Wensleydale

A couple of weeks ago Sue and I spent a couple of days visiting friends in the village of Middleham in Wensleydale, which is part of the Yorkshire Dales (although just outside the Yorkshire Dales National Park).
On one of the days we visited two different ruins dating from the 12th Century:- Jervaulx Abbey, which was completed in the middle of that century, and Middleham Castle, which came a bit later, the building not being started until the year 1190 AD.
The castle was owned and lived in by various different powerful people over the years, with probably the most notable being the future King Richard III (although it is thought that he spent little or no time there after becoming king). One of the pubs in Middleham is named in his honour.
The abbey, for most of its life until it was destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th Century, was owned and lived in by the Cistercian order of monks.

Jervaulx Abbey, East Witton, North Yorkshire
(Photo © Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jervaulx_Abbey)

The geology of the Yorkshire Dales is dominated by limestone, and this results in quite a lot of interesting plants and we saw a few while we were there - one of these was one I had never seen before - Giant Bellflower (Campanula latifolia), and I got quite excited about it. While writing this blog-post I discovered that there is a pub in Selby, just south of York, called The Giant Bellflower. I would like to visit it one day (just because of the name) although I'm slightly nervous as it is a Wetherspoons pub and has had some pretty impressively bad reviews on TripAdvisor over the last few years.

Giant Bellflower (Campanula latifolia)
Although usually the flowers are purple,
most of the ones we saw were whitish.

A botanist (me) identifying Giant Bellflower
(see the leaves in the bottom left of the picture)

Betony (Betonica officinalis) - not a very rare plant, and one that I have seen in many parts of England,
but never as abundantly as it was growing in the valley of the River Cover, near Middleham.
There were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of plants.Although the flowers might look,
to the lay-person, a bit 'orchid-like', it is actually in the Mint family

Not every plant in the Dales is a rare or unusual one! I spent some time trying to turn this into something
rare, but had to admit in the end that it was Common Bird's-foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus),
an extremely common plant, which you probably have growing within 500 metres of you, wherever
you are now (if you're in Great Britain or Ireland, that is)

South Gare

South Gare with some of the notable features marked

South Gare [gare rhymes with bare, by the way] is a peninsula on the east side of the mouth of the River Tees - at this point the river is flowing pretty much south to north so even though it's on the south bank of a river which flows broadly west to east and IS called South Gare (and there is a North Gare on the other side), it should perhaps be called East Gare instead.

However, although you can now walk dry-shod around a large area of natural-looking grassland, sand dunes, reedbeds and ponds, with many 'rocky outcrops' and other interesting-looking 'geological features', closer examination of some of the 'rocks' will give a clue to the truth. Before 1859, South Gare did not exist and the mouth of the river would have been much wider, with mudflats and sand dunes on both sides - the whole peninsula is in fact man-made.

In 1859 the construction of 22 miles of walls began in the River Tees, using solid blocks of blast furnace slag which were specially cast and moved into place in the river mouth. Construction of South Gare itself (which seems strictly speaking to refer only to the last 2.5 miles of the wall (although most people use it when talking about the whole peninsula)) began in 1861 and finished in 1884. An estimated 5 million tons of slag was used in the construction of the gare with 18,000 tons of cement, and the wall was then back-filled with 70,000 tons of silt and mud from the riverbed, as well as quite a lot of slag (which accounts for most of the interesting 'geological features'). The very end of the gare is a sort of pier with a lighthouse on top, the lighthouse having been built in 1884. The creation of the breakwater, as well as the dredging of the river, canalised the mouth of the River Tees and allowed it to keep itself clear by a combination of the tides and the flow of water from upstream. [NOTE  - the exact weights of slag, cement and silt used may not be very accurate as the Wikipedia article that furnished me with most of the facts used in this paragraph, uses 'tonnes' (aka metric tons) and 'tons' interchangeably whereas in fact they are different.]

