6 JUly: Portland

Bath and Bristol.  (With respect to the later I am -so far -  resisting any references to rhyming slang or page 3 of The Sun.)

In case you are wondering about the shortage of images, that is because LINUX seems to want to open my entire image gallery to select a single image and thus runs like a dog with no legs.  I will keep trying to add some stuff but am not optimistic that a solution will appear until I am safely back in the arms of Microsoft next week.  After two days of spitting the dummy the image insert function seems to have returned so I have added some below.  No idea why they wouldn't appear earlier and no chance of getting an intelligible message to prevent it from recurring. On further reflection I have developed a suspicion that this is in some way related to the bandwidth available on the ADSL connection to main house: they are pretty much at the end of the range as far as BT are concerned.

Bath is an excrescence and has been deleted from our life.  Bristol will probably get some action on Thursday.  Today was Weymouth, Portland and (a bit of a surprise) Stourhead.

We became locked into today as Weymouth Day as we had undertaken to deliver a brooch to a relative of a friend in Canberra.  This duly happened at 10:30am on the steps of Weymouth Station.  As the recipient greeted me by name I am pretty sure he was the right recipient!

We had got to Weymouth much more quickly than I had expected.  This was due to the roads being a lot clearer and it being (somehow) less distance than Google Maps had suggested.  (Had we been going in the opposite direction the comment would not have applies.  We were held up for a few minutes at road works: the tailback in the opposite direction was 1.5 miles.) So we had filled in a couple of hours, mainly scoping out Radipole Lake, a large reedbed in the middle of Weymouth, run by the RSPB.  It was another good reserve with about 25 species being logged.  Common Sandpipers were an addition to the trip list - seeing 12 of them sitting on a rail was very unusual.

To my surprise Weymouth was very much a seaside resort in the classic UK sense.   I presume that one of these hoteliers wanted to ensure his guests were aware they were still in the UK, while the other was hoping to give a Gallic flair to his charms.  My camera (or possibly my brain) refused to take any photos of the fun-fair establishments elsewhere along the Esplanade

We then moved out to Portland.  The opening sight of the Island was not promising as it seemed to be a wall of identical timeshares.  Once through that we got to the Bill and soon saw a Rock Pipit and a Black Redstart.  We wandered around a Defence facility (getting good views of a female Kestrel) and found some Guillemots and what I persuaded myself was at least one Shag.  Needless to say it was on a rock.

A very fast moving Guillemot then appeared.  The reason for speed was quite apparent: a Peregrine Falcon was right up its  tail feathers.  After all this excitement the trip list is up to 112 species!

We then checked out Chesil Beach (an amazing wall of pebbles) before wandering off to Stourhead House and Garden.  This was a house and garden developed by the Hoare family in about the 17th Century.  The family started to prosper as jewellers and gold merchants and then moved in to banking, in which they are still active.  Some of the family are still in the area: as a guide said (and probably wished he hadn't "There are still a lot of Hoares around here."

When they passed it over to the NT it was accompanied by a large endowment so is well maintained.  The house was quite good, with particular points being awarded for the mentions of the conservation work they are able to do as a result of the endowment.  The gardens were excellent both in scale and layout.  The images in this neighbourhood show a view across the gardens too a folly and another inside a grotto with a statue of Poseidon (or some such ancient Greek deity).

We called in (again) for tea at The George in Gurney Slade and it was good pub food washed down with some good beers: Austell Tribute and Butcombe Bitter.