For my last full day in Arundel I knew that I wanted to spend my time exploring the Arundel Wetland Centre. It’s an easy walk from the town centre – simply walk by the entrance to the castle and continue all the way down the street, over a bridge then continue until you see the entrance on the right – it takes maybe 15 to 20 minutes. Do note that part of the route has no pavement but it’s a wide track and easy to navigate safely. There is of course a car park if you’re driving.
I visited the National Garden three times during my visit to Athens, once to walk through on the way to the Panathenaic Stadium, once for some welcome shade to reapply my sunscreen before heading to the Benaki Museum and once to actually explore the gardens themselves. They are 38 acres (so I didn’t explore the whole thing) and up until 1974 were called the Royal Garden, which gives you the first hint about their origins.
Taking advantage of the beautiful sunshine I ventured out to Holme Pierrepont Country Park recently to explore an area I hadn’t been to since I was a child. The park is home to the National Watersports Centre and British Canoeing and where many years ago I went on a school trip to try out kayaking. There are several walks around the site and I started by doing one that went through the woods but even though we haven’t had rain for a while it was surprisingly boggy so I recalibrated and went for a less muddy walk around the regatta lake instead.
Every so often I do a post about the birds and animals I’ve photographed in the garden. We’ve had quite a few interesting visitors that I haven’t managed to photograph or that we’ve only caught on our nature camera overnight such as cats, hedgehogs, foxes and once quite memorably a badger but there are others that stuck around long enough for me to grab my camera. One such creature was this rat which had taken a liking to the seeds I put out for the birds (I moved the bird feeder around and took a break from re-filling it and this worked for a little while). [Since starting to write this post I found the rat dead in our garden – RIP].
Recently needing to de-stress after a particularly busy week at work I ventured out to Colwick Country Park with my dad, prompted to do so by a recent council email about improvements to the footpaths at the park. A huge park with lakes and a marina that was opened in 1978 we were impressed with the new pathways – much more comfortable to walk on and far better for pushchairs and wheelchair uses.
Nottingham has a great deal of green spaces many of which I’ve never actually visited, so this year I’ve decided to try and visit more of them. Arnot Hill Park was the first of these, which I picked solely because I happened to be roughly in the area on the day. It was easy to get to by bus – there’s a stop right outside the entrance on Nottingham Road.
On this trip I entered the reserve via the Beeston Canal towpath which I haven’t done before. It was foggy to start off with though not actually all that cold, even though large parts of the lakes and ponds were frozen. You can’t get lost on this route (or really any of the different routes around the nature reserve) so we just followed it until we decided we needed a cup of tea (first time I’ve used a flask in ages!) and then headed back the way we’d come to where we’d parked the car.
You can’t visit Conwy without taking a walk along the quayside and admiring the boats and the seemingly larger than life seagulls. There’s a pub and fish and chips shop, plus a stall selling ice creams and hot drinks etc. There are also boat trips available (I did one of these which will feature in a later post) and the quay leads on to part of the Wales Coast Path (various sections of which will also feature in later posts).
The area that is now Regent’s Park once belonged to the monks of Barking Abbey until Henry VIII dissolved the monastery and turned it into a hunting park. In 1835 it became a public park on the instructions of the future King George IV who at the time was the Prince Regent (ruling in place of his mentally ill father George III until his death in 1820 when he became George IV). That’s why the park is The Regent’s Park, but hardly anyone ever calls it that.
Lotherton is an Edwardian house and country estate with gardens, extensive grounds, a deer park and a small zoo. When I first visited back in 2013 you couldn’t take photos inside the house and Wildlife World was originally a bird garden. Much has changed since then however and I’m splitting these posts into the zoo, the house, the chapel and the gardens, starting with our first destination of the zoo. There is still more of a concentration on birds here than on the animals they’ve since acquired and one of my favourites was this lovely Edward’s pheasant, named after a former director of the Natural History Museum in Paris.
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