Looking to the Garden

This weekend is a bank holiday weekend and the garden is in need of some attention. I have planted out the raised beds and moved the tender greenhouse plants into the garden. We have a small area of rose bed that is overrun by weeds. The roses have not done well in the wet soil, so we are going to extract them and gravel the bed over.
This warrants a trip to the local garden centre for supplies.
Bridgemere Garden World is a long established centre that has almost everything for the gardener. They have been extensively refurbishing the site over the winter and have lots of new business innovations to show this month. There are new shops, a vintage car show and soon to be opened miniature railway.
We made our purchases - weed screen and gravel - then went for a walk around the show gardens, which are quite extensive and free.
I love the structure of these gardens. They range from the formal to the traditional and to the rambling disorganization of random bedding. There is also a small cottage show garden where vegetables and flowers are grown in a living setting, including a bee hive and compost bin.
I saw this grey wagtail by the ornamental pond garden. It was resting on the rocks by the pond and watching for small flying insects. Occasionally it would fly up and catch an insect on the wing, often returning to the rock where it started its short flight. I stood and watched this bird for ages as I have seldom seen wagtails actively feeding on flying insects.
There are a wide variety of wild birds around the gardens, including robins, finches, wrens and blackbirds. Many of them can be seen flitting in and out of the flower beds as you walk around the paths.
What a pleasant way to spend a morning. Back to the garden now to shift some more plants and do the job.

The Shivering Mountain

Mam Tor (the mother hill) is the highest peak on the Edale-Castleton ridge. It is a series of horizontally bedded shales on top of the Edale Shales and the Carboniferous limestone. The geology makes the Tor unstable and about 3000 years ago a massive landslip removed an enormous chunk of the hillside. This exposed face can be seen from Castleton and the top of Winnats Pass. The Victorian engineers built a road across the landslip in 1802 to allow vehicles to drive over the pass and I remember using the road in the 1970's when I used to walk regularly on the High Peaks.
Mam Tor is deceptively large in this landscape and people often misjudge the time and effort required to walk up its slopes. In 1977 there was a significant movement in the slip material leaving a 60cm step in the roadway. It was always known that the road was unstable and in 1979 the road had to be closed to through traffic on safety grounds when a further slip displaced the roadway completely.
A new road has been built to go around the landslip and across the pass. This involved a new road surface through Winnats Pass leading on to the top road in the dip between the Tor peak and the surrounding hills.
Whilst walking up Winnats Pass and on Mam Tor I spotted this little fellow. Pied Wagtails are common in the valleys between the peaks and they are particularly active in the warm Spring weather.