It's just not cricket!

This is a collage of photos taken on our walk this afternoon. It was a mostly grey day (with five minutes of heavy rain before we set out) followed by an occasional break in the cloud.

We walked round Harts Grove, which is an estate of houses built in the 1980s in the grounds of Harts House, which was originally built in 1617 and then rebuilt in 1816 as a stuccoed Regency mansion, and which now serves as a nursing home. There are signs all around the estate of its former iteration, with some beautiful old brick walls having been left intact.

So here you have a variety of points of view – in the centre (and included sneakily as a means of getting some blue sky in it!) is a shot of a helicopter looking down on us. (Ms Quizzical might be amused to know that this was identified by my Mac as a Gryllus bimaculatus, or a species of cricket! Sadly, I can’t identify it properly, as she would, because I didn’t get a shot of its markings).

This is surrounded by shots of the ancient walls and the vegetation growing on them, including a Clematis armandii and some wall screw-moss.