This is the end

This is it, the last post. The blog has fulfilled what I intended to prove and that is to show that every day, you can find something different at Three Brooks that is worth stopping for. I have learned a lot from it and I enjoyed doing it, but it was starting to take up too much time during my lunch hour which I could use for other things so I decided against extending it.

Some stats: I wrote a total of 239 post, had 1577 views (about 6.5 per post), the busiest day had 60 views and there was a total of 44 comments. I wrote for roughly 13 months so that’s about one post every  1.6 days. Congratulations Mrs. Onderdeappelboom, you are the top commenter with 17 comments. Oh, and I had a total of 852 spam messages… There were a total of 439 pictures so almost two per post.

I hope you all enjoyed it too and hopefully maybe learned something from it. The main thing I have learned is to open your eyes and look!

As a final farewell, a picture from me on my bike:

Kaboom

I think I mentioned in one of my very first posts that somewhere in Three Brooks, you can find a crater. It is a remnant from the second world war when Bristol was bombed. The reason the Germans got it this wrong is because they had built a dummy airfield in Three Brooks so it seems like it worked!

This is a picture I took during the winter of a plant beautifully lit by the sun:

I came across this (what I assume) wasp nest a couple of months ago:

Finally, a picture of my children enjoying the fruits of summer:

Sadly, tomorrow will be the last day of this blog!

From higher up

There is one place in Three Brooks I have never shown you before in any of my pictures and there’s a very good reason for that: it’s too steep to get up there by bike. There is a big hill in Three Brooks which is actually the whole reason for its existence.  And all is not as it seems! The hill is not natural. It is actually the soil excavated from the Severn River when they were building one of the two bridges to Wales (which is only a 15 minute ride from here). As a compensation for the loss of habitat, Three Brooks was set up. I believe the lake has something to do with it as well but I’m not quite sure how that one fits in.

This is a view on top of the hill overlooking it:

While I’m on the subject of the lake, this is a picture of one of the bridges:

and this is a nice plaque which you can find on the other bridge:

Tree of change

In the past, I have been showing pictures of a tree during summer and winter. I now have a version from during spring too (spring-summer-winter):

  

Spread around the park, there are a number of benches made from tree trunks. I was going to use the pictures during the long winter months if I really didn’t have anything else to show you but as it turned out, I did have something to show you every day. Unfortunately, a few of them are vandalised by now (they tried to burn one down and another one has some graffiti on it now). They do seem to be enjoyed for young and old alike though:

Last chance: spring colours

Spring is quickly wrapping up (and looking outside right now, turning into autumn…) so here are some pictures I took during late winter – early spring time:

Now that’s what I call WEATHER!

It turns out the weathermen weren’t joking after all. It’s been storming pretty severely during the night. We got the brunt of it as it funnelled through the Severn river. That combined with a high tide made for some pretty hazardous conditions. There have been gusts up to 65mph (over 100kph for our continental readers). I was talking to a lady this morning and she said a tree fell in front of her while walking the dog yesterday!

As promised yesterday, here are some pictures of mushrooms from during the wintermonths:

 

You can’t be serious!

Weather forecast for this afternoon: torrential rain with gusts of wind up to 50mph due to a depression moving over the UK”. Hasn’t nature tweaked by now that it’s not autumn but spring? Well, OK, we had our week of hot weather last week so maybe it is thinking that summer is over!

Anyway, this is to be my last picture of the day:

This is done as a reminder of my first picture ever (which I don’t really know any longer where exactly I took that picture):

There’s been a lot of picture of flowers and trees the last couple of days/weeks so I’ll end this post with pictures of animals I have taken during the last year but didn’t have an opportunity to show before:

As the weather is pretty bad right now, tomorrow I’ll have pictures of mushrooms.

Lots and lots of roses

It looks like it’s a good rose year although the weather from the last couple of days hasn’t done any good to them. Still, there are more roses in Three Brooks then I’ve seen at any one time:

That red tree is back!

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last two days. My boss came over two days ago and surely it would be rude to say no if he invites us to pub lunch! Yesterday I had a day off work. By the way, Monday and Tuesday are bank holidays over here in the UK so you won’t see anything from me then either.

One of the first three pictures I took was of a very red tree. It is red again (although slightly less so than last year):

And this is the picture I took last year:

The grass is currently doing very well too:

 

And look what I found in between the grass last week:

 

Flowers everywhere

The offloading has started! These are some pictures I took recently of wild flowers: