissie, our little golden Schipperke for walks around Ballure Reservoir and on the Lhergy Frissell when she and Emma (our cat) joined us after their stint in quarantine kennels.

That was the last of the photos because the battery on my camera, which had been flashing red warnings for most of the walk, died.   We continued down the South Promenade and returned home via the quay and the usual route through the houses.

When we got home I remembered to look up the translation of the Manx names of three of the sections of the new housing.  I thought they might be named after flowers or trees but I was wrong they are birds - Close Ollay (Swan), Close Thunnag (Duck) and Close Drean (Wren).

Tuesday.

A sparkling, bright and shiny, frosty, sunny morning.  It it was cold in the shade but the sun is high enough to give some welcome warmth now we are well past the shortest day.  We did our usual shopping in the morning.  

After lunch we walked down to the Sulby.  We were serenaded all the way down the glen.  Every garden seemed to have a resident robin proclaiming his right to the territory.  And when we passed Greenlands we heard a chaffinch.  I forgot to mention that we heard a dunnock singing near Crossags yesterday.  It was the first time we have heard the dunnock’s song - and we only knew it was a Dunnock singing because we could see him perched on the bare branches of a hawthorn.

Trees are beautiful in all the seasons.  I love seeing the structure of the bare branches in winter, especially against the backdrop of a blue sky.

And there is the added bonus of seeing the birds that would be hidden in the foliage in summer - like this party of jackdaws in an ash tree.

There were some Canada geese feeding on the river bank just upstream from the confluence of the Sulby and Auldyn rivers.

Unfortunately we have been overdoing the walking in this frosty weather and Tim’s back started to trouble him on the way home.

Wednesday started with sun and then a wintry shower.  The garden got a good sprinkling of soft hail - small pellets of compressed snow about the size of petit pois.  No real snow yet this winter - except a little on the hills.

After morning tea we went for a short walk in the glen.  Tim pointed out this mass of blossom on the far side of the river.

I think they must be cherry plum trees (Prunus cerasifera).  The trees are the right size and the flowers are too small and too early to be wild cherries (Prunus avium).  I checked back to previous spring photos and found that I photographed the same group of trees in full flower three weeks later in 2014.

Thursday

Another cold day with mainly clear skies and the promise of later sunshine.  Just a few early clouds although isolated wintry showers were forecast.   

We decided that it would be a good plan to have a rest from walking and concentrate on plumbing.  The bathroom toilet had refused to flush on Monday and I had a look at Tim’s big DIY book and diagnosed a damaged flap valve in the cistern.  Naively, I thought that it didn’t look too difficult to replace but we have a direct action flush in a close-coupled cistern.  (I couldn’t resist using some of my new vocabulary!)  So I had to dismantle the whole cistern mechanism and that entailed uncoupling the cistern from the back of the toilet bowl and undoing the overflow and inlet pipes.  There were bits strewn all over the bathroom. 

On Tuesday we bought the new flap, which is just a bit of plastic with two holes punched in it.  It only cost 20 pence.  But plumbing is never simple.  It proved impossible to tighten the nut securing the inlet valve to the cistern sufficiently to stop a slow leak.

After having a rest from plumbing on Wednesday, I tried to fix the leak on Thursday morning.   A new washer didn’t help.  Then a small but vital part of the float arm mechanism fell out.  It was white and I couldn't find it because it landed on the white bath mat.  Things were getting worse rather than better and I thought the only answer would be a totally new mechanism.   We drove into Ramsey before lunch during an isolated wintry shower of rain mixed with some very wet snow.  Luckily, Felton’s, the hardware store at the east end of Parliament Street supplied the correct inlet valve and float arm separately so I didn't need a complete kit.  After battling to get the nut tight enough, and the float level correct . . . the agony was finally over (touch wood!) . . . but I was too exhausted to feel ecstatic.  

Friday was bitterly cold in Ramsey with an east wind blowing through the town.  We did a small amount of walking - from Shoprite to the fish shop in the morning, and then from the house to the end of the tarred road in our branch of the glen in the afternoon.

Saturday was yet another frosty morning but the sun was shining and we walked down the glen road to the post box at the corner of Lezayre Road and Gardeners Lane to post a birthday card.  Now that my plumbing anxiety has diminished I can start worrying about apostrophes again.  I prefer casual conversational language to strictly formal grammar.  But I don’t like “uneducated” grammar - like the misuse of apostrophes and Gardeners Lane worries me.  There is no apostrophe on the road sign but I feel uneasy about leaving it out.  Perhaps I should just use the Manx - Bayr yn Ghareyder.

