We have never been particularly good at sticking to New Year resolutions. However, this year we have decided to get ourselves off on a longish walk each week of 2025 to discover more of beautiful East Kent, whilst also getting fitter in the process.

The first of these walks last week took us past the ancient sweet chestnuts in Fredville Park near the village of Nonington. These trees were planted in the 1740s to create two tree-lined avenues leading from Fredville House out into its parkland.

The National Trust website states that one ancient oak hosts more biodiversity than a thousand 100-year-old oaks. As a tree ages, different types of decay, broken off branches and all manner of folds, burrs, loose bark and water pools create many different habitats for an increasing range of species.

Majesty, the largest surviving maiden oak tree in the United Kingdom and estimated to be between 800 and 1,000 years old, also stands in state at Fredville Park. However, the tree is on land with no public access and it requires special permission to go and see him. We did get this consent in 2018 and again in 2019 and have twice gone to pay our respects to his Majesty:

Delving into my photo archive for the 2019 photos of Majesty made me enthusiastic to gather together pictures of other elderly trees that we have come across in recent years:

We have our own impressive tree growing in the wood. It’s a sycamore coppice made up of a dozen connected trunks that have been left to grow enormous:

Jelly ears fungus is growing abundantly on any dead limbs:

And, above a height of about five metres, there is a healthy growth of lichen on the trunks:

We measured the girth at a height of 0.3m and found it to be 7.3m:

It is a really quite a tree and definitely one of the highlights of the wood.

I have been busy getting out the annual reviews of this blog and it has been a few weeks now since my last normal post. On the weekend before Christmas we had a cup of coffee at the shack at the end of Deal pier. It was just before midday and yet the mid-winter shadows were so long:

We hadn’t lingered over our coffee, yet it seemed like a completely different day by the time we returned back down the pier towards the town:

When the weather has allowed it, we have been getting on with winter jobs in the meadows such as hacking back bramble and planting trees. Nine new trees have been planted, some of which went to plug gaps in the new hedgerow:

One day I was out pruning this new hedge when two choughs flew past me, along the cliff-line southwards to Dover, where choughs were reintroduced in 2023. This was a very special sighting although sadly I didn’t get a photo.

Some of our other newly planted trees were fruit trees and went into the orchard. There is an insect hotel with a slate roof in the orchard and, whilst we were tree planting, we noticed something interesting happening on those slates:

The slates were covered with several hundred tiny cones, each only a couple of millimetres long. Once we had got our eyes in, we saw that the cones were slowly moving around:

This called for my macro lens. They turn out to be the caterpillars of the Luffia moth (Luffia lapidella form ferchaultella) that have protected themselves by building a cone of silk onto which fine grains of sand and soil were stuck:

The Luffia moth (Luffia lapidella f. ferchaultella) is a common moth across the south of England but amazingly there are only females and all the young are produced parthogenically – they develop from an egg without it needing to be fertilised. As well as the crazy fact that there are no males involved, the adult females themselves are flightless and distribution is thought to be by wind

Interestingly, there is a different form of this moth in Cornwall (Luffia lapidella rather than the Luffia lapidella f. ferchaultella across the rest of southern Britain) and this Cornish form does have winged males.

The weasel has been seen a few more times on the gate, although mostly moving and blurry:

To demonstrate just how small this animal is, I have cropped these two photos by the same amount to compare it with the size of a rat:

We had bought a small bale of dust-extracted barley straw to go into the hedgehog box that has recently gone out into the garden. We had no use for the rest of the bale so it went down by the wild pond in case the badgers were interested in using it as bedding in their nearby sett:

They definitely were interested:

But, because the straw was cut into short strands, it didn’t roll well and merely smeared itself into a straw road as the badgers dragged it off:

Looking over the fence, the straw road led down the cliff a short way and straight to a burrow. We couldn’t have planned this better if we had tried because we now have a good idea where baby badgers may be born in February and can get a camera on this sett entrance:

As usual at this time of year the trail cameras are not coming up with very much, but barn owls are still hunting in the meadows:

This next photo is amusing and I can tell you that I recognise those skinny black legs. Magpies often escort raptors around the meadows:

We have a new camera looking at the perch in the second meadow and it is doing a very good job coping with the miserable January low light and rain. It’s early days but so far I’m very impressed – it is twice as expensive as our normal cameras though:

It got very cold this week and the ponds froze over, although some areas around the reeds had melted by the end of the day. When I took out the peanuts at dusk, a little egret gracefully rose up from the pond just as I came alongside. Even though the bird was no doubt after our frogs and newts, it was forgiven because we have only ever once before seen an egret hunting in the ponds.

There is a camera looking along the banks of this pond, but unfortunately this did not have the egret on it. However, the camera looking at where the peanuts go down had been triggered by a hopeful fox twenty minutes before I arrived, and this does show the egret in the far right of the picture:

On Christmas Eve we completed the cutting and clearing of all the dogwood in the marjoram glade in the wood. Work in this large space is now completed and I am looking forward to the woodland butterflies we will see there in the summer:

We dug a pond in this marjoram clearing two years ago and this week the camera there captured a pair of sparrowhawks:

The wood is definitely well stocked with sparrowhawks but we’ve never seen two together before:

The ponds froze at the wood as well:

Fieldfares arrive at the woodland ponds at dusk throughout the winter to take a bath:

Woodcock are another winter visitor to visit the ponds:

Although they are not often seen bathing:

My final photo for today was taken on the second of our New Year resolution walks. This time we walked south along the cliffs towards St Margarets Bay and here we are returning home inland on a sunny early January day:

It’s going to be a bit of a challenge to plan a new and interesting walk for each week of the year and no doubt we shall have to start repeating ourselves eventually. But every walk, when done in a different season, should have something new to offer and it’s good to set ourselves a fresh and exciting target for 2025.