Sledging in Udimore

As I said before, there are no hills in Camber, and bike sledging is hard work, so we picked up four friends and went off in search of a better place to sledge. It was snowing quite hard, and the wind was blowing too, so the vehicle of choice was obviously the Defender.

The first place we stopped involved a walk through some beautiful woodland:
but once we got out to our intended hill, we found it wasn't much good, and we moved on further up the road.
Once we got to the other side of Udimore, we found the perfect location, with some people already sledging there:
The snow was pretty deep, for our part of the world at least:
Here's a video of us all sledging, and most of us falling off as well!

After we'd all got cold and tired we went and sat in the Defender and had soup. Very cosy!
The Defender did very well - definitely the car to be out in when conditions are bad!

Mike

p.s. All the photos and the sledging video were taken with a mobile phone.

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Bike sledging!

There's no hills in Camber, so what do you do when it snows?


Tracy says her voice is squeaky because of the cold weather... ;-)

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Snow at Camber Sands

OK, I have a lot of pictures (and videos) related to snow... So, to start with, here's the ones taken in Camber and Rye.

Early on in the period of snow it was also sunny, making for some great shots on the beach:
Then more snow came...
leaving the beach more thoroughly covered:
I got a couple of pictures while the snow was coming down, but with my mobile phone rather than the SLR:
Yes, that really is snow on the sand over 100m out from the shore! It didn't stay for long though out there.

Meanwhile, in Rye, everyone was panic buying bread and milk...
The roads got pretty icy as well, here's ours early one morning:
Fortunately the Defender is well able to cope with this :-)

Coming up later - some pics of snow in the wood, and videos of sledging and towing a sledge with a bike!

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Back to the top...

Having progressed far enough down the hill with our coppicing for this winter, we've returned to the top of the hill to deal with some of the edge trees that we're going to thin out. First though we went to collect a load of firewood for a neighbour and top up the bird feeder.

We found the bird feeder on the ground - probably the work of a squirrel! Anyway, we fixed it back up and within minutes there were several birds back in the area:
Back in Sweep Wood there were also a lot of birds, and there seem to be some complex interactions between them - at one point there was a sparrow, a robin, a chaffinch and a blackbird all within a metre of each other. Not sure who was threatening who, though clearly the blackbird has a size advantage. Here's the chaffinch:
and a female and male blackbird (there were two pairs hopping around):
Anyway, on with the work. Here's a before and after shot:
The holly was quite awkward (again), it all needed roping and I had to go into the neighbours garden (with their permission) to recover some of the branches.
The brash will be used to cover the stools of trees we've coppiced, to make it harder for rabbits to get at the shoots as they regrow in the spring. There's a lot of logs too, but we've not decided what to do with them yet.
We're helping some friends move house tomorrow, and then we're not back in the woods until Friday - our normal jobs need us back...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Camber Sands by moonlight

There was an almost full moon and a clear sky last night, so I went down to the beach to take some long-exposure photos.
The streak in the last one is a plane that was flying past.

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.