Thinking about gardeners reminded me that I have done absolutely no gardening since I tackled that fallen holly last week.  But in the morning I looked out of the kitchen window and saw that I had help in the garden.  A rather fine male blackbird was weeding moss out of the back lawn for me!  He cleared quite a big patch near the pieris.

While I was watching him, I noticed that the snowdrops are past their best but the first “back garden” daffodils are starting to open.  We didn’t plant any bulbs in front of the wooden edging so they must be self-seeded daffs.

Sunday brought yet another cold, sunny day.  Possibly the last for a while because rain and wind are expected tomorrow.  We did our top of the glen walk.  I discovered that there is something even more beautiful than bare branches with a backdrop of blue sky . . . these bare branches covered with white blossom against a backdrop of bright blue sky.

We only walked fifteen and a half miles this week because we had to cut down during the second half of the week.

Winter 9

Taking time to stand and stare . . .

Sunday 21st February, 2016

Monday

Winter and spring are overlapping this week.  There are mixed signals.  It was 1 degree C (feels like minus 2 allegedly) when I checked the Ramsey weather on the computer this morning - but patches of sunlight were reaching the top of the garden before nine o’clock and there was a chaffinch singing lustily in the white flowering cherry.  We are waiting until it warms up before walking.  It will probably be a case of getting less cold rather than warming up because we are only expecting a maximum of four degrees.

Later: We left under the bluest of blue skies that it is possible to imagine.  We decided to do an extended Ramsey route, walking up past the hospital and then down the footpath to the Mooragh Park.   It was still cold but there was very little wind so it was comfortable walking weather.  We noticed ice on the puddles in the glen road and from the top of the Mooragh brooghs we could see that there was snow on the fells in the Lake District . . .  and the camera could see the distant fells far better than we could.  I don’t know the Lake District well enough to be sure, but I think the closest mountain may be Scafell Pike - the highest mountain in England.

According to the Isle of Man Guide “Mooragh Park was not always a park for it was built, but then its lake was not always a lake. In 1881, the Ramsey Town Commissioners bought a 200 acre tidal swamp. The Land was purchased for 1,200 pounds with the intent to build the site into a pleasure park. Six years later the site was opened to the public . . .”   

The lawns were decorated with scattered clumps of crocuses.

The water level was so low that we assumed the lake had been emptied for cleaning.

Wading birds, nearly all oystercatchers, were taking advantage of the shallow water.

The original tidal swamp was fed by one branch of the Sulby River, which used to have access to the sea in two places before the present entrance to the harbour was dredged and protected by piers. The water level in the lake is still controlled by opening the sluice gates (at the end of  a tunnel - under the road - which connects the lake to the old river} during high or low tides.

We walked down the path along the side of the old river.  The tide was out and small boats at their moorings were sitting on the mud waiting for the water to return.  The shipyard is on the right and the swing bridge is ahead just downstream from the point where the old and “new” river courses go their separate ways.

I stopped near the bridge to take a photo of this curious structure.

There is another one upstream of the bridge and I wondered whether they were used for securing the bridge in an open position. After doing some research on the internet, I discovered a possible additional purpose.   They may also mark the edge of the shoal on which  the north side of the bridge is constructed.  This extract from a sailing website explains:

Ramsey harbour is entered between two long piers, again marked by light towers.  The channel bears round to the left and there is a lit dolphin in the middle of the harbour which marks a shoal extending out from the north side of the harbour; this mark should be left to starboard. There is a swing bridge over the harbour beyond which is a shallow inner harbour suitable only for small boats and unlikely to be of any use to the visiting boat.  

This smaller structure must be the lit dolphin.

The name amused me because I always assumed that the only dolphins were the swimming variety.  But apparently harbour dolphins should not be confused with harbour porpoises.  Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that “A dolphin is a man-made marine structure that extends above the water level and is not connected to shore”.

We walked along the west quay.  As well as numerous ducks and gulls, we saw five adult swans in the upper harbour but no juveniles.  There were far more swans last winter. Then we returned home along usual route from Ramsey through the revamped Ponderosa and Lezayre Park.

Tuesday brought a sudden change in the weather.  A turbulent day was ushered in by this dramatic sunrise.

