5 July: Somerset Levels and Dunster Castle

Portland Bill: much birding.

No thanks.  That is scheduled for tomorrow as we have arranged to meet someone in Weymouth tomorrow morning.  Today is rumbling around Somerset and North Devon.

I finished off yesterday rabbitting about cows looking in the window.  Here is an image.

Sometimes they get closer than that, but I suspect readers have a fairly low requirement for pictures of cows.  Even pretty ones.

Cows also entered our consciousnesses later in the day.  Taking the A39 along the South Bank of the Severn there were a number of places where cow crossings had been installed.  You had to stop if the lights flashed as some rustic returned his herd to the rest of his farm.  (There was no such refinement for the tanks on Salisbury Plain: I guess if you hit 50 tons of Leopard you tended to stop anyway!  Also if  the converse applied.)

It was a quiet day today but very pleasant.  Our first stop was a National Nature Reserve, Shapwick Heath on the Somerset Levels.  This was essentially a peat bog, with a great heap of dug out peat on the opposite side of the road!   In the Reserve the density of vegetation - and apparent age of some of the trees - was a very good argument for maintaining the peat bog habitat.  The big ticket item here was otters, which we didn't see at either of the hides we visited.

Before gettng to the birds we did see, there was a faintly annoying bit of business with a sign about "this track to the Decoy Hide is closed because of a fallen tree'.  Had they not had the sign we would not have tried to get to the decoy hide that way, but gone the much drier way.   This reminded me considerably of an article in Punch many years ago about a sign in a pond saying nothing more than "DO NOT THROW STONES AT THIS SIGN".

The highlight of birds seen at Shapwick was a Bittern flying over the reeds as we got near to the Decoy hide.  A Hobby was also good, as was a Marsh Harrier.  An 'area highlight' was the sight of St Michael's Chapel on Glastonbury Tor clearly visible over the reeds.


Having sorted a small locational issue vis-a-vis the stupid map at the road, we then moved to the Canada Hide.  This was a small trek from where we had parked but scored 3 Little Egrets, another Hobby, and on getting back to the road a Buzzard.

We then moved on to Bridgewater Bay, down some of the most entertaining (for me) and terror inducing (even at 20mph, for Frances) roads - to use a term loosely - thus far.  The big ticket stuff here was the late Summer moult by Shelduck: at that time some 6,000 of these huge ducks were expected.  My estimate is that only 2-3,000 were present today.  Still bloody impressive.  Every white dot on the mudbank is a 1 metre wingspan goose!

Other good things here were an Oystercatcher with chick and about 40 Curlews.  A bad thing was the wind which was beginning to howl across the river.

After a very slow drive West along the 'A'39 towards Minehead we got to Dunster Castle.  This had been in the same family for centuries but had been greatly updated in the middle 19th Century.  The best set of info about the building was in the Tenants House (where the tenants paid their rent, and which we found at the end).  The original building seems to have been significantly trashed by Stephen in the 1200s.  They were on the right side in the Civil War and came close to being on the losing side in the Monmouth rebellion (but their troops were too fond of drinking to arrive on time for the Battle of Sedgemoor, so avoided the recriminations).

The reason we actually went there was for the views across the Severn and back to the Quantock Hills.  Here arre a couple of images:

On getting home I decided to deal with the remaining Badgers.

• The Blandford Fly was sauced up with ginger since that was supposed to be the antidote to a biting fly around the Blandford area.  I don't care: the beer was extremely good.  Badger is now the best brewery although Greene King IPA is still my preferred single brew.
• Tanglefoot was named after the Master Brewer's condition after demonstrating his wares to his staff!

The only comment needed about the A39 was a sign just after Bridgewater that there had been 927 casualties' in 5 years.  My own thought is that if they had better road signs (and didn't locate them where they were 90% obscured by vegetation) people would have a better chance of driving properly, rather than milling around wondering where the pharque they were!

We have found the language much easier down here.  We can largely understand what people say, but they do all sound rather like Phil from Time team.  I spoke to a guy in Glastonbury (about his Morris 1000 van, my first vehicle, about 42 years ago) and his reply was along the lines of "Noo rust, jest neyou tieyeres".   A request in the George Hotel to "Show me that" was rendered as "Shoe myeh thart" while a child was advised her mum was outside having a gasper with the immortal phrase " Moom suit thar."