Category: Most Popular Posts

Creative Imagination in a mini-pond

Creative Imagination in a mini-pond

Welcome to a Jurassic swamp with dragons in the deeps and dinosaurs hiding in the grass.  A child sits watching with open-eyed wonder.    It’s the stuff of children’s fiction. But it’s real and better than any made up story or computer game. There are things going on in that garden mini pond that are guaranteed to catch the imagination of any child. Not least our granddaughter. Then all of a sudden, as if from nowhere, out crawls a monster breathing fire and looking fierce. What prehistoric creature is this?

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Walking the Fells with Wordsworth

Walking the Fells with Wordsworth

What draws the crowds to the Lake District? If you’ve ever been there you’ll know. But leave the car and the tourists and start climbing into the fells. You’ll soon find yourself alone walking where Wordsworth walked and sharing his thoughts so beautifully expressed in his poetry. 

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Our Lost Wildflower Meadows

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‘And  that will be England gone, the shadows, the meadows, the lanes….. all that remains for us will be concrete and tyres‘

On holiday recently, passing mile upon mile of road-side verges sprayed with weedkiller, I couldn’t help thinking of these ringing words from Philip Larkin’s disturbing poem ’Going,Going’. Even back in 1972 he was warning of the way we are trashing our environment. Those sprayed verges are understandable as part of essential high-way maintenance yet, in a way, deeply disturbing. With the road-sides looking like a ‘scorched earth’ policy it raises the question ‘Where have all the wild flowers gone?‘

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