Horwich

Belmont Road

I'd overslept and so was too late for the planned visit to the seaside (it was too late to get my money's worth for the train tickets) and I didn't fancy the hanging round for the best part of an hour for the Southport train to have a wander round Marshside or Martin Mere (I haven't worked out a way round that that doesn't take just as long for more effort). So I decided to go and have a wander up to Horwich to give my knees and wind a bit of a workout.

I got the 125 bus up Old Chorley Road to Georges Lane and walked up the lane. The weather wasn't sure what it was doing except that it wasn't doing it for more than five minutes at a time. The one constant was the wind blowing straight across the lane from the West Lancashire Plain. A family of carrion crows divided their time between playing in the wind and harassing either of the pair of kestrels that were hunting over the fields. 

Kestrel, Georges Lane

A raven cronked overhead as I approached the edge of Wilderswood. A couple of jays and a blackbird called from the woods and a carrion crow scared a flock of half a dozen fieldfares out of one of the hawthorn bushes down the hill.

Further along another pair of kestrels were hovering over the moors, another couple of targets for marauding crows. I got myself a cup of tea from the cottage shop and sat to admire the view. Just down the hill a mixed flock of rooks and black-headed gulls fed in a field that held sheep on my last visit here. A large flock of gulls — black-headed and a few common gulls — rose up from Lower Rivington Reservoir but I couldn't see what set them up and they floated back down fairly quickly. Shortly afterwards a first-Winter great black-back flew over, pursued by a carrion crow.

The view from Georges Lane

Cup of tea over I wandered up Belmont Road to have a look over the small conifer plantations in the hope there may be a few crossbills still around (there weren't). Windswept but still interested I decided that on the way back down Georges Lane I'd take a detour down the path that forms the Southern boundary of Wilderswood then down Factory Hill to Old Chorley Road. I think Wilderswood would definitely be worth a bit of exploration in its own right come Spring.

I bumped into Bridge Street Local Nature Reserve before I got to the main road. It's a small stretch where a couple of streams intersect in a narrow ribbon of woodland and a pleasant ten minutes' wander.

Back home for a pot of tea and the earthly consequences of spending an afternoon listening to hillside streams gurgling and bubbling along the lanes and paths.

By Belmont Road