Dogged endeavours
25 October 2009 21:38![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glenatronFollowing on from my questions of a week or two back I did end up getting a new phone and it's a very dapper little creation, powered entirely by androids and determined to bring about the destruction of humans by any means imaginable. Going from a very old Nokia to a very new HTC Hero has basically overawed me with gadgetty goodness and so I've got total new toy syndrome at the moment and I'm doing everything I can with it.
This includes using the GPS to record our routes, so I can safely say that today our ride was 6.12 miles long and that our average moving speed was 3.7mph. Which, given that we trotted quite a bit and had some ( slightly overexcited and bucky ) canter in a few places, suggests that our walking speed is a trifle sluggish. We're working on it.
A single pine out on the edge of the marsh.
The grave of some long-forgotten king - the mound at the foot of those pines is a round-barrow dated to the middle bronze age, probably the burial mound of some significant individual from the local community of 4000 years ago.
A single silver birch, momentarily golden with october leaves, on the edge of the wide heath.
The trail ahead lit up by Sycamore and Chestnut leaves. It's been quite blustery so I'm guessing by next weekend most of the trees will be bare and we'll be all set for winter, but right now it's still very pretty.
Edit: I'm not entirely content with any of those pictures, apart maybe from the round-barrow. The horizons out on the heath are rather hard to judge and trees often seem to want to grow a little off vertical which makes an objective frame of reference rather hard to find, especially when one is taking pictures from horseback, where I find the difference in height can make perspectives come out funny as well. Actually they're probably fine as pictures, probably it only bothers me because I was there and they're not quite right.
The ride did have one significant downside unfortunately - as we came up to the trail off the common I saw a grey-haired couple ahead of me with a golden retriever and a black-and-tan egyptian looking dog ( the kind with those funny Anubis ears on it ) who looked very interested in us. They vanished off around the corner ahead but shortly afterwards I spotted the black-and-tan dog running flat out on a long loop around our right about a hundred yards away. It looked a lot to me as though he'd gone into some kind of hunting or herding mindset that likely to end badly for us so rather than going on down the ( narrow, wooded and barbed-wire fenced ) path off the common I was planning to take, we stopped and turned to face where I thought he'd come from and sure enough ten seconds later he came shooting out of the bushes and zoomed towards us making some growly-barky sounds and straight past as Zorro reared at him and span to follow him. I'm pretty sure that if I'd not been paying attention he'd have had a nip at Zorro's heels and someone ( or maybe everyone ) there would have been injured to some degree. As it was we had quite a scare, enough that I got off for a few yards so Zorro didn't feed off my adrenaline and we could both calm down a bit before riding back up the road. It worked fine and the rest of the ride was calm but I'll probably have a hell of a time persuading him that corner of the common is safe next time we go there.
I did think to catch up with the dog's owners to let them know that they were putting other people in danger - could have been a child, could have been a more flighty horse that would have bolted and quite possibly gone straight over them given which way the dog was running - but frankly Zorro wasn't going to get within fifty metres of that dog and I could understand that pretty well.
To counterbalance that, earlier in the ride we met a couple with a little terrier who they had trained to stay still when horses approached. I told them how much we appreciated that.
This includes using the GPS to record our routes, so I can safely say that today our ride was 6.12 miles long and that our average moving speed was 3.7mph. Which, given that we trotted quite a bit and had some ( slightly overexcited and bucky ) canter in a few places, suggests that our walking speed is a trifle sluggish. We're working on it.
A single pine out on the edge of the marsh.
The grave of some long-forgotten king - the mound at the foot of those pines is a round-barrow dated to the middle bronze age, probably the burial mound of some significant individual from the local community of 4000 years ago.
A single silver birch, momentarily golden with october leaves, on the edge of the wide heath.
The trail ahead lit up by Sycamore and Chestnut leaves. It's been quite blustery so I'm guessing by next weekend most of the trees will be bare and we'll be all set for winter, but right now it's still very pretty.
Edit: I'm not entirely content with any of those pictures, apart maybe from the round-barrow. The horizons out on the heath are rather hard to judge and trees often seem to want to grow a little off vertical which makes an objective frame of reference rather hard to find, especially when one is taking pictures from horseback, where I find the difference in height can make perspectives come out funny as well. Actually they're probably fine as pictures, probably it only bothers me because I was there and they're not quite right.
The ride did have one significant downside unfortunately - as we came up to the trail off the common I saw a grey-haired couple ahead of me with a golden retriever and a black-and-tan egyptian looking dog ( the kind with those funny Anubis ears on it ) who looked very interested in us. They vanished off around the corner ahead but shortly afterwards I spotted the black-and-tan dog running flat out on a long loop around our right about a hundred yards away. It looked a lot to me as though he'd gone into some kind of hunting or herding mindset that likely to end badly for us so rather than going on down the ( narrow, wooded and barbed-wire fenced ) path off the common I was planning to take, we stopped and turned to face where I thought he'd come from and sure enough ten seconds later he came shooting out of the bushes and zoomed towards us making some growly-barky sounds and straight past as Zorro reared at him and span to follow him. I'm pretty sure that if I'd not been paying attention he'd have had a nip at Zorro's heels and someone ( or maybe everyone ) there would have been injured to some degree. As it was we had quite a scare, enough that I got off for a few yards so Zorro didn't feed off my adrenaline and we could both calm down a bit before riding back up the road. It worked fine and the rest of the ride was calm but I'll probably have a hell of a time persuading him that corner of the common is safe next time we go there.
I did think to catch up with the dog's owners to let them know that they were putting other people in danger - could have been a child, could have been a more flighty horse that would have bolted and quite possibly gone straight over them given which way the dog was running - but frankly Zorro wasn't going to get within fifty metres of that dog and I could understand that pretty well.
To counterbalance that, earlier in the ride we met a couple with a little terrier who they had trained to stay still when horses approached. I told them how much we appreciated that.
