Fruits of our hedgerows

It has been a while since I have had the opportunity to walk our dog along the lane as two of my children have taken on that responsibility between them as they are on their holidays from school and university. Today no-one else was around which gave me a good excuse to take my camera out for a stroll with our dog. I was amazed at how much things had moved on even though I drive up and down the lane every day! We still have the odd dandelion seed head scattered along the verges.

I really love to see teasels the way they stand majestically towering above everything else.

Bindweed seems to be weaving it's path through everything else, of course it is there all the time but not noticed until the stunning white flowers appear.

I guess as we are nearly into August, I should have expected to see signs of late summer fruits, but I really wasn't expecting to see so much. such as the amount of bittersweet berries which are already starting to turn red.

Sloe berries are appearing.

Blackberries are also starting to ripen

Elderberries are promising another good crop here, although they still need time to turn into their deep dark purple, it is always best to wait until their stems of the fruit clusters turn purple or red.

If you look carefully you can also find hazel nuts or cobnuts.

I also saw so many butterflies today, including this Red Admiral,

There really are a lot of  these around this year - Gatekeeper

Small White

Speckled Wood

Comma

This Peacock butterfly had a damaged wing

My first holly blue butterfly of the year, not a great photo as it was raining by the time I took this picture,

A large dragonfly flew past me but unfortunately didn't land, but there were a good number of these. Any ideas anyone?

If this afternoons stroll is anything to go by there could be a good harvest from our hedgerows to be gathered, maybe this year I might be tempted, we will see!

Our visit to The Isle of Man

It never ceases to amaze me how many beautiful places there are to visit in the British Isles. The Isle of Man did not disappoint! I am totally hooked, why haven't I visited the island before?
I am not going to bore you with all my holiday snaps on this post, but hopefully I will create a page of Isle of Man photos for you to peruse at your leisure some time in the not to distant future.
The idea of this is to share a few of our island experiences.
We only stayed for three nights, we wanted to take our daughter away for a few days after her intense few weeks of GCSE's, so we opted for the Isle of Man with the hope of seeing some basking sharks!

       Port Erin

We loved these little gardens. They were the other side of the road from the houses and looked out over the sea, very compact, each totally different, and reminded me of show gardens at Chelsea.

The Coast between Port Erin and Niarbyl

Peregrine Falcons

Niarbyl

Peel

Eider ducks

Grey Seal

Puffins

The little boat which took us out looking for basking sharks!

Basking Shark; this photo shows both it's fin and tail. we had found a group of at least three, maybe five, Objective achieved!

This is a much better view of it's fin, we were then told that we would have to leave them so we put cameras away ready for our fast journey back splashing over the sea, but had only moved a few yards when the boat came to a sudden halt as a shark came up right alongside the boat. No pictures I'm afraid as we knew we couldn't get to a camera in time, so just treasured the moment instead.

The Cronk

Gannets

The Ayres; Manx National Nature Reserve

Leaving Douglas