South Gare is something of a mecca for birdwatchers (or birders as many of us generally prefer to be called) as it attracts many migrant birds to stop and rest during their northward journeys in the spring and their return journeys south in the autumn. Several rare and scarce birds have also been found over the years, in amongst the more common ones. In addition many birds breed on the peninsula during the spring and summer, and many others use it during the winter when they are fleeing the harsher conditions in their breeding grounds further north. Birders have their own names for many of the features at South Gare, such as the Blast Furnace Pool, Cabin Rocks, the Bomb Crater and the Shrike Bushes, and I have managed to learn some of these (I'm still not entirely sure where the Shrike Bushes are) while also inventing some of my own names, such as "the Central Highlands".

The very end of the gare, under the shadow of the lighthouse, is a good place for 'sea-watching' - by sitting with binoculars and a telescope and staring out to sea for a protracted length of time, you have a good chance of seeing many seabirds, such as (depending on the time of year) Manx Shearwaters, Red-throated Divers, Little Auks and Long-tailed Ducks. However, you will often be, as I was this morning, surrounded by fishermen trying to catch a Mackerel or a Plaice off the end. This morning there were even three guys in kayaks fishing just off-shore - a sight I have never seen before.

As well as the birds there are also other animals, including the two Roe Deer I saw this morning, and many very interesting plants. Some of these are garden plants that have apparently been dumped there, but some of them are quite rare native plants, such as Purple Milk-vetch (Astragalus danicus), which may have found their way here naturally or may have been introduced inadvertently with some soil from elsewhere.

The birds I saw this morning would mostly have been breeding there, as the spring migration is pretty much over. They included singing Skylarks, Meadow Pipits, Reed Buntings and Whitethroats (a kind of warbler), and also four Sandwich Terns in amongst the more numerous Common Terns during a short sea-watch at the end of the gare.

P.S. the name apparently comes from the name of a small settlement which once existed here but has since been demolished. I have been unable to find anything out about the etymology of the word 'gare', or the precise location of the settlement.

A 'Rocky Outcrop' in the "Central Highlands" of South Gare

Viper's Bugloss (Echium vulgare)

Pyramidal Orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis)

The largest of the several reedbeds, viewed from
the "Central Highlands" of South Gare 

Part of the "Central Highlands"

The 'plateau' of the "Central Highlands" 

Blast Furnace Pool, South Gare

View across sand dunes and beach to a rocky spit
on the south side of the tip of South Gare

Part of a former steel works at South Gare

A World War II pillbox in the
"Central Highlands" of South Gare

Cycle ride to Stockton - Postscript

I meant to put this in the main blog entry yesterday but forgot, and decided to post it as a separate 'mini blog-post' instead of editing it into the other one.
Yesterday, while we were resting by the Tees Barrage, on the way to Stockton, a chap came past us on a bike with lots of touring gear - paniers front and back and on the handlebars. Sue asked him how far he had come and, once he understood the question (his English wasn't brilliant) he said "Korea". From what we could gather, he had cycled from Korea to Laos, and then flown from there to Moscow and cycled overland from Moscow to the Netherlands, from where he had got the ferry to Harwich, and since then had been cycling round England and Scotland.
However, what puzzles me about this now, having looked at a map of eastern Asia, is that the only way to get overland from Korea to Laos is to either start in or go through North Korea. Obviously no-one from South Korea would be able to do this but I didn't think people from North Korea were able to leave very easily. It seems unlikely that someone from South Korea would fly to Laos so that he could then fly to Moscow and cycle from there.
So, did we misunderstand what he was saying to us about his journey (quite possible given his poor English and our non-existent Korean), or was he a North Korean defector who had made an epic journey to get to the UK, or perhaps someone high up in Kim Jong Un's government who is cycling round the UK on a fact-finding/spying mission? Or is he actually from Romford and was pretending not to speak much English so that he can give his friends a laugh when he gets back to Essex?