A February Walk Round the Hirsel Lake

At last the pall of cloud lifts,  it is a sunlit February day, and I have the time to walk up to the Hirsel and take a leisurely walk round the lake. Although it is Sunday, and there are plenty of people walking in the grounds, nobody seems to be walking round the lake, and when I get to the Hide it is deserted.

A few birds float past the Hide:

There is some graphic grafitti of the usual kind on the walls of the Hide, and someone has demolished on of the sides:

I walk on round the lake path:

There is farmland to the left of the path:

Then further along the path divides, with the left hand path going into the woods, where in a couple of months the famous rhododendrons will be flourishing:

I decide to walk into the spinney near the lake.  The ground is very soft underfoot, and I find myself sinking in, so try and anchor my boots on a piece of fallen branch.  A treecreeper is climbing up a tree, it moves amazingly fast, like a little mouse. Down nearer the water I can see greylag geese:

But as a try to inch nearer through the bog they sense my presence and take off, with an amazing cacophony:

I think of the geese that saved Rome with their clamour – there was me trying to plod surreptitiously across the mud, quite some way away, but they get a sense of me and rise into the air, wheeling above me in a frenzied flock, honking away, shadowy above my head.  I thought I’d scared them away.  But eventually they come down on to the lake, further off, their honking fainter, and feeling a tad abashed at creating this uproar, I gaze for a few moments at the peaceful, birdless water:

Then I unstick myself from the mud and continued along the path, through the grey wintered trees:

On the path is this pretty feather:

I am near the end of the route round the lake, I know that when I came across the willows that I like to look at from the other side of the water, and that I missed when they were cut and I couldn’t see that lovely red that shines almost vermilion from far away:

Coming out from the path, I see  the Hirsel  spread out on the top of its gentle slope:

I walk back past the reedbeds:

Then look back across the lake, from where I started, before going to have a cappucino in the Hirsel Tearoom, which is packed, although in the whole of my walk, on such a fine day, I only met one couple going round the lake.