A pair of brown cows and calves in Ruscombe valley

I went to visit Philip B. at their house on Bread Street on the west side of the Ruscombe valley. We had planned to go for a walk in the nearby and ancient Randwick woods where the bluebells are as usual flowering in abundance. In the end we stayed in the house drinking good coffee and chatting about our lives and then our separate and quite extensive journeys around Asia in the mid-1980s. Rain started falling and my hip was hurting so the sedentary option won out.

To go home I drove about half a mile towards the head of the valley and the heart of the hamlet of Ruscombe, where a spring has flowed continuously forming the combe, before descending downhill to join the river Frome in Stroud. The single track road twists and turns following the slopes of the hillside. I spotted two animals and possibly their young sitting in an old orchard on the slope below me. It immediately occurred to me that these were cows with their calves and I decided to stop.

I walked to the fence with my camera and realised that I was right. I sense that the claves are extremely young, possibly only a day or two old, and the cows look very tired. With my zoom I took a wide shot (see the ‘Extra’) to show the whole scene before quickly zooming in to look more closely at the animals. The jackdaw arrived at the last minute and was ignored by the animals. In fact once I saw the large number of flies on their bodies, I realised that they probably were pleased to have a bird eating the insects.