23 May 2009: a warm spring evening at Cressage, Shropshire
23 May 2012: having fun in France – the Somme Bay railway, the cliff lift at Le Treport and the Somme at St Valery. Lots more photos on the blog – see “Sunshine“, and on Geoff’s Rail Diaries –  “Rails around the Somme Bay”

22 May 2005: a visit to Lilleshall Abbey, between Telford and Newport. We were the only people there.
I mentioned our 2012 French trip a couple of days ago (it was covered pretty fully on the blog at the time). On 22 May 2012, we visited the Cité Souterraine at Naours. For more on our visit to this amazing place, visit “The underground city” (the most visited page on the blog).
Later that day, as the sun went down, we walked beside the Somme, from our gîte at Saigneville, in a lovely quiet corner of Picardy.

“Unseasonably” so, according to the Met. Office. There’s certainly no shortage of fresh air on today’s short walk, but much of the potential subject matter for the camera is blowing about madly, so just three pictures today. Yes, the wild rose is coming out in profusion.

That’s 2006 and 2007… Thirteen years ago, on this day, we visited the red kite feeding station at Gigrin Farm near Rhayader in mid-Wales – what a spectacle! (It would have been better, photographically, if the sun had shone…) These are native kites, the offspring of a very small number of survivors from the original population. Today, we regularly see birds from the Welsh population in Shropshire.
On 20 May 2006, we were very nearly in mid-Wales. We’d planned a walk over Hergest Ridge, from the Herefordshire border town of Kington. It would have led us to lunch just across the border. The forecast suggested there might be one or two showers. We were rained off! A heavy, fine, penetrating rain which, among other things, would have soon soaked into our cameras. The significance of this day is that one of the photos appeared on the very first page of this blog, just over a week later (see “The new blog“) Yes, we’ve been going 14 years.