Our day started early with a trip to the hospital for Tim’s routine blood test.  There was a gusty wind which strengthened during the day.  The rain was only supposed to start in the afternoon but there were already a few sparse drops when we did the shopping.  Back home for a quick cup of tea and then a short walk in the glen before the serious rain was due.  We were buffeted by the strong gusts in our road but the Fern Glen branch of our drunken V shaped walk was more sheltered. (PS  We were perfectly sober - but the V shape of the walk is decidedly wobbly.).

After lunch I noticed that another old holly had been blown down in the back garden.  It was growing half way up the bank behind the hawthorns.  

I went up to check and it looked as though the roots had rotted and snapped off so there wasn’t much damage to the bank.  I will have to wait for drier weather before dealing with it because I need to use the electric saw.

Wednesday morning.

It is still raining but the wind has dropped.  We had 57 mls (about 2 ¼ ins) of rain yesterday afternoon and overnight.

 

Later:  After the rain stopped I went out with the hand saw and cut some of the smaller branches off the fallen holly to disentangle it from neighbouring plants..  It has only caused minor damage to one hawthorn branch and a self-sown shrub near the stream (I think it is a Chilean myrtle).  I should be able to finish working on the holly tomorrow.

After lunch we did our three mile Whitebridge walk.  There were three ducks near the river bank by the footbridge - one female and her two male admirers.  The male mallards follow their chosen females around in spring and are remarkably patient.

Earlier this week I was scrolling through old blogs trying to find out the date of our first daff in 2015 and I came across this snippet of information which I had recorded about seasonal lag - in England the coldest day of the year, judged by average recorded temperatures, is February 17th.  It has average minimum and maximum temperatures of 0.8C and 6.7C.  We are not in England but we are just across the Irish Sea and our temperature today matches those averages fairly well - Min. Air 1°C and Max. Air 6°C.  So statistically we should start warming up tomorrow.   

Our robin will be pleased if the statistics prove to be correct.   After looking sleek during the mostly warm winter weather, he had his feathers puffed up against the cold yesterday morning.

Thursday.

The statistics lied.  To celebrate passing the coldest day of the year, we woke to a frosty morning with white grass and ice on top of any containers full of rain water.

It soon warmed up though and there was hardly any wind -  an ideal day for working outside - and walking.  I did a session of holly cutting with the electric saw  before tea and then we went for a six mile walk. Our route was an extended version of Monday’s walk. Instead of walking up Richmond Road towards the hospital, we turned left down the Jurby Road and then right up Clifton Drive and then continued up the Andreas Road and Bride Road, turning down to the shore at the Vollan and returning through the park.

We finally located an active rookery near the Bride Road but all the birds departed as we approached.  Perhaps they thought my camera was a type of gun because they flew off cawing furiously.

We passed major infrastructure works under way in the north end of the Mooragh Park.  It is something to do with a pumping station which will be connected with the sewage treatment plant out at Balladoole.  Once it is completed the Ramsey beach should have much cleaner water.

This little playground always  brings back memories of visiting grandchildren - especially Emily, the youngest of our six granddaughters.

The water level in the lake was a little higher than it was on Monday and the wading oystercatchers had departed and been replaced by swimming gulls.

We crossed the swing bridge again and I stopped to take a last dolphin photograph.  This is the one upstream from the bridge on the edge of the shoal between the old and new rivers.  

The old river is behind the dolphin and the shipyard is on the left.  The most famous ship to be built there was The Star of India, a full-rigged iron windjammer ship, which was launched in 1863 (originally named the Euterpe). She now resides in the San Diego Maritime Museum.  According to the museum website she “became an "American" ship by Act of Congress” and “Still sails in the ocean by a volunteer crew”. The Ramsey shipyard is still active although its glory days are long past.

Friday

The usual shopping was followed by a brisk walk in the glen.  It wasn’t raining hard but it wasn’t a dry walk so I didn’t risk taking the camera.  

Saturday brought more of the same weather - light patchy rain.  We walked down to the Whitebridge and on the way down the glen I noticed some signs of approaching spring.  The blossom was starting to open on this tree . . .

. . . and there were buds on a magnolia.

The magpie’s nest in Gardeners Lane has survived all the gales.  We hadn’t seen the occupants for a couple of weeks but one emerged from the nest when we walked past on our way home.

Sunday was even wetter than the previous two days, so we completed our walking week with a short and very wet glen walk.  It brought our total mileage for the week up to 23.7 miles - our highest total so far.

