Berner's Heath Walk

I hadn't walked with anyone other than Dawn and William since I took Sarah back to Leeds at the start of the year. But today I had a chance to walk with Joyce and catch up on the last 2 1/2 months since we had last met. She invited me to walk with her to visit Berner's Heath, a Site of Special Scientific Interest with an interesting history. It is only accessible from November to February, so this was also a bit of a last chance until next winter.We met at Rampart's Field near West Stow and headed North along the Icknield Way to start with.This was our route...

Very rectangular! Here are a few of my photos.

It was nice to have a path that was sandy rather than muddy...

...but we are in the Brecks. There was quite a bit of air activity, and it couldn't be Brits going/returning on holiday abroad, could it?

We marveled at these trenches ready for potato planting.

Berner's Heath is open access land... but only between November and February.

These hummocks are interesting.

Soon we got to the cross of trees that was used as a target, as described here.

The deer have been here, but we didn't see them today.

We walked down the middle of the cross of trees.

The gates (and there aren't many of them) to the heath aren't very friendly. You have to climb over them. Perhaps they forgot to remove the barriers in November.

We chanced upon a team of three from the Forestry Commisson at work. Well Joyce's Dad worked for them for 40 years, so we had to have a chat. They had been planting trees since 7:20am... 4 rows of Douglas Fir with a row of Corsican Pine in between. I'm sure Joyce will correct me if I remembered this wrong, but I think we were told they had planted 7000 trees since they started on Tuesday morning and had planted over 2000 today. (I think I remembered wrong when we stopped for lunch that it was 7000 today). Wow!

We stopped for lunch here. Oh dear. Did we break the COVID rules? But here was nobody to see.

On our way back now, this path was very wide.

There are still plenty of last year's leaves in place.

"Are they hares?," asked Joyce. No. Just rabbits.

And just before we got back... a reminder of the classic Breckland tree skyline. I love it.

Thank-you Joyce. Lovely to visit that special place while we can, and to catch you, of course. Looking forward to walks with the rest of the gang soon!

You can find more details of our route here on MapMyWalk,