Macro shots of findings around Leek and Leekbrook

When it is a nice sunny day (I say when, because they are few and far between at the minute), our daughter and I take our walk to town via the Leekbrook Line. It is a very picturesque track walk and if you are quiet you get to see many forms of nature, not only butterflies but we have seen the odd large rabbit (and sometimes the white bob-tail end of one) and snails kissing (I'll get to that in a bit). Yet as you walk along the line (overgrown as it is at present) you also get to see ducks flying over head, herons, and we get around 5 buzzards in our area.

I would like to now post the nature part of Leekbrook and Leek, I will also add that we heard a Pheasant makign its mating calls back on the 1st July, on our way to town, we had passed the side of Leek golf club as we came out of the long Leekbrook tunnel and we just couldnt see it, we heard its noise several times during our walk to town (before it was sounded out by the noises of cattle and sheep at Leek cattle market).

So here are some photos (and bitty blog bits) of our explorations in the sunshine.... our daughter pointed these snails out to me on a walk one day a fair few weeks ago, I couldnt help but take a picture of what looked like "kissing snails", I used selective coouring on the shells as the colouring was so beautiful.

now our daughter was tracing her stick along the lines on this graffiti (not that I like graffitti anywhere but on special canvasses and NOT painted on old tunnels like this) but I couldnt resist this capture of her, making it look like she was the one doing the tagging!

the capture of Leekbrook Tunnel here is wicked, the shadows of the trees and bushes, and the darkness within the tunnel is captured beautifully in my opinion yet I did take the photo so of course I am biased.

Any volunteers to trim these bushes? we ventured down them on 1st July and it was like walking through "a jungle mummy" as our 3 year old politely puts it.
The gorse bushes in full bloom (on macro feature) These flowers have now gone (they were out in May) but im sure they will be back in full bloom next year.
This was taken at the start of the train line by the Leekbrook Junction control box, I was only testing my macro feature out on my new camera at the time and it came out like this, so I was pretty impressed to say the least, another example of the nature we have on our doorstep.