An Enchanted Place

Most of the time when I leave the house my feet tend to lead me on wanders around the local lanes and, particularly, into the meadow. I’m very fortunate to have such beautiful countryside barely a few minutes walk away from home. Occasionally, however, it’s nice to hop into the car and pay a visit to somewhere a little further afield – such as one of our local nature reserves.

With gravel extraction being such a big industry along the Trent Valley, there are lots of former gravel quarry pits that have been transformed into lakes and ponds and wetlands. Many of these are managed by the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trusts, including the one at Besthorpe.

If you’d like to know more about the transformation of gravel pits into nature reserves, I wrote an article about them last year. You can read it here.

For day 49 of 365 Days Wild I went for a walk through the Besthorpe Nature Reserve and along the River Trent, accompanied by my mum, Millie Thom.

I tried not to take too many photos – the amount I stop can get a little annoying for people walking with me – but I did manage to snap a few nice views. 

Most of the wildflowers that we saw were one’s that I’ve already photographed in the meadow, but I did spot a lovely patch of Meadow Cranes-bill. I think there might be some of this on the sandy bank at the edge of the meadow, but it hasn’t yet come into flower. I, of course, just had to spend a little while photographing it.

As we walked we counted butterflies for the Big Butterfly Count.

This is what we spotted:

Small White – 15

Meadow Browns – 7

Small Tortoiseshell – 6

Large White – 5

Red Admiral – 4

Peacock – 4

All in all, it was a lovely morning for a walk, and great to have a change of scenery no matter how brief!