Birr

Just a last few photos. I am sorry I don't have any worth sharing of the hornbeam cloisters - they are so wonderful, but at this time of year they are so leafy that you don't see the structure as well as you would earlier and later in the year.

72" reflecting telescope, originally constructed in 1841 - 1845, and restored in 1997.

Fagus Sylvatica "Aurea Pendula"  - always a striking splash of colour.

Poppies

The lake - again!

The  meadow land in front of the castle hasn't been ploughed for a couple of hundred years - it used to be grazed by sheep. It's full of all sorts of wildflowers. I didn't see it this time, but in the past they have mown a path through part of it in the shape of the spiral nebula  as observed by the 3rd Earl of Rosse who built the telescope.

The Castle - not a good photo, but I think I have to include one.

WaterWorld

I said that one of the constant sounds last Wednesday was water. These few pictures will give you an idea why.

Reflections 1

 

Reflections 2

Reflections 3

Lake

Lilies

Waterfall

Swirling Scum - well, what else do I call it?

One Hot Day!!

It was such a treat to be able to go to Birr today, even if means that I haven't really had a day off this week, as I had to get up early on Monday to go to the doctor and early today to travel with C. We went a different route to our usual one, and now we've found a way that only takes an hour and three quarters to get there, I am sure we will go again soon  for a day together. But goodness, if it was hot in the car going down, it was even hotter come back. So I am pretty tired from the heat and the long day, and have just picked a few photos that didn't need anything except resizing and don't need to go together.
Seeing the dipper was a real treat - we've seen it there once before, the same time we saw a Pine Marten. I wasn't that lucky this time. At least I was lucky in that the dipper started out on my side of the river, making my first photo the best.

When I sat down at a picnic bench to have a drink and change the lens on my camera to take the view across the lake, there was the greatest rustling in the reeds at the edge - you can just see a duck flying up. He wasn't actually meant to be in the photo at all.Obviously they are well used to being fed by people at the picnic bench, as a pair of them stood around hopefully quacking away gently till I moved on.

This, the lady I was talking to who works there, thinks is some type of Chinese bird - a goose, I guess.

Most of the morning the only sounds were water, birds, insects, more birds, more water and the sound of my feet on the paths - so relaxing. And the scents - green grassy, woody, roses, azaleas, mock orange...wonderful.

We are treating friends to a meal out tomorrow - a long-standing tradition when they come home on holidays from Africa, so I don't know if I'll have time to get any more photos sorted out till the weekend. And it's hard to capture all those  wide open meadow spaces and trees with photos, they just don't do it justice.

Birds!!

This morning I was hanging the wash out before work and thinking how much we miss our little robins. I wish I knew what had happened to them. I was thinking that now there are no birds that will come to the feeder unless I am in the back porch -  and promptly on cue a little scruffy juvenile coal tit flew across and started digging into the feeder. He kept flying off and coming back, so when the wash was all pegged out I stuck the big lens on the camera and sat in the back porch for a few minutes.

There must be something good in here.

Ah, a nice sunflower seed.

How do you get into this darned thing!!

(He really was having trouble with that seed, he was pecking away at it for ages).

It was lovely and sunny in town too. I am so happy that it's good weather this week. C has to go to Birr for a meeting tomorrow, and as it's a day I'm not scheduled to work, I'm going to go down with him and visit the Demesne. It's almost three years since we were last there - too long.

The Liffey at low tide - looking almost rural!! The sunshine really  makes the green look so green.

Odds and Ends

A last few photos from last Saturday...
At first sight I thought this was spider's eggs hatching, but on a closer look at a more advanced cluster it turned out to be little caterpillars of some description.

I loved the shape of the seed heads from this, which I think was a Crown Imperial lily.

Complete with its own cargo of insects on a leaf...

Winter casualties...

Adding Some Colour to Life

At last the sun came out this evening, but really it's been grey since some time on Sunday. These are all pictures from Saturday,  with the added bonus that  all I had to do was scale them down. Just as well;  not too much time for fussing around with editing as I took advantage of the sun and lack of rain to go and pull all the ivy and brambles out of the hedge. It's been hard to find a chance recently when I wouldn't get an inadvertent shower at the same time. And I spent a bit of time today making a little mini album of photos from my aunt's garden to give her when we go there for dinner tomorrow evening.

I love Escholztia -I grew some from seed one year and they were almost as vivid as the ones in the photo, maybe a bit more yellow. But after a couple of years all the self-seeded ones were coming up more like primroses and buttermilk.

You don't really see the photos in the mini-album so well, but they were almost all on the blog back at the end of May anyway!

Water-World

We saw a lot of water-snails on Saturday - I don't ever remember seeing that many before. Some were on the lily pads, some were swimming around. You can see that they had just cut the grass - all the lily pads near the bank were covered with grass trimmings.

Winging It

I said that the irises were attracting photographers just like the flowers were attracting bees (OK, so I did have my tripod now that I have my lovely new carbon-fibre one, but one of the guys there had at least two, if not three, different reflectors).  Not sure how come all the iris photos I uploaded were blue, when I did take some other ones...So here are just a very few of the bees we saw.

Time for a good scratch

Feeling happier

Dragonflies - if you look closely, the one on the right is all turquoise, but the one on the left has a green thorax - if that's the right term for it. Abdomen?

And since I just happened to have dragonflies on the card I made today...

I was at the optician this morning. I thought she would tell me I needed to move on to varifocals, but she reckoned that since I didn't need to change my prescription, I might as well wait another year, if I was only finding it a slight inconvenience and not a major problem. No charge for a basic check-up including the glaucoma test and the one where she shines a bright light into your eyes. Now I know for sure why I travel to go to my regular optician for the last number of years, instead of switching to one of the large chains nearby or in the city centre. But between the rain and the heavy traffic, I don't know why I listened to C and drove rather than taking the train, which would have been my first choice. At least he had been over that direction recently for a training course and advised me to allow an hour to eliminate the stress of running late - I needed most of it.