Walks with the cuckoo.

I’ve been for a constitutional on Sleights Moor. Exercise is good, but I move so slowly – there is so much to engage the senses.  Here be a bronze age burial mound with a trig point, a good place to sit and think, and listen to peewit, curlew and skylark – and the mew of a bird I don’t recognise.

On the moor edge this little chap came up to me, making faint bleats. He is a roe deer fawn – you can tell that by the two white spots on his top lip.

I was dressed in grey, so perhaps he thought I was his mother.

Closer he came . . . I reached out.

But that was too much and he walked away to tall grass, and curled up like a crescent. All the while I sensed his mother was watching from cover.

The cuckoo arrived so I sat on this rock for half an hour and listened.

Took my first ever selfie. I’m all grey like the rock – maybe almost as old. The cuckoo circled me, calling – he might have thought I was a likely rock to perch upon.

He gave me up and settled by a drystone wall. He called from there. A pipit came to see him off.

He got fed up with the pipit and moved away.

The way down ran through chiff-chaff country. All was song.

Down into Eskdale. Beneath this green road is a 30 year old North Sea gas pipe. I thought ‘you would never guess.’

The ash marks a vanished hedgerow.

Sheep pass through easily these days.

But long ago a farmer blocked a gap with the end of the bed his grandad had died in.

A last look at the fawn. I hope he makes it through and has a life.