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| Definitely not the Cotswolds |
The weather here at home was murky when we left, and apparently remained so for a few days before the cold snap set in. It brought early snow to parts of Europe (the Alps, when we flew over them on the homeward journey yesterday, had a good covering of snow) but only one frost here. The weather is now chilly and damp, and windy, and likely to remain so for a couple of days at least.
The ash trees have now shed all their leaves - it looks as if every ash tree at this end of the village dumped its leaves in our driveway! so that was today's clearing-up job. The apple trees and the shrubs are still hanging on to theirs. The flowers are in late-autumn changeover: little left of the summer/autumn display but with the winter flowers not yet out (although the winter jasmine is nearly there).
Today's leaf-clearing was accompanied by the clacking of a fieldfare somewhere near. If late autumn comes, can fieldfares be far behind? but none seen on the apple tree yet. The green woodpecker was seen making a hasty exit from the apple tree, though. The apples are small this year, though the cooker did manage one that was over a pound in weight (and would have been more if the woodpecker hadn't been at it!). A couple of rotten ones left out on the patio were much appreciated by a blackbird today, and a couple of hen pheasants were skulking in the shrubs (apparently hiding from today's shoot) but otherwise there weren't many birds about.
A mole has been busy. Normally we don't get any beyond the bottom of the garden, but one has reached the house; the back-door paving has obviously obstructed his excavations, but he has worked his way along the line of the gap between paving stones, throwing up a lot of bedding sand. I'm not sure how I'm going to get that back into place!
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