We like to get away with the dog in early spring and this year we headed west. We first stayed for a few nights in Lion Lodge, the gatehouse for Newark Park which is a National Trust property in Gloucestershire, built on the Cotswold escarpment with views out over the Severn Valley.

The prime reason for our stay in Gloucestershire was to catch up with our daughter who lives in Cheltenham. However, whilst we were there, we also wanted to visit the Golden Triangle. This is an area between the villages of Newent, Dymock and Kempley on the Gloucestershire/Herefordshire border where our British native daffodil grows wild and free. There used to be a lot of orchards there but, in the 1960s and 70s, these were largely ripped out and the land used to grow grain and potatoes. The daffodils have become increasingly limited to roadside banks and hedgerows but a few protected remnants of the old days still exist. We visited two small Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust reserves, Vell Mill Meadow and Gwen and Vera’s Fields, where our native daffodil still grows in profusion.

The wild daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, is smaller than the planted garden varieties and has pale yellow petals surrounding a darker yellow trumpet. Although greatly declined, it can still be seen in woodland and damp meadows in parts of south Devon, the Black Mountains in Wales, the Lake District, and in the Golden Triangle along the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border.

After three nights at Lion Lodge we headed further west to Pond Cottage near Tavistock in Devon, just to the west of Dartmoor. Although Pond Cottage is now owned by The Landmark Trust, it sits within the estate of the Endsleigh Hotel.

The 6th Duke and Duchess of Bedford built what is today the hotel in the early 19th century as a ‘cottage’ for themselves and their twelve children for when they wanted a break from their main home at Woburn Abbey. At the time they owned about a third of Devon and had the luxury of selecting the loveliest of spots:

They commissioned the architect Jeffry Wyatville to build the house and several  other picturesque buildings within the estate such as Pond Cottage. The landscape gardener Sir Humphrey Repton designed the gardens, including a stream that tumbles over waterfalls and down through an arboretum, arriving into the pond at Pond Cottage before spilling out into the River Tamar.

The damp conditions around the stream meant that there were some fantastic lichens. I don’t know much about lichens but think that this magnificent specimen might be Peltigera horizontalis.

There were always grey wagtails poking around the stream and pond:

And lots of yellow spotted sedge, Philopotamus montanus – caddisflies that fluttered around the wet vegetation at this time of year:

Several imposing Sequoias rose high above the rest of the arboretum..

..and there were plenty of other wonderful trees as well:

When the Bedford family finally sold the estate in 1956 it was bought by a syndicate who formed the Endsleigh Fishing Club, still retaining the atmosphere of a privately-run house. However, things started to increasingly fall into disrepair and the Landmark Trust bought three of the buildings in the grounds during the 1970s and 80s in order to save them – Pond Cottage, the Dairy and Swiss Cottage. In 2005 the remainder of the estate, including 108 acres of grounds, was bought by Olga Polizzi and transformed into a very comfortable hotel. We stayed in the hotel back in 2013 and have lovely memories of that time.

Given that it was Dartmoor in March, we had a week of pretty amazing weather and were able to spend four days walking up on the moor.

There was a lot of ‘swaling’ going on the moor when we were there – the farmers are allowed to burn the heather, gorse and other moorland vegetation between 1st October and 31st March to encourage new growth for the sheep to graze. Since it was getting on towards the end of March, time was fast running out to get this job done:

When Dave and I first started visiting Dartmoor on a regular basis back in June 2013, we hired a wildlife guide because we really wanted to see the Ring Ouzels that were known to breed there. But, despite extensive searching on two separate days, we unfortunately failed to find a single one.

The number of pairs of breeding Ring Ouzel on Dartmoor had been in decline for some time but Tavy Cleave, a remote valley in the north-west militarised zone, became their last stronghold not just on Dartmoor but for the whole of Southern England. Sadly they are now almost certainly gone from Tavy Cleave as well. The reasons for the decline are unclear but climate change, grazing patterns and problems at their over-wintering sites and on migration are all potential factors and these aren’t problems that are going to be solved anytime soon.

We had never visited Tavy Cleave before but did a walk there this week.

Although Ring Ouzels do start to arrive back in the UK from mid March, we certainly didn’t see one on our walk up Tavy Cleave. If we want to see breeding Ring Ouzels now, we are going to have to take ourselves further north.

It was lovely to get away but, as always, I was itching to get home to see how spring was getting on back in Kent. But it certainly won’t be long before we return to Dartmoor once more – although we are most unlikely to ever get such good weather there again.