Sussex Scrapbook
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Nature walks throughout the year
Saturday 17th January 2009
Pulborough - Stopham - Petworth - Fittleworth - Pulborough
13.5 miles
Last night there were
strong winds and torrential rain and we woke to find that the contents of the
neighbours bins and washing lines had been strewn about the street. However, the
weather man insisted that it was going to be sunny all day with strong gales
to follow in the evening, so we took him at his word and set off by train to
Pulborough. On the way we were treated to a very clear rainbow which heralded in
the sunny winter's day that we were so kindly promised.
Just outside of Pulborough Gill accidentally stumbled upon a thing known as a
geocache, organised by
www.geocaching.com. This is a small box of hidden "treasure" that can be
sought after using a GPS unit. The enclosed rules state that if you find the
cache you should take an item and replace it with something else. Apparently
there are 714,402 of these sites
throughout the world but this was the first time we'd heard of them. Not surprising really seeing as we don't have a GPS.
This walk took us through a lot of agricultural land and farms, coppiced woods,
commons and forest. The villages of
Stopham and Fittleworth are both very quiet and picturesque and Petworth
supplied us both with tea and huge portions of chocolate brownies at a great
credit crunch fighting price of £3.40.
Only common farmland
birds seen today, but they were in great profusion, especially Chaffinches, Blue
Tits and Great Tits. Hopefully the other small species came through our recent
icy spell without being decimated.
Geocache and log book
Geocache instructions
We left a couple of toggles and a hairgrip and we took a pendant thing
that looked like a cross between a poodle and a sheep
Stopham Bridge next to the White Hart pub
St. Mary's, Stopham
The view from our rest bench at Petworth