Hubby and I had already decided on a trip to Crummock Water, when I checked Twitter and discovered that the challenge for #wildflowerhour was #bythewater. For a similar challenge last year I found so many flowers that I wrote a blog post about them.
Crummock Water has featured on this blog before. Even before we arrived at our destination we had some excitement. There was a red squirrel running along the side of a country lane through Loweswater. (The place not the lake!) We parked in a National Trust car park and walked through woodland beside the River Cocker to Crummock Water. It was a sunny day with a cooling wind.
The scenery was stunning and I found many different wild flowers, including about a dozen new to me. I managed to identify some of them from reference books (field guides) and the experts from #wildflowerhour helped with others. We also spotted a few birds, mainly wagtails. One was a small bird which hovered (and had a white rump). Any idea what it was? There were some fairly small fish in a stream.
Some people who overtook us as I was taking a photo alerted us to the presence of a lizard. We retraced our steps to find it. It was undisturbed by people and dogs passing nearby.
We had a picnic lunch under a hawthorn tree with a view. Then we continued along the path finding more interesting flowers. We returned by the same route along the lake, but a different path through the woods. I took about 90 photos mainly of flowers. Digital photography is a useful invention!
