Overnight Visitor.

I looked out of the window this morning and saw something had happened to the back lawn. There were a number of  brown marks on the grass. They were too small and irregular to be molehills so I wondered if they had been made by a squirrel, a bird or even a badger.

When I went out to look more closely I could see they were cloven hoof prints. Had a deer come out of the woodland ? But as they were bigger than a man's hand it would have had to be a very large deer. That's when I realised they were cow footprints and sure enough when I checked the wire fence at the bottom of the cows' field it had been broken down. There were no more prints or other signs of a cow in the garden so I rang Martin and told him about the broken fence. He was most apologetic about the damage to our lawn which wasn't that bad. He came down and spent most of the morning putting up a new fence so we shouldn't have any more bovine visitors.

It was a lovely sunny morning with a cooling breeze as I went out for my walk up the hill. This large, 8cms, Golden-ringed dragon fly was patrolling part of the road and settled long enough for me to take some photos.

I didn't have to go to school until 3.15 so I tackled another small project, filling in the trench in the outbuilding. Originally there was a concrete block and stone bar there which was one of the first things I took down but I had never got round to filling in the resulting hole. We had some sand and cement left over from building the chimney so I carefully counted the spade loads of cement into the wheelbarrow and then realised it was going to take an awful lot of sand to make up the correct ratio. The hardest part of the whole job was pushing that wheelbarrow up the drive and then up the steps to the scree garden. At that point I was thinking that I would have far too much concrete and was planning where I could use up the excess. But when I mixed it with water and began to fill in the trench I saw that even with using broken slabs there wasn't going to be enough concrete. Luckily there was another half bag of cement so I made up a slightly smaller load which nearly completed the job. At that point I had to clean up and go to school but when I returned I was able to scrape together enough sand and cement to finish off. There is a little bit at the front which needs doing but the main part of the job is done.