The Back Road

 

Monday 6th February 2012

A thick fog - the first for a long time



Tuesday 7th February 2012
I was surprised to see the sun this morning.
It hung in the mist like a Chinese lantern.



The Back Road

I often talk about taking 'the back road' to and from work. It's proper name is Langary Gate Road. It runs parallel with the main road I live on and runs across the back of my land, about two fields away. It takes you from Holbeach St Johns to Gedney Hill, crossing the flat fenland fields interspersed with a series of dykes, passing a few farm houses along the way and crossing South Holland Main Drain at Coy Bridge. It lies on the Greenwich Meridian, marked by a beheaded obelisk by the roadside.

This line of trees is often full of pigeons and fieldfares. This morning 3 Jays flew along in front of the car here - a very unusual sight, probably driven across from the continent by the exceptionally cold conditions there.

This recently ploughed field margin is attracting a small flock of finches and buntings, including Yellowhammers and Reed Buntings. If the cold spell continues, these may be tempted out of the fields to my feeders.

 Our time in London was spent living not too far away from the Meridian Line, but now it turns out we have moved even closer. The large, leaning trees here are the ones which appear in my sunrise pics.

The few gnarled bushes which dot the landscape often make a lookput perch for crows, kestrels, buzzards, and even hen harriers and short-eared owls if you are lucky.



The sweeping expanses of the fens are cut through by a series of hidden dykes, home to wintering wildfowl, moorhens, herons and egrets.



South Holland Main Drain, a highway for water birds, and winter home to Mute Swans, Cormorants, Goosanders, Tufted Ducks, Teal, Mallards and Moorhens. In the summer, its reedy banks are full of the rasping song of Reed Warblers and the occasional Grebe lurks along the vegetated fringes.



 

 

Langary Gate Road crosses the Main Drain at Coy Bridge. Further along, the river flows under the road to Holbeach Drove at Shell Bridge.