28MilesInFebruary Miles 8 to 10 – South Holland Main Drain

The biggest challenge for today’s walk was finding the start!

It’s been a few years since I’ve walked here.

After being nowhere near to where I thought the walk was I ended up using the OS Map app to feed into Apple Maps to give me a route to the start.

As we got nearer to the start things started to come back to me.

I’ve tried to recall how I found this walk. But for the life of me I have no clue, except I was not told about it.

The final bit of road saw us pass a kestrel perching on an overhead line.

Little did I know that this would be one of the handful of birds I would see this afternoon.

Start Point: TF 42634 19713

Distance: 2.1 miles

Total Distance: 10.12 miles

Near the start of the walk glimpses of the first flowers of the year were showing. A small patch of snowdrops, two or three patches of daffodils. It’s no surprise these were early in the walk near the boundary of a garden.

Unlike yesterday this was not a windy walk, every now and then there would be a light breeze.

What surprised me about this walk was the lack of bird life. I saw a single gull, and a couple of crows. Maybe that regular bang of the bird scarer a farmer was using was working. But I didn’t see anything on the water.

However I did find maybe an answer to the mussel mystery. As the photo above shows I found the remnants of some baby mussels on the base of some reeds that had been dredged out of the drain.

During the walk I was reminded of bringing Nico here with Strider. Especially of the time Nico was chased by a flying pheasant. But boy did Nico like going off into the crops making the walks last a lot longer than they should have taken.

On the way back an egret flew across the drain.

As we walked towards the car I was paying attention to the tracks in the mud. There are some big dogs being walked here going by the size of the paw prints. But I also saw evidence of deer using the path as well. You didn’t need to be a tracker to know horses were also rode here.

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