Botanic Gardens – Reviewing the Walk

Looking down the perspective of this twisting trickle of water from the top of the footpath leading up from the entrance to the National Botanic Garden of Wales where I have been walking this week, I am reminded of how much our two daughters enjoyed this place when it opened and they were young children. This stream of water and other features along the way created endless fun for them to the point where one of them said it was her favourite place in Wales!

Twisting water at Botanic Garden of Wales

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Cycling Perspective and Reviewing the Walk

My walk this week has been along a very straight footpath that also doubles as a cycle path. I used to cycle a lot but my preference now is for walking – both are excellent forms of exercise and both give you more time and peace to enjoy the sights and sounds of your surroundings so I heartily recommend them to everyone as a means of maintaining health and wellbeing.

End of the footpath

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Flowing Along

Another small detour I took from the suburban footpath I have been walking along this week took me to the Afon Lliw. This is a river I have studied in detail – to be accurate I should say that I have documented children studying the flow in detail . . . from source to sea. The project I was involved in was Our River and you can see all eight chapters of the videos made here on the StillWalks website.

river

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A Long Straight Path

 

The long straight path I took on my walk this week is not all that long in reality, and neither is it entirely straight. Often when walking I try to pace myself and not rush off at the beginning as this allows me to do a longer walk without my knees giving any trouble. However, when the path is flat, paved, even and like this one, straight(ish), I find I automatically speed up and it can become more of a march. Had it not been for the fact that I was stopping to photograph and record, I would have completed the linear route there and back quite quickly.

long straight footpath

The photo below is of something not generally considered very desirable – Japanese Knotweed – but I liked the strange sticky curtain in front of the field that it created in its bare winter state.

landscape

long straight footpath

Under an October Sky – Walking in the Forest

October is often the wettest month for us here in Wales but whether the cloudscape below is evidence of this I could not say – I simply found it an interesting arrangement. In reality the weather conditions these days are seemingly so erratic, it is sometimes difficult to know which season we are in or what month it is. It is not easy to tell from these photos or the sound clip if the weather on my forest walks in October were wet or not.

October sky

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Autumn Leaves and Lakeside Laughter

Fallen Autumn leaves were well spread out on the ground underfoot on my walk this week around the enterprise zone lake in Swansea and it was a pleasure to walk through them. The soundscape around the lake held the things you might expect in this environment including the voices of various ducks, geese, swans, gulls and other birds.

Autumn Lakeside Leaves

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Walking Towards the Sunlight

Down on the edge of the salt marsh as I walked towards the sunlight of a more open landscape I came across a couple of interesting features. The first were these (there were a cluster of them) earthy looking large boulder-like objects sitting at the edge of the slightly higher ground I stood on. I guess they were once part of that higher ground and the sea has simply eroded away all that once surrounded them.

Earthy marshland feature

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Frilly Fungi on the Footpath

One of the good things about my walk this week being the reverse of the same route taken a couple of weeks ago, is that I noticed different things. I must have passed this big tree stump with the frilly patterns of fungi all over it on my previous walk here, but if I looked in that direction as I walked, then I didn’t “see” it and subsequently made no note of it in my mind. Nor did I notice the rhododendron which seemed to stand out to me with its bright colour – it is of course possible that the flower was not there two weeks ago!

valley footpath

fungi patterns

Rhododendron