Back to England - Berkshire part 1

How the time has flown this last week! We've been busy with our tree man doing some work and have had a lot to do as well, so I hadn't noticed it was a week since I last posted. I've two posts to finish off the photos taken in England and then the blog will be back in my garden again.

After rural Somerset we moved on to suburban Berkshire to stay with my brother and sister in law. They had fetched my parents in law down to stay with them/us as my father in law is not well and can't drive any more. This was our main reason for going to England to spend time with them. As my sister in law works shift work and has odd days off during the week we were able to get out for a bit of retail therapy, and the occasional times when it was sunny we went for a few walks. Luckily for us this lake featured below is only a few alley ways along round the backs of the houses from where we were staying and it's a nice place to visit. People feed the ducks and the waterfowl are therefore quite tame, as you can see from all the swan pictures, who pretty much followed us around the lake. There were seven cygnets swimming about with their parents which was rather cute. How they can be called ugly ducklings I don't know! 

The trees around here are huge and you'll see in a photo further down what it is like in the road where my brother in law lives. There are Scots Pines and other trees so tall that I couldn't get far enough away to get them in one photo, hence the two photos below!

Just to make a change there was a solitary Canada Goose which also made a beeline for us from the other side of the lake, hoping to be fed I imagine.

And a few pics of us....

The road where my brother in law lives. So when we heard about that storm that was forecast I was a little bit concerned.... in fact it wasn't bad here and no trees fell, thank goodness!

Another sunny afternoon we visited Wildmoor Heath - I was rather excited reading the noticeboard which mentioned Dartford Warblers, a bird I've never seen, and the bog area is supposed to be good for dragonflies and damselflies, but we were rather disappointed. I know it was late in the year for insects but the sum total of birds, bugs and flowers was one clump of heather, a solitary robin in the car park, one fly seen by my OH and three midges by me. :-(

But it was still a nice walk, and there's a good mix here of woodland, heathland, and marshland/bog.

Eventually I turned my attentions to fungi as there was more of that about than anything else!

I thought the following were Parasol mushrooms, but having looked at Google images now I'm not so sure. These are the immature ones and the photo below this is the more mature fungi. They were pretty cool, whatever they are.

I guess it must have been raining somewhere.... and it even looks like a double rainbow!