Horsey Mere

I have been meaning to do the circular walk around the Horsey area since I moved here.  To be honest the main thing putting me off is that I am too tight to pay the car park fee.  Personally I think it's a liberty to make you pay extortionate prices to park somewhere like that.  Anyway today I bit the bullet and decided to blow the budget and pay the darn fee!

I arrived and marched reluctantly to the machine to buy a ticket only to be greeted with a sign which told me the trail was closed due to flood defense works.  How typical was that?  It also said that the shop might be able to advise me alternative walks so I trundled over there and spoke to a very nice lady who told me that if the locals had opened the fence because they were sick of it being closed.  Yipee said me and off I went and climbed through the gap in the fence.  I love a bit of trespassing!  After a while I realised that I was losing the trail.  I think that some of the way markers had been moved during the works and the trails crushed under caterpillar tracks.  After doubling back and finding a way marker I thought I must be on the right trail but eventually came to a dead end where a cut went right accross the path and there was no bridge.

Evidence that I can follow a path

I don't know exactly what was going on with the trail but despite having to turn around and head back to the car after an hours walking I am glad I went because I had a lovely view of two Common Cranes who were actually in the same field as me (probably a field I was not meant to be in...)  They were just ambling along without a care in the world.  It was probably one of my nicest Crane sightings because it was unexpected, I was alone and they were on the deck and fairly close.

When I got back to Horsey Mere I went back into the shop to check where I had gone wrong.  The nice lady had been replaced by a very rude man who treated me like an idiot who couldn't follow a trail, virtually pushing me away from his kiosk window to serve someone an ice cream, which was obviously much more important than my enquiry.  However I can follow a trail, see the evidence above!!!  I feel an email to his employer The National Trust coming on!

Other purely gratuitous pictures from my walk today, which I really did enjoy before I met the rude man in the shop....

Synchronised  Greylag

I never knew this existed

Horsey Mill, it used to be a donation to go up it, now its £2.50 a go!