Chris arrives home

For one man, a broad sandy beach on the Gower peninsula in South Wales recently marked the end of a mammoth journey which began on the same spot back in 2017. Since then he has walked not just around the entire UK coastline but around every offshore island too, inhabited or otherwise. His reasons for doing this are spelt out on social media and in a book that he published at a midway point on his journey, Finding Hildasay. The amount of money he has raised for his chosen charity, SSAFA, is almost beyond belief.

For us, however, the story starts in 2018, by which time Chris had made his way to Scotland and was painstakingly following the many twists and turns of the Argyll coastline, documenting his progress through the Facebook pages that would track every inch of his six year mission. For this is what it had become for him, a life-changing challenge, the biggest undertaking he had ever taken on. And as he explains in his book, whilst walking along the coast through the village of Ardrishaig, carrying his usual massive rucksack, wearing his trademark kilt, his distinctive headwear, and with his dog Jet at his side, he met our son Michael who lived there at the time.

The bond forged between them on that day was something special and the rest is history, as they say, but it does explain why we chose to leave home and drive over 500 miles south so as to meet Chris on the beach in Rhossilli Bay to witness his final steps as he crossed his own starting point.

With him on the beach, along with Jet, were his fiancée Kate,  their son Magnus and most remarkably, several hundred followers who had travelled from far and wide to meet and welcome them home.

Just like all the others we were able to walk the last mile across the sand with him and marvel at this remarkable man's achievement. The money he has raised for the ex-servicemen's charity is simply staggering yet Chris's modesty at what he has achieved is equally hard to believe.

Our son Michael may no longer be with us but Chris's memory of their brief time together has stayed with him and the massive emotional hug that I received from him when I introduced myself was so full of meaning that even now I am overwhelmed when I look back on that moment. We made the 1,100 mile round trip just so we could be there to meet him and it was worth every inch.

Life and other sharp things

It wasn't so long ago that we were celebrating the elimination of bramble from much of our garden and recovering from clambering around the steeper parts where the stems seemed to hide most successfully. Realistically 'elimination' was never going to be the correct word since, much like the cockroach which was one of the few creatures to survive the Late Permian Extinction Event, bramble is a tough plant to kill. So now that we are firmly into summer and everything in the garden is growing at full speed it is inevitable that the tough roots which still lie beneath the soil are sprouting new shoots wherever they can. And it is here we come across one of the plant's cleverest strategies. It likes to hide its new shoots within the stems of another shrub so that it becomes visible only when the shoots have acquired significant strength and toughness and are pretty much indestructible. But this is only part of it. The clever bramble will select a host plant in which to hide which has its own defensive strategies, be they sharp thorns or stinging leaves. From a human perspective this can be seen as a cunning plan on behalf of the bramble since most attempts to remove the plant will involve pain of one sort or another, enough to discourage most people. Nettles are one example of a favoured bramble companion but in our garden we also have gorse, holly, wild roses and strawberries and also blackthorn, the latter having long dangerously sharp thorns hidden amongst its innocent looking foliage, spikes that will penetrate even the toughest glove. In fact we hadn't realised just how hazardous our garden was until we started searching out those spiky little bramble shoots and we now live permanently with the consequential scratches on our arms and legs.

Having got all that out of the way it is now time for a short pond update.

So we'll start with The Mud, a technical term for material recovered from a discreet raid on the pond in the public wildlife area of our local castle. This pond is quite natural (indeed it may well have been there when Robert the Bruce was rebuilding the castle back in 1325) and the small container of mud that we liberated brought us a random collection of tangled roots which will almost certainly add to the diversity of vegetation living in and around our pond.

The mud is now spread out along the margin in such a way that those roots can extend into the water whilst keeping a footing on the bank. At first it simply looked like, well, just mud, but then gradually on my daily progress checkups I began to notice thin strands extending out into the pond beneath the water, roots seeking out nutrients to feed something living within the mud and then eventually tiny shoots rising from the mud itself. We have no clues as to what might be growing and nor do we care. It is life, in all its complexity, which is all that matters.

At this point our pond is less than six months old, a hole dug into sloping ground with a plastic liner and an overflow pipe to keep the water at a constant level. Two separate raids on the castle wildlife area have brought us a small sample of plant life, an insect menagerie (although most of this may have found its own way there, we assume by air), a small collection of tadpoles and a newt called Nigel. There are now countless water beetles and pond skaters, damselflies engaged in egg laying but sadly the tadpoles are gone and we think we now know the reason for this. Hidden amongst the imported weeds was a large nymph which has gone on to become the biggest dragonfly we have ever seen - the size of a small bird. The nymph's exoskeleton was left behind, floating about on the surface, a reminder of an early life spent gorging on amphibians who had nowhere to escape to. The adult dragonfly pays us occasional visits so maybe he/she has designs on making this a permanent home. Time will tell.

The pond will develop, becoming more natural looking as the mud and the surrounding vegetation matures to hide the exposed edges and we hope that by next year this will attract other amphibians who might just happen to be passing by and who might fancy spawning there. Perhaps even Nigel will return.