"Monday June 17th will be a walk from Lackford Lakes. We will meet at the Suffolk Wildlife Trust car-park, Lackford, Bury St Edmunds IP28 6HX (free to park and enter) at 4pm. We can have drinks from the cafe before we walk at 4.30pm. I envisage a 2 hour walk (6-7 miles) and then back to the centre for a picnic tea (6.30pm) before visiting the bird hides for a further 1.5-2 hours and making the most of the Full Moon and Mid Summer evening. There are plenty of picnic benches and it's a chance to have a very sociable evening together. Please bring your own picnic and binoculars etc and maybe long trousers in case of gnats. The centre toilets are open til 5pm only. You are free to join and leave when suits you.", said the invite to Joyce's Weekly Walks group. What a good idea! And we weren't disappointed.
We started with a cup of tea and a chance to meet Joyce's Mum and Dad. We were also joined by our group member Nicky, who was still recovering from a nasty hamstring injury so couldn't do the walk, but came to catch up with everybody. So we had to pose for a group photo before we started the walk.
And this was our pre-picnic route, passing along the back gardens of houses in Lackford Village, circumnavugating West Stow Country Park and adding an extra loop through the lovely woods of Weststow heath.
We saw plenty of geese around the lake and the River Lark was burbling along gently in the evening sunshine.
Back at the Lackford Lakes visitor centre, even though it was now closed, we were able to use the tables again for our picnic.
Joined by a couple of other friends at 7pm we then we spent a leisurely evening listening to the songbirds as we walked the paths and watching the birds from the various bird hides. I won't attempt to name what is in my photos, but our new recruits Barry and Dawn noted seeing and/or hearing a total of 60 different species!
That last one of the solitary swan reflected in the dark water in the shade reminded me of a favourite piece of music, The Swan of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius.*(see the end of this blog post to read about it).
Thanks Sarah for taking a group photo which has me in it.
We stayed until the sun went down and were rewarded by some lovely skies.
It was getting dark by the time we reluctantly headed for home.
What a lovely evening. Thanks Joyce for organising and leading us, Barry for the low alcohol cream stout and everyone else for the excellent company.What fun!
There is only room for a selection of my photos here. You can see more of them here on Flickr, and you can find more detail of our afternoon walk here on MapMyWalk.
*In case you want to know more about the piece... "The Swan of Tuonela is a tone poem by the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). It is inspired by a story out of the the Finnish national book of mythology, the Kalevala. Sibelius said “no” to the dissonance and atonality of the 20th Century and did not abandon melody and harmony like many of his European peers. In fact, as this piece shows, he almost went of in the direction of hyper-Romanticism. Maybe this has something to do with the long Finnish winter nights.
Tuonela is the Hades in Finnish mythology, which a swift dark river encircles. On this river, a majestic swan swims and sings. In Sibelius’ tone poem, the swan is represented by a melody played on the English horn. The tune moves slowly and gracefully, looping around and above the lush harmonies of the orchestra. The river is represented mostly by the violins, which use soft and shimmering short bow strokes to capture the dark, quiet feeling one watching the last rays of daylight playing on the ripples of the water’s surface. Toward the end, the full orchestra wells up and plays forte, filled with anguish. This harmonic tension eventually resolves itself and a cello carries the swan’s theme off to the end." Text quoted from here.
No comments:
Post a Comment