A new route

Today was a cycle and a rub, so be impressed pitiful earthlings! Or, more likely, not.

Cycle ride took me past the old sailing club lake. It used to be a pretty sight on weekends, with the colourful boats swishing about and the admittedly rather rah-ish folk having fun. Then the fishing club turfed them out and turned it into a big sterile watery hole, with a few mallards and greylag geese pootling about. Really sad, I always think, there was room for both.

So that was 7 miles on the bike in the morning, and then in the afternoon decided to run out to this footpath to apparently nowhere I see from work.

I've always wondered where it goes...

Well, I'll tell you bloody where. Having risked my neck running by the side of the quiet and peaceful A17, the nice friendly brown sign saying "Public Footpath" led to no footpath, or anything that could be called a foot track, or foot route not thigh deep in bloody nettles. In the opposite direction to the sign there was some some sort of farm track  next to a very stagnant drain from which I startled a heron - god only knows what kind of fish it was trying to catch in there.

The track was next to a field of rape, and added into that nasty cloying stink was some sort of muck spreading nausea stew going on. This path was nay beauty, as my mother would say, leading to an old airstrip by the air museum and piles of landfill rubble, but there were some lapwings about.

Lapwings! I'm sure when I was a kid they were everywhere out in the fields, but you never see many these days I reckon, so I was pretty chuffed to see those familar broad wings and psych magpie colour schemes presumably disturbed by my clod hopping running up into the miasmic air.

I ran eleven miles, close to, and really didn't see a lot - apart from a few green veined white by that ditch, not a lot to be seen, beacon hill reserve was quiet and after 7-8 miles I was pretty cracked by then. If weather holds, a trip to Langford Lowfields beckons, or at least to the hide on the perimeter.