Younger trees, old tree

Today I’m taking you (again) to Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. We’ll walk up the High Ride, through glades of trees, in relatively young maturity …

… before descending to saunter through the parkland of Studley Royal. I’ve got a lot of ancient trees to show you next week, but today I’ll show you just one. A cherry tree, or what’s left of it. It’s about 400 years old, which is unfathomably old for a fruit tree. I must say it looks its age. But isn’t it remarkable?

A newer branch has somehow grown from that ancient trunk.

For Becky’s Walking Squares, and Bren’s Midweek Monochrome.

A Daily Walk’s an Adventure in Serendipity

Lockdown in 2020 taught us to value the tiny slivers of the unexpected in our necessarily limited ‘Daily Exercise’. Here’s yesterday’s unexpected: a cluster of tiny mushrooms in autumn-leaf red, cheerfully growing in the middle of the village cricket pitch. I don’t know what they are. Do you?

They’re multi-tasking mushrooms, because they’re here for Becky’s Walking Squares, as well as for Brian’s Last on the Card for October. Brian insists that we don’t edit our photos, but if I need a square photo, I’ll just have to make a subtle clip, top and bottom. I might get away with it.