It felt like being in a cavernous cathedral lit with a soft green light as we walked up through the Valley Wood at Wold Newton. It was pleasantly cool in the wood after the heat of the open sun. Emerging from the wood we were greeted by a view down the next valley to Beesby Wood and the coast beyond. Our route took us down to Beesby where we climbed out of the valley and along the top side of the wood. In contrast to the cool, green interior of the wood, to it's north harvesting was in full swing. The barley had already been combined and the lone worker was leading the huge bails with a natty bail catcher and trailer that loaded the trailer semi-automatically and then unloaded them alongside the already massive stack. Back in my youth this would have been a job for a team of men working with pitchforks and much smaller bails. And not long before my childhood the harvest would be done with a reaper and binder and sheaves led by horse and cart to the stack yard where they would have been threshed using a threshing machine. I well remember visiting my grandparents who sent me off down the field to find my great grandfather. I found him working on top of the (to the eyes of a small boy) huge and fascinating threshing machine. He was retired by then and just 'keeping his hand in' but had worked on the land all his life.
I had hoped to find more butterflies, especially near Stock Furlong Wood but they were disappointingly thin on the ground.
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