St Catherine's

I finally escaped the office to enjoy the "mid-Summer" (in UK mid-April!) warm and sunny late afternoon and evening. 

I drove just a few miles from the office to the bottom of St Catherine's Hill: a chalk downland area maintained as a nature reserve.  It includes an Iron Age hill fort, a 17th/18th century mizmaze and a copse of beech trees containing the site of a 12th century chapel.

The mizmaze (extra) is one of only two surviving historic English turf mazes or labyrinths where the path is a narrow groove in the turf, and is also one of the only 8 surviving turf mazes in England.  It's just a pity that a group of students had decided to have a BBQ sitting at the edge of the site limiting my viewpoint (though they were "well behaved" otherwise!)

For the main shot, having thought ahead for a change, I had added my crystal ball to the camera bag, which proved ideal for showing off the beech copse.  I had thought that remains of the chapel (dedicated to St Catherine but destroyed in 1537) would be on view, but these are buried beneath trees and there is no visible indication of its location.