Does the world make much sense to you? If it does, even in a small way, you are doing much better than me. Much of what I know about the state of the world I learn from podcasts as I walk my dog along the quiet, meandering tracks of our beautiful Andalusian campo. Listening to the news keeps me broadly in the loop, but it is hardly cheerful. I may be surrounded by peaceful landscapes, but my headphones connect me to the woes of distant parts of the world. Even nature struggles to help at times. A little owl may be peering down at me from a telegraph wire as news comes in of the latest madness from Washington, or some random cruelty meted out to innocents far away.
Continue readingCategory: Natural history
You may have noticed that I have been very quiet for some time on the subject of my own local river, the Río Guadalhorce. The simple truth is that it has been through some hard times in recent years but there are signs now, happily, that it is beginning to pull through. The river dried out in the summer of 2023 following a period of drought and the fish dropped back into whatever deeper pools they could find, or down towards the estuary.
Continue readingIf a person had even half a brain, they would not have given a second’s consideration to walking from Reinosa to Fontibre yesterday afternoon. The rain did not let up for even a moment, and that would have come as no surprise to any of those half-brained people who had kept an eye on the weather. So yesterday afternoon — as you will not be surprised to hear — I decided to leave Reinosa and walk to the source of the River Ebro at Fontibre.
Continue readingPaul Reddish and I took a trip along the Pisuerga River yesterday, meeting the river in Aguilar de Campoo and following it upstream towards its source in the Cantabrian Mountains. The road can only take you so far — we pretty much ran out of tarmac in the little village of Santa María de Redondo, home to dogs that sleep in the street and begrudgingly allow you to drive on. There’s an ample car park for those who want to hike further, but it was a little late in the day for us to do that. That hike follows the course of the river initially before separating, but it eventually leads to the river’s source, said to be a spring called Fuente Cobre.
Continue readingI don’t know which one of us is more stupid — me or our dog, Sable. The two of us have taken to wandering the local tracks of the campo and trekking across open fields in the moonlight, when anybody with half a brain would be tucked up in bed.
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