Ohio

A short damp walk

Monday 22nd October, 2012

 

If there are weather gods, they must have a slightly warped sense of humour.  I planned to mow the back lawn on Sunday afternoon but the grass was saturated and stayed wet all day.  The forecast had been for dry weather for the next five days - so I decided to continue cutting back the old growth on the knapweed and oregano that I left for the bees, and to put off the mowing for a couple of days, hoping for drier grass.  Of course, when I checked the forecast again in the evening, it had changed.  After an allegedly dry Monday, rain was now expected for Monday evening and early on Tuesday.

 

Well they were wrong again, it started raining before we left for Sulby this morning - but fortunately it was just patchy drizzle.  We started from the Claddagh and climbed up the farm track to Ohio Plantation.  The planned fungus hunt was a bit disappointing.  The most photogenic examples were these little mushrooms which look suspiciously like honey fungus and were growing around a dead larch.

While we were waiting for Dorothy to finish taking photos, we started wandering along a track towards the east side of the plantation.  There were a scattering of rather tatty nondescript white mushrooms and I thought I might take a photo of them on my way back to the main path so that I could try to identify them from the illustrations in my mushroom book.  But, after Dorothy joined us, we found there was a mountain bike track up the edge of the plantation and decided to explore. So no tatty white mushroom photos.  But I took a misty photo of the top of Cronk Sumark, the site of an ancient hill fort, with the northern plain behind.  No views of the Scottish coast this week, we could barely see the coast of the Island.

Then we turned up the mountain bike path which followed the edge of the plantation until we climbed down a steep bank onto the top of the main track through the plantation.

We did a bit more exploring in the plantation but I didn't find much which interested me although Dorothy spent quite a lot of time photographing a rusty and semi-collapsed corrugated iron shed. 

 

Then we returned to the main path and walked up through the fields.  The approach to the gate onto the moors above the Narradale Road is along a track with a fence either side.  I noticed a couple of sheep ahead of us and Tim put Danny on the lead.  There was no way for the sheep to get out.  The only thing they could do was double back, and run past us - a tactic which was complicated by a huge, deep puddle near the gate.  We started climbing up the bank at the side of the track to bypass the puddle.  After dithering for a while, one of the sheep panicked and decided to jump over the puddle.  It either underestimated the size of the puddle or overestimated its jumping ability.  Not even an Olympic long-jumping sheep could have cleared the water.  It took a huge leap into the air and ended up doing a sort of woolly swallow dive into the middle of the puddle - making a huge splash and sending up a spray of muddy water.  It was followed by its companion in slightly less dramatic fashion.  Dorothy was disappointed that we didn't manage to film the action but it really needed video to do it justice.

 

We had planned to walk on to the dubs (dew ponds) on Sky Hill but it was still a bit drizzly and the light wasn't great for photography, so we turned down the Narradale Road.  I thought I had photographed this old slate gatepost before, but Tim remarked on the contrast between the old and new gateposts and mentioned that the new one "has no artistic merit".  So here is a photo of the non-artistic gate.  It looks as though the old gate post had been relocated after the entrance was widened but, unless there are two slate gateposts on the Narradale Road, this is an imposter.  It is not the same gatepost that I photographed in the spring. 

Further down the road I stopped to photograph some web, bejewelled with minute drops of water.  I wanted to see what it would look like magnified on the computer.  I am not sure whether the web belonged to a spider or to a colony of gorse spider mites.

 

When Dorothy and I caught up with the men they were looking over a gate at the side of the road and two extremely large and muddy pigs were looking back at them, apparently hoping for food.  Danny had never seen a pig before and was fascinated until the larger pig snorted at him.  He found this highly alarming and backed away with a nervous look on his face.  We continued down the road, but Danny kept looking back.  I think he was concerned that the pigs might escape and chase us down the road.  The poor boy was obviously worried by his encounters with flying sheep and snorting pigs because his tail was down almost the whole way back to the car.