An antidote to London

I spent all of last week in London for work, so the weekend was a great opportunity to make up for it by camping in the woods, which are looking great at this time of year.
We took it easy on Saturday, and walked in the wayleave to do a butterfly count to feed into the local Butterfly Conservation database. Here's a few of them...

White Admiral (in our wood, and the wayleave):
Tortoiseshell, which we don't see very often up there:
Meadow Brown:
and a mystery one - any ideas?
Heading back into the woods, it's amazing to see what's happened to where the footpath got a bit muddy with us extracting wood there last winter. The churning of the ground, combined with the light let in by the coppicing, has made it a fertile place for grass to grow up:
As it's not being driven on again (perhaps ever?), it'll be interesting to see how the grass gets on.

I was pleased to see that the young oak we had to pollard a year and a half ago (after it was accidentally damaged) is doing well:
and that a slightly older, but still quite young, oak near the footpath/ride junction has responded to the extra light by putting out dozens of side-branches:
Near the pond, foxgloves have arrived. Not that they're rare, it's just nice to see new plants appearing:
Another new pant there is this one, which I think is a Spearwort of some sort:
Back near our camp, the chestnut that we coppiced first, back in 2007/8, has now started to flower!
I'll be interested to see if any fruit develops...

Saturday night we had light provided by solar PV:
which is also handy for charging your mobile phone:
Sunday was a work day, and we set to levelling out the ruts in the path:
After doing this we thought we'd better test it out, and completely emptied one rack of logs into the land rover:
leaving just a few depressions in the ground behind:
and moving all the wood into a location where we can access it easily this winter:
I know this means moving the logs more than once, but we want to get them out of the deeper parts of the wood while the ground is dry, so that we don't churn the tracks up in the winter.

That's all for now...

Mike