Sweet chestnut reaping

I'll get to gathering nuts. And attempting to roast them. But first, this was another new walk for me. Some exploration.

Always nice to see ponies.

They were grazing next to a former railway line that has been made into a long walk or cycle route. I loved this old bridge.

In a mile and a half, the route goes through a tunnel that is so long you need a torch to get through. I've never been there.

It reminds me that when I lived in Devon, the old people used to talk of all the journeys they used to make by train all across the county. Even in the 70s and 80s those lines had closed. Well, I guess it happened well before then. Now we have a railway system that is very expensive and not very reliable. And there is a new line being built at extortionate cost, destroying habitat across the country, to places already connected by rail. The reason? It's meant to be a bit faster. Absolute idiocy. And now it might not even reach the stated destinations.

Anyway, I followed this old line, crossing a railway bridge... and going off the path to look at the fast-flowing river.

As I was looking at it, I recalled part of a dream from the night before, which came back like the memory of something real. It's a little uncanny when that happens. In the dream I had been by a huge river that suddenly changed and I said, "It's all the silt it carried after the rain." We, I was with some unknown others, crossed a bridge and saw the silt so piled up it was impeding the flow of the river.

This felt similar. The fields have been ploughed and with the heavy rain, the soil just washes away. Absurd.

On the other side of the bridge, there was a patch of scrappy woodland. I was wandering through it and thought, "Poplar!" It was the scent of the leaves, I laughed aloud that this was so pertinent to me.

I like this photo. The trunk of the ash looks like the prow of a viking longboat.

I walked back up to the village where I had parked my car. Spotted through the fence a gorgeous beech tree.

It's the second one, the foreground tree is a sycamore - also lovely. But the trunk of the beech looked like some huge being had twisted the tree as it grew.

And then I came to the sweet chestnut. So many fruits! Harder to collect than horse chestnuts as the cases are really spiky, but I enjoyed my gathering.

I did not have an open fire to roast them upon, so I put them in the oven. I heard explosions, opened the oven and received a blast of pulverised nut. I'm still getting bits out of my hair. Maybe it was too hot. The large bits, I ate. Delicious. And plenty for the squirrels.