The Quarry is a 29 acre, Grade II listed park in Shrewsbury that borders the town and the River Severn. I found myself walking around here quite a few times on my visit to the town – on my arrival after checking in to my B&B to stretch my legs and as a convenient place to sit and watch the world go by when I needed a break from walking around.
Back in the beginning of June I went along to the Open Gardens event in Burton Joyce, a village just outside Nottingham. I’m fairly familiar with the village as a friend grew up there but I’d never been to the Open Gardens event before. 11 gardens were open to the public with the ticket price (£6 if booked in advance) going towards Maggie’s, a cancer charity based at Nottingham City Hospital.
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.
Situated next to the entrance to the driveway down to Gedling House is the entrance to Gedling House Woods which I decided to visit after I’d been around the house. It was quite busy with dog walkers in the meadows area but I chose to follow the path through the woods and had them pretty much to myself, other than the squirrels.
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].
After putting in some long hours at work recently (the joys of being self-employed!) I decided to take a random day off to enjoy the sunshine and headed out to Attenborough Nature Reserve. I’ve been here before a number of times but this time I travelled there from Nottingham on the train (an all day ticket is £3.70 and the journey takes around 10 minutes). Attenborough is a tiny station with only two platforms but the nature reserve is well signposted from there and it only takes about 5-10 minutes walk through some streets lined with very beautiful houses to reach one of the entrances to the reserve.
If you’re looking for a bit of greenery in Cambridge you can look no further than the Backs and Sheep’s Green and Coe Fen Nature Reserves. It can be found along the west bank of the River Cam and steps away from the busier streets of the city.
One Sunday last month it was a surprisingly sunny day and I decided to venture out to Colwick Woods. I’d realised while looking at new to me green spaces in Nottingham that although I’ve been to Colwick Country Park a number of times I’d never been to the nearby woods. 50 hectares large it is an ancient woodland that has been around since at least the early 1600s and even possibly longer as well as part of it being farmland that was abandoned in the 1950s.
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