It’s difficult to do justice to the place where I’ve been working today. Dinefwr Park in West Wales is a beautiful, historic designed landscape, laid out by the people who lived here in the 17th century.
A mixture of parkland and farmland, with hundreds of oak trees that are over 500 years old. Today we were working out how to maintain these ancient trees for another two hundred years, and how to create the right conditions for their successors. So we’ve been thinking very long range thoughts today indeed.
And if that wasn’t enough Dinefwr is home to a very rare breed of the White Park Cattle. This beautiful breed can be traced back in history over a thousand years.
And if the trees and cattle are not ancient enough, then just under the soil here there are rocks containing thousands of trilobite fossils, aged a mere 400 million years.
It was a wonderful day immersed in such ancient beauty.
Here’s a song and video about life on earth….dedicated to Carl Sagan
The sea cliff flowers have all but gone for another year, but there will always be colour around us…
This week I have been back in the mountains of the Snowdonia National Park in North Wales working, although it didn’t feel like work, on an upland farm. I was there to help advise on management and to survey the magnificent heathland that has developed on the mountain in the last 30 years.
There are some rare and unique plant communities growing up there now because the traditional farming practice of burning and grazing by sheep has been absent for all that time.
On the valley floor is the beautiful lake (Llyn Dinas)….
I only have a very small, cheap digital camera, but it’s a times like these that I wish I’d made that upgrade! Here’s one from someone who has…
Mike Howe 