Come, Take A Walk With Me.......

.....before it's too late.  Our walk begins here, just two minutes from the back of my house.

To our right there is a big field of barley with a bank of trees in the foreground - this is where we find the best blackberries towards the end of the summer.

In front of us is this little piece of fairyland, all delicate leaves and dappled shadows.  Hidden among the undergrowth is a pond in which ducks nest, frogs spawn and squirrels leap above from branch to branch.

At the end of the shady trees, you get a glimpse of where we are going...

There are swathes of buttercups to our left, golden in the sunshine.

Across the way we can see the far side of the barley field - the trees in the front are another good blackberrying spot.  Above this field in the past couple of years we have seen Red Kites circling and wheeling in the sky, on the lookout for prey.

We turn the corner past a line of fruit trees - I gorged myself on wild cherries here last summer, stuffing them into my pockets to take them home.  At the end of the path there is a fantastic sloe tree - we picked pounds of sloes last summer and made several pints of sloe gin.

Turning left we get a glimpse of the fields between here and Crookham Village. One year I came face to face with a deer around this corner and luckily Clovis was so gobsmacked I had time to put him on the lead before he decided to chase it.

We walk around this field and turn to come home at the top.  To the right is a small copse - this is where the deer hide.  Further along is a bank of flowers with exploding seedpods - many summer afternoons I come this way with the dog just to play with them.  Some people never grow up!

There are many different kinds of wild flowers all along this walk.  The primroses, celandines and bluebells have gone and been replaced by speedwell, vetch, buttercups and clover.

You can see the village in the distance - the exploding seedpods will be under these trees in the late summer.

We are on our way home now, heading back towards the little fruit grove.

But we turn to our left and follow this little track - in the winter it is almost impassable due to mud and flooding.  Today is it just glorious.

Come on, I'm thirsty!  Clovis knows there is a stream at the end of the walk, just before we get home, where he can have a paddle and a cool drink.

Did you enjoy a brief look at the beautiful countryside that lies a few minutes behind our house?  I love walking here and so does Clovis - we come here almost every day, rain or shine.

However, there are plans afoot to bulldoze the lot and replace it with an enormous housing estate.  In these photos, the plans mean that as far as the eye can see, it will be buildings - no more flowers, no more meadows, no more deer, no more larks singing, no more pheasants, no more foxes, no more sloes, no more blackberries, no more elderflowers, no more ducks and frogs, no more red kites, no more cherries - what a crime.

If you live in the area and feel as strongly as I do about the possibility of all this beauty being destroyed , join FACEIT-Group, a group of like-minded people who want to protest at the loss of yet more of our countryside and pretty much the only piece of Fleet that is still wild and untouched.