It is often the simplest poetry that strikes a chord in our emotions.  Like the following extract from the poem "Leisure" which I stumbled across while reading a Country Diary article on the Guardian website.

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night . . . . .

WH Davies

From Songs Of Joy and Others (1911)

I go to the other extreme and spend too much time standing and staring.  Sadly, I can’t stare at squirrels.  There are none on the Island . . . but there is no shortage of streams and trees.

Winter 8

Has Spring started before the end of winter?

Sunday 14th February, 2016

Monday

When I got up it was not actually raining but patio was wet so there must have been a recent shower.  I checked the rain gauge - looking through the bedroom window and using binoculars.  We had over two and a half inches during the first week in February.  The forecast for the next couple of days suggests a drier but colder spell.  In other words - more normal February weather.

While I was looking out the window the huge, mechanised refuse lorry passed our house - in reverse!  This solves the question of how it manages to turn half the way up the narrow glen road now that the edge of the road further up has been damaged by floodwater again.  The answer is that it doesn’t.  The driver must reverse across the bridge and all the way up to the big communal bin that we pass during our walks.  The skill of the heavy vehicle drivers when negotiating our narrow and winding roads never ceases to astonish me.

We extended our top of the glen walk this morning to include the two post boxes in the glen.  I intended photographing them last week but forgot.  There are no shops or pubs in the glen but we are oversupplied with antique post boxes.  

The oldest near Ballagarrow, dates back to Victoria’s reign and is labelled “Glen Auldyn Village”.  Barely a quarter of a mile further up the glen there is the Georgian post box which is labelled Glen Auldyn Bridge.  It must have been erected here in the early 1930’s during the reign of George V when the tiny Glen Auldyn Post Office opened nearby.  In the past Glen Auldyn attracted tourists to the tea gardens and waterfall up in Fern Glen. They were ferried in by a bus service from Ramsey.  The tourists, the bus, the post office and the tea gardens are long gone.  Now only the post box remains to remind us of past glories.  There is a third post box, an Elizabethan one, about a mile from our house. It is near the end of the glen at the Lezayre Road/Gardeners Lane junction.  We sometimes use this one because it is the only one with a “mouth” wide enough for the square National Trust cards that I prefer to conventional birthday cards.

I am ashamed to record yet another”no gardening” day - and the no gardening will continue for a while because I have a niggly back pain and I don’t want to aggravate it.

Tuesday

A memorable day because it was our youngest daughter’s fiftieth birthday.  I am not sure how this happened.  I don’t feel old enough to have one fifty year old child, let alone three.  I rather liked a little note on a Facebook collage which our daughter’s husband had created in honour of the occasion:

looks 22

feels 18

acts 10

that makes me 50

I can identify with the concept of feeling and acting younger than my age - but as far as I am concerned the looking younger doesn’t apply, unfortunately.

We walked to the Whitebridge, intending to extend the walk to three miles by adding a short stroll up the riverbank on the north side of the river.  Another best laid scheme that ganged agley. The lower reaches of the Sulby are tidal and it  was just past a particularly high tide.  It was touch and go whether we would even reach the bridge with dry feet.  

I took this photo from the bridge - a couple of ducks enjoying a swim in shallow water covering a patch of grass on the river bank.

The path that we had intended walking along  was still under water but before we returned home we crossed the bridge and I took a photo of more water, more ducks and Skyhill.

On Wednesday we repeated the walk to Whitebridge but extended our route by returning through Ramsey.  We also, added the bit along the river that we couldn’t do on Tuesday, plus a short detour up Milntown Lane in a futile search for rooks’ nests.  We could just glimpse a couple of big nests in the trees in the Milntown grounds from the glen road but they were too far away for us to identify the occupants.  We thought we might see them better from the lane but couldn’t see them at all from that side of the property.

The road walking is getting very repetitious and nothing is happening in the garden so I was pondering on the fact that I seem to be writing reams of waffle about very little and wondered whether I would end up being one of those experts who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.  Maybe I could end up being an expert on the potholes in the glen road.

But there are still new things to see.  On our way home through Lezayre Park we saw this sparrow sunbathing on satellite dish.  We used to watch sparrows having dust baths in the garden of the house that we rented in Ramsey but they never frequent our part of the glen.

