Just a quick geography lesson for anyone interested: The Isle of Sheppey is an island on the north coast of Kent (i.e. in the Thames estuary). The Swale is the stretch of water between the island and the mainland. This picture was taken at the eastern end of the island.

I haven’t taken any pictures recently, so here’s yet another from Hampshire: one of the wild-living ponies in the New Forest. Which may be wild but are completely unfazed by human presence.

Mottisfont Abbey is a house run by the National Trust which is most notable for the fact that the garden is host to the National Collection of old-fashioned roses. Not that you can see many roses in this picture.

I still have some more pictures of Hampshire that I might use, but I thought it was time to post something a bit more urban. Enough with the plants already!

This wasn’t actually quite such a bizarre spot to sit and eat lunch as it looks: that stretch of river by Tate Modern and the Globe is always packed with people, so there were probably people sitting on all the more promising bits of wall. And the rubbish bags were pretty inoffensive, really.

The locals have ancient common rights to graze animals in the New Forest — it’s one of those peculiar medieval survivals that hang on in various bits of the country. As well as being quaint and picturesque, it helps maintain the Forest as open heathland, which is a valuable wildlife habitat. Some of the other ancient rights have been tweaked to protect the forest: so the commoners are supplied with firewood by the Forestry Commission as a replacement for the right to collect wood from the common land.

The New Forest ponies are the most famous animals, but there are also cows and donkeys like these ones.

On some dry heathland in the New Forest, there were a few patches of burnt gorse.

More geology; I think this might be the last of the Wales shots I’m going to post. I’d better go out and take some pictures of something new…

I really like jackdaws. Admittedly, I say that about loads of birds — I am basically a sucker for the whole avian tribe — but jackdaws are attractive, with their silvery heads, and like most crows, they have personality.

This one, in the close of St David’s cathedral, would be even more attractive if it was just a tiny smidgen sharper, and might make a better photo if its head wasn’t slightly overlapping the gravestone, but I still quite like the shot.

Thrift is one of the classic British seashore plants, and there are great swathes of it in Pembrokeshire.

There was only one cow when I started trying to take its picture, but they all wandered over to look at me.

I’ve cropped the photo a bit. The location is approximate: it was somewhere between Marloes and St Ishmael’s, though.