A trip to Darley Abbey Park

In our house, doggy birthdays are not forgotten. Rinny was four on Friday and to celebrate, along with the string of toy sausages & chocolate bones, we took her for a lovely walk to Darley Abbey Park on Saturday. Thankfully the weather was just right. She had a splendid time haring around like a complete loon & chasing after her toy. She even brought it back! It was refreshing, for once, to not be the owner of the dog that chases after everybody else's dog. (This has been replaced by crazy barking when she spies her toy, not great, but better than the chasing of other dogs; she gets so very excited by her toys that she just can't contain herself. I was warned about this by the lady I bought her from.) In-fact, she was the chased for once!

We found a huge stick.

Aoife spent much of the walk like this:

And there was a lot of this:

The girls found LOADS of conkers and Aoife was particularly pleased to find her first acorn, albeit a wee one! We explained that most of them had been squirrelled away for the winter.

Roisin and Isaac had lots of fun on the swings:

We had a well deserved beverage in The Abbey. This is an old pub in the middle of Darley Abbey. It's tiny, but drinks are incredibly reasonably priced and the place has loads of character. Plus it allows children and dogs.

On the way back we stopped to look at the river and Simon was telling the girls about salmon swimming upstream, only to see a fish trying to jump up the waterfall!

The bit of the park we walked around is mostly trees and grass so we didn't see a lot of flowers, but we did see this one in amongst some nettles.

We used our new book about wild British flowers to identify it when we got home and found that it is a policeman's helmet (Impatiens glandulifera) which is not indigenous to, although considered naturalised throughout the UK. We thought it was very pretty. 

Both Simon and I think it's disturbing that more children these days seem to be losing touch with the natural world. We think it's important to pass on a love of and respect for nature, but you can't do that if you don't get out about about in it. So, we are. Trying to. I'd love to find some more wild spots to wander about & forage, but local parks are a good place to start. While we fully admit that we aren't terribly knowledgeable, we have books, access to the internet and we're interested. So we'll do our very best to find out what we don't know for them and, of course, Isaac too.

While at the Just So Festival, we joined the RSPB who have a site not far from us. Aoife spent ages poring over the information we got and was engrossed in the bird book. She was very pleased to tell me all the different birds she recognised already and was quite excited by the prospect of doing more outdoors-y stuff. Roisin told Daddy "this is fun" while re-potting some jasminiums on Sunday. There's hope, David Attenborough!