Thursday 

We decided to be more ambitious and try a longer walk.  We started off on the usual Whitebridge route but turned west along the Jurby road.  At first we walked through suburbia but eventually we left the outskirts of Ramsey behind and reached farmland.  There is so much sky out on the northern plain - ideal for battery recharging!

It reminded me of my favourite cartoon by the Australian cartoonist, poet and philosopher, Leunig - with whom I share a fondness for ducks.  No ducks in this cartoon though . . . just truth.

A little further on the sky was reflected in a large puddle - a double dose of recharging, maybe.

When we reached the road leading the Garey ford we turned south towards the river.  Just before the footbridge we came across this sign.  There is no escape from ducks on the blog this week.  

While we were standing on the footbridge watching a group of ducks a vehicle drove across the ford.

And then we witnessed a fierce duck fight!

On the road back to Lezayre road we could see the other side of Skyhill - the west side.

Every time we walk down the glen road we enjoy this view of the east side - with its wooded and jutting slopes rising above the Magher y Troddan (Field of Conquest).  It is a magical hill. It is said that it  was once occupied by “a fundamental stratum of the population, confused or identical with " the Fairies."  One of the farms on top was held to have been " the first house " (or " the oldest house ") that was ever lived in in the Isle of Man."  Moreover, a certain Miss Douglas had a nurse and the nurse had it from her own father that “the fairies used to have a regular city just about there, and ones had seen it all lit up at night when they would be passing.”

We returned along Lezayre Road - a busy road and part of the TT course.  This building is the Lezayre Church Hall.  A building of no architectural pretensions - but important nevertheless because Alexander went to school there. 

All the Schippies were taken to obedience classes in a vain attempt to socialise them but Alexander was the only one who behaved well enough to attend regularly.  The others weren’t expelled but we stopped taking them because they found it too stressful (and so did we because they behaved so badly).   Their schooldays were not the happiest days of their lives.

Later we passed the lovely meadows and old trees of Ballakillingan.  This is a dairy farm and there are often black and white cows grazing in the meadows.

We also passed an old, ivy covered bench decaying happily in a hedge - just the sort of photographic subject that Dorothy and Trevor, our hiking friends, like.  So I took a photo of it.

Friday was shopping day so we just did a short road walk and I took a photo of our first daffodil of 2016.

Saturday 

The patio on top of the garage was dry this morning for the first time in months - even the little puddles had dried out.  So we decided to risk the mud and tackle a Brookdale plantation walk.  There was still plenty of mud at the bottom of the hill but on the plus side there are just peaceful trees for company instead of speeding cars to dodge.

We discovered that walking along almost flat roads is no substitute for climbing steep hills if you want to increase fitness. The climb to the view site in the plantation is less than a mile from our house but it seemed more tiring than yesterday’s long walk.

I love the old moss-covered stone walls in the plantation.

Clouds had gathered over North Barrule, but while we were up at the view site, the sun was shining on the northern plain.  Part of the new housing estate on Gardners Lane is visible in the bottom left corner of this photo.  And just to the right of the buildings, behind some open fields, you may just be able to make out the Whitebridge . . . if you are eagle-eyed.

After lunch I did a little gentle pruning and weeding in the garden to see how my back would cope.  I finished trimming the tutsan down by the road, weeded out some dandelions which were thinking of flowering, and started removing some yellow archangel from a flower bed near the drive.  The bees like this plant and so do I - but it grows too well in this spot and is trying to take over the whole area.  I want to remove it all and plant my hydrangea cuttings there instead.  They have been waiting patiently in pots for over a year and will be a low maintenance substitute for the archangel.

Sunday

We finished the week with a quick road walk in the glen.  A cold day but there was intermittent bright sunlight and I couldn't resist another photo of our first daff - backlit by the sun.

Now the big question is . . . Is it going to be an early spring?  Mid-February seems too early to be predicting the start of spring but I usually date our personal start of spring from the day that the first daffodil opens in our garden.  And our first one opened three weeks earlier than the first daff of 2015.

The birds are also getting excited about the approach of spring.  We have heard wood pigeons cooing recently and more twittering than usual in the garden. On Wednesday, while we were walking, we noticed pairs of jackdaws and hooded crows flirting. And on Saturday morning we heard our first chaffinch song of the year in Brookdale. Tim has also seen a great tit checking out the nest box.

The season of dawn choruses and lawnmowers is looming on the horizon - and the efficient gardeners have already given their grass a trim.

PS  Our total walking distance this week was over 21 miles.