Saturday, March 24th, it was sunny when we woke up so a spur of the moment decision was made: lets explore our previous walk a little more, and walk the correct way. We hurried ourselves to shower, pack and leave as soon as possible and were out the door at 11.05am. We headed our usual way to Latchbrook, though didn’t stop with any distractions as we usual do, and went straight to the steep stairway that was the beginning of the public footpath we found.

At the top of the very first hill, conditions were almost perfect for photography. The colours were vibrant, and the sky was blue, so we stopped around this area for quite some time to take photos of an old shed (I’m guessing), which was rusted, adding a lovely red to the scene. We headed a little further in to the top of the field where the first gate and stile was, stopping once again to take photos of the gate, and a small bird hopping around in the trees, which I couldn’t quite make out.

While at the gate, we took the time to take some photos of each other, and together. As always, they didn’t turn out quite how we wanted so no one will get to see us together from that day, except ourselves. After a bit of frustration, we walked through the second field, again taking photos of the next gate and stile, before climbing over. This was the gate in the previous post that we didn’t take notice of and therefore headed in the wrong direction. This time we did, and headed over to another gate, then up the field a bit (it was the wrong gate) to the corner diagonally to the first. While in this field, we stopped again for some photography. Zeta snapped around and I managed to get a fairly okay panorama, with a total of 8 photos, showing the country side and a bit of Saltash. Nothing spectacular though.

We continued on to the right gate, climbing over the stile once again, and into a cow field. The cows simply looked at us and ignored us for the most part. We got some photos of them, Zeta getting a video as well, right at the time one of the cows was having it’s toilet break lol. We moved on, coming to a crossing, I guess you would call it, where a few of the fields intersected. This was obviously where the cows moved from field to field, as it was extremely muddy. I’m guessing the mud was probably well over ankle deep in the middle. We skirted around the side of this, stopping for a moment so Zeta could take some photos of a deep road cut into the mud by a tractor of some sort and then continued to a lane that was a line of trees and wall on both sides, straight down between two fields. It was quite a peaceful walk.

At the end of the lane, we came to a sort of cross-road, if you wish. We could go in 3 directions: left (route 3), right (route two) or straight ahead (route one). We decided to go straight ahead. It was a small area with a body of water, lots of trees and plants of other kinds, and a bridge that went over some of the shallower water. We went to the other side, taking photos of an old tree in the water. Zeta got another video here, and then we decided we’d take a seat and eat lunch (packed sandwiches we purchased on the way at Spar). We sat on the bridge in the sunshine and ate. During our after lunch snack (crisps, or chips for those in Australia), Zeta spotted a butterfly which kept landing on the bridge. She got down on her hands and knees, and moved slowly towards it, then onto her stomach to get some macros of it. I tried to do the same, but it flew away almost instantly, landing on a plant nearby, where I got a couple of photos. We later identified this butterfly as the Peacock butterfly.

After lunch, we went over to the next stile, which was a horse paddock. There were two horses. Zeta was first to climb over and walked into the field a little, until one of the horses started walking towards her, then making noises, scaring Zeta a little. She walked back to the stile and climbed back over, assuming the horse didn’t want to let us pass. Eventually, the horse came over to us, and let us pet her (assuming it was a her, that is). We noticed she was eating a plant that wasn’t in her field, but there wasn’t much, so we went off and found some for her, feeding her by hand. She was actually quite a friendly horse.

We took some photos, some videos and then decided we’d head off the other way (the right path) rather than attempting to go through the field with the horses. We followed the small bridge back to the other side and followed another path, which more or less lead to no where, so we came back and went to the last path we could take. First off, it was into a cow field again. A lot of cows here, and a lot of perfect opportunities for photography. We spent a fair amount of time, composing photos of the cows and the landscape surrounding them, eventually moving on over the next stile and into another lane like the previous, following it right to the end, where there was a very small stream and a bridge to cross. Naturally, we followed the bridge, and up through another gate, which again, lead into another field.

We followed in the direction the arrow pointed, which came to a stile and gate. Unfortunately, this one had no arrow, so we just assumed to go straight ahead. We came do a dead end, so we followed around the edge of the field (after taking some photos of the beautiful view, of course) looking for our next stile and/or gate, not finding it. Unfortunately, at this point, we had both used all of our memory. One gigabyte worth of photos each. It was also getting fairly cold, and late, so we thought we’d just head back the way we came and get home. We walked on home the same way.

Wednesday, 21st March, we did the Latchbrook walk again, though to explore a road we hadn’t before. We had been told there was a stair there, which was the start of a public footpath, so we thought we’d check it out. The weather was lovely, so we got a bit distracted on the way there, since we started at Latchbrook. First we were distracted by a large group of sparrows, and a few bumble bees, which Zeta wanted photos of.

Next, I got distracted by a black cat, which I got a couple of photos of. I did try to get him/her to come to me. He/she did want to, but wasn’t sure and kept turning back, so I gave up and caught up with Zeta. The sun really started to shine at this point, and we were close to a spot that was great for composing photography. I think we probably spent just an hour or so itself at this point taking photos at different settings. We did eventually pull ourselves away though.

We continued our walk through a bit more of Latchbrook until we found the stair Zeta’s mum had told us about, with the sign next to it saying “Public Footpath”. We climbed the stairs (which were few but quite steep), which came out onto a large grassy hill with a faint path through the grass straight up the middle of the hill. Of course, we followed it up to the top, stopping to take in the view and take a few photos.

The lighting improved slightly up on top of the hills, which just meant we had even more interesting and warm lighting conditions for photography. We followed each gate/sty though didn’t read the arrow on one properly, which meant we ended up going the wrong way (and probably trespassing at the same time) and we came to a point where there was a cow. We couldn’t go any further, and it was starting to get a little late in the afternoon, so we turned around and headed back the way we came. When we came to the last gate with a sty, we checked the arrows direction and realised we had indeed gone the wrong way. We went straight rather than diagonally across the field to the next sty, so we decided to just go home and leave the rest of the exploration for another day.