Walk Fifty-two – Oooh-er bit of a shock!

When I was a child I recall being quite disdainful of some Australian children who were on holiday at the same place as us in Fiji. The reason for this was that as they left their holiday ‘bure’ (Fijian syle house) to go down to the beach they ran like the clappers through the coconut trees that fringed the beach, just in case a coconut fell on their heads and killed them. Obviously coconuts fall off trees but in all the years I’d lived in Fiji I’d never witnessed a coconut falling off a tree, let alone falling on someone’s head. Similarly here in England, you can see the evidence of branches and even entire trees that have fallen onto the woodland floor, but you never witness the event – until today. As I was emerging from the first little spinney on my walk, there was the most God almighty crash behind me, birds flapping and squawking and flying out into the open together with what seemed to be bits of debris flying through the trees. I was too nervous of the first tree destabilising more trees to go back and look so I stopped at the first stile and calmed my nerves with this soothing watercolour. And yes that slice of field in the background is the formerly bright yellow oil seed rape field that I painted in a previous post.