This is a medieval stone cross a long way outside the village on a road which just leads past a few isolated houses before circling back to the village. Noone really knows why it’s there. It looks more like a Cornish roadside cross than anything else.
These blackberries were showing the colours of every stage in the ripening process: from greens, through reds to the rich blue-black.
This plant was growing by a roadside near Lower Penn.
These haws looked like they were already completely ripe – pictured a week ago.
This spider’s web was very obvious when the sun caught it against a shadowed background.
This one was less noticeable. It stretched across a rabbit hole, presumably currently unoccupied. It was in a deep shadow, but made more visible because it had caught some sand which had fallen on it.
This clump of ragwort was proving very attractive to insects early in August. A cinnabar moth caterpillar is near to the ragged white butterfly (above) while the hoverfly (below) came along a minute or so later.
Looking down Darlington Street from Queens Square towards Chapel Ash, it almost looks like the former church is rising through a wood.
Keeping this illusion with a closer view meant a very careful choice of where to frame the picture.
There are two young coots here, swimming and eating a few yards from each other.
They are the same birds feature in the post of August 19th
when they must have been very recently hatched.
This family of swans include a second adult which wouldn’t line up to get in the same shot of the others, as well as the three well-grown young seen below. They have a large territory heading out towards the junction with the Bradley arm of the canal.
Todays post feature water birds seen on a stroll along the towpath of the Birmingham canal, heading from the city centre in the direction of Birmingham, a couple of weeks ago.
This duck and her two ducklings were in a gap in the wall above the canal a few yards from Bilston Road.
From the middle of August, heathy areas like this part of Cannock Chase near Brocton, become a mass of purple as the heather comes into flower.
By early August these plums were ripe enough to show the beginnings of the bloom on their surface.