Friday 13 April 2012

Spring. What's not to like...

Gorgeous Springtime run early this morning. Fields full of lambs. The air filled with the liquid burbling of curlews punctuated by the piercing peep of oystercatchers. The hawthorn (or it may be blackthorn, I'm a bit vague botanically on this) is in flower; clusters of small, white, star-shaped blossoms turning the hedgerows into ribbons of white foam. They are fragrant too, but you need to be careful when you sniff them!
My route was a familiar one. I call it the 'Buzzard Loop', because I watched a pair of them circling above me on one occasion. It starts with a gentle climb and then contours along sheep-grazed grassland before dropping back down to the river. It took about 30 minutes and felt brilliant. The sun was fighting its way through the cloud, there was a fresh cool breeze and I got a sense of the land waking up. A cracking run.
Smiley rating 9/10

3 comments:

  1. Tis a fabulous time of year and no mistake. Running in the snow and battling snipey northerlies has its attractions but you can't beat a moor-full of mental skylarks.

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  2. If it's got leaves it's hawthorn, if it hasn't got leaves it's blackthorn. It'll be the latter as we're currently going through the 'blackthorn winter'.
    Keep up those cracking runs.

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  3. 4w: Dead right!
    RF: That's really useful. Thanks ever so much. It's definitely blackthorn - I'm thinking sloe gin at Christmas...

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