Local patch 40

Suddenly, there is colour everywhere: blossom and catkins, hedges full of primroses. On the waterways there are Gadwall, Shoveller and Tufted ducks all bright with fresh plumage. At Westhay Moor NNR the Great crested grebes are elegant in their summer feathers: cream and orange, black and white. They are beginning to display, weaving complex patterns across the water. Chiffchaffs are shouting from the trees, a Peacock butterfly basks in a sunbeam and, along the gravelly paths, butter-yellow Brimstones dance. 
It is Springtime in Somerset!

Local patch 39

We walked in the gentle Quantock Hills, on the western border of the Somerset Levels. We could see East to Glastonbury Tor and the Mendips and North to Somerset's coast, with the Gower Peninsula and the Welsh hills beyond. It is a place of rolling barrows and wooded, stream-cut combes, criss-crossed with ancient tracks and trails. In the oak-woods, deciduous branch and twig are still waiting for their greening, but there is primrose on the banks and sweet violet pushing through last autumn's leaves. The old heather is bleached or burnt on the hillside, ready to spring into life. Skylarks are tossed like rags in the wind, their song tugging at the memory of every other summer of my life.

It is too cool, yet, to find lizards or snakes, but our passage startled groups of red deer hinds and they bounded away from us, disappearing with ease among the bare trunks, or across the heather tops.

Local patch 38

March comes in like a lion … a very wet and windy lion this year! The rivers and rhynes of the Levels are full to overflowing. The water meadows behind our house are part of the managed flood plain. The sluices are opened regularly to let the water onto the fields and relieve the pressure further up the river system. We wake in the morning to find a glistening, silvery ocean. And before long, the watery birds have stopped to investigate. As dusk falls there is the sound of ducks dabbling in the shallows. They pipe and whistle gently to each other.

In the winter-dark hedgerow, there are the acid stars of wild daffodils and the promise of clumps of primrose before long. Prickly blackthorn (prunus spinosa), always the earliest to flower, has made confetti in the lanes. Her delicate white petals have been tossed and ripped by exuberant Storm Freya.

Pinch me someone ...

In a thrilling evening in Mayfair last night, at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards, I was given the Bradt Travel Guide's New Travel Writer of the Year award! Pictured here with Hilary Bradt, I am grateful to them for their amazing competition and the wonderful way that they encourage aspiring writers to this most competitive of fields. My thanks, too, go to the lovely people at Wexas Travel for the promise of the prize trip to Finland. I have dreamed of those Northern lands for many years, drawn to reindeer and huskies and all that beautiful, bleak scenery. There is time, now, to build up muscle tone for snow-shoeing and study the wildlife guides for Scandinavia. Look out for one or two tales from faraway, among my local patch stories …!