'New' footpaths and secret doors

During lockdown, my two boys and I have been studying maps of the village where we live and trying to find footpaths that we don’t think we have walked before. We are challenging ourselves to walk all of the marked footpaths on the map (in our village) and we’re doing pretty well. On one of our walks last week we came across this rather lovely gate. We couldn’t see over the hedge, so we just had to guess what might be behind it – a beautiful garden, a swimming pool, a zoo, a tropical beach (we let our imaginations run away with us!) or maybe it’s a portal to another word. It’s a bit like what you were doing for your English lessons this week.

It’s great to get out into the woods and fields at this time of year and see all the flowers coming up and the trees coming into leaf. On some of the footpaths that we have walked the most often, we are beginning to discover where some birds are nesting – we think we know where a woodpecker is nesting, as well as a wren and a blackbird.

The boys really like it when we come across somewhere they already know (usually a football field!), but via a different route to normal, then we go home and look it up on the map to see how got there across the fields compared to how we would get there via the roads in our ‘normal’ life. We might even have found some short cuts we can use for when we get back to our usual regime.

Hopefully you and your families are managing to get out and about too; I’m not sure the weather is set to be as nice this next week, but it’ll be interesting to see how that affects the wildlife.