A Southerly Wind

We walked north along the coast today with the wind, a aggressive southerly, at our backs and the sea, with almost two hours to go before high tide, already reaching the top of the beach - and having deposited two creels, presumably from the one remaining boat which is still fishing through the winter.

Just at the back of the sea wall, at a junction in the paths where we've often been greeted by a robin, we found one dead. There's no way of telling how or why it died but every time we see a corpse we pray it isn't the first sign of bird 'flu moving into a new bird population.

To avoid the hard work of walking home into the teeth of the wind we made our way back through the forestry. Part of the track, close to the castle, has large amounts of wild rose of sharon growing along it, the berries looking ripe and, one would have thought, appealing to the birds but, while all the other berries have been stripped from the trees, there was no sign of anything eating these ones.

This is a cheering sight. There's only one place in the castle woods where the snowdrops are shooting and one of them has a bud, while....

....this is a mystery. It's three to four centimetres across and appears to be the fruiting body of a fungus. Unfortunately, it was growing on a fallen tree which lay on a steep slope so I couldn't get close enough to take a more detailed picture so have even less chance of identifying it.