Having found Glastonbury suffocatingly alternative, what a relief to find Burrow Mump such a delight. The sky was displaying its blue wizardry, with brilliantly complicated cloudscapes. Met a nice man at the top with a smiling lurcher and passed a very fat woman peeing in the car park on the way up, like a beluga, inadequately shielded by tattooed husband holding a small floor mat. But am sure conditions would have been worse in King Alfred’s day.
Indeed, having just finished Yasunari’s Kawabata’s extraordinary Snow Country, I am now diving into Justin Pollard’s wonderfully insightful Alfred the Great: The Man who Made England. Highly recommended.
Then on the RSPB’s Greylake Reserve. Fascinating to feel molehill dirt that is freshly excavated (soft and damp) and older (more like clinker, if you remember that). Various warblers and dragonflies, but a highlight was meeting an emissary of the local Kermit Society
Next, back to the King Alfred monument in Athelney, where the same moody sky framed the scene – reminding me of our visit many moons ago to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Happily, after many struggles along the way, the Alfred story turned out better for him than the Little Bighorn did for the headstrong George Armstrong Custer.
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