Holiday in the Yorkshire Dales - pics.

[curiouswombat]

Sunday pic-spam this week are all taken during my holiday in the Yorkshire Dales. My friend dougalsservant and I shared a cottage just north of the small village of hawes in Wensleydale. Yes - it is a real place not just Wallace and Grommit's favourite cheese! We ate some of the cheese whilst we were there, mind you.

This set of pictures are of the Dales, the cottage's surroundings, and the wildlife who visited us.



Our cottage was lovely - with a deep ravine behind us with a beck in it; I think it might be the Hardraw beck rather than the actual river Ure but, to be honest I'm not sure.

So - the view out of my bedroom window was rather like sleeping in a talan - I am up in the canopy -



If you go outside and walk along the back 'patio' you get this view -



Yes - we had our own waterfall! Look closer -



The view out of the front of the cottage -



Or looking on a different angle, and a bit later -



Gorgeous eh? Well I think so, although it might be a bit bleak for some tastes.

There is a bird table - we had nuthatches, blue tits, coal tits, goldfinches, and... pheasants!



The pheasants arrived at 8am demanding breakfast - the first morning we discovered that they like bananas -



A little further around the cottage, at the side, there are budleia bushes which attract butterflies - well, to be honest, which attract red admirals - anything up to 10 at a time - but no other sorts!



We drove up over the famous Buttertubs Pass to Thwaite - these pictures give you an idea of the dale near Thwaite - but the whole of Wensleydale looks very similar, with stone built barns in almost every field, the fields being defined by stone walls -





Here is a close up of one of the walls -



And finally, for this post, there was also another couple of regular visitors to the bird-table - what do you think this might be, upside down, in the squirrel-proof peanut holder?



Yep! Here he is sitting on the top -



There were a pair of them, but I never managed to get them both in shot - as one came in from the left the other would leave on the right, and so on... as did the pheasants.



Finally - it was the Harvest service at church today. All the traditional hymns, but also the children led the singing of a song called 'Paint Box', which starts with 'cauliflowers fluffy' and has a chorus that finishes 'Broad beans are sleeping in a blankety bed'. It mentions 20 different fruit and veg. Last week my fellow teachers got the children to draw, or collage, all 20 on separate sheets of paper. Today they got 20 adults to come out to the front and hold up the relevant fruit or veg as it was mentioned in the song... the result was brilliant!