Bad start in that having carefully packed the picnic bag we forgot to put it in the car, but luckily Molly Maid in the New Bridge car park was able to supply soup from sachets and hot dogs - our first junk food of the holiday. We were told afterwards that Mr. Molly Maid was a serious ice cream man, working this spot all through the year.
From the car park we walked south, upstream along the eastern bank of the river, getting slightly lost but making it to several signs advertising a second hand book shop (in aid of the Devon air ambulance) in the middle of the country. We thought that knocking them up Sunday lunchtime was not quite the thing, so we never got to see what their stock was like.
The only wild animal was a rat scurrying along the bottom of a stone wall, we saw no fishes despite there being plenty of bright, clear water to see them in and tweeted no birds, although there were clearly plenty about. In part because of all the young trees coming up in what had been, until not very long ago, riverside pasture. Riverside pasture which had provided food for us townies and work for the country folk, quite a lot of whom are now reduced to benefits, bottles or emigration. But there were plenty of spring flowers.
Lots of celandines looking well in the bright sun. Lots of primroses and sundry clumps of white wood anenomes, aka wind flowers. A few violets. A few unidentified white flowers growing in the tops of walls and such like places, illustrated. And on the way out a rather fetching pond covered in white flowers which we have now learned are aliens, aponogeton distachyos, also known as water hawthorn or water hyacinth. Perhaps their being aliens was why the Dartmoor trusty sitting in the car park knew nothing about them. Not the stuff of proper heritage at all.
Lots of moss, including lots on the trees, from which we deduced that it must be very wet for much of the time. And lots of ivy.
All in all, a fine place in the bright spring sunlight, what with steep valley, river, woods and everything springing into life.
PS: struck once again by how many of the striking plants that one comes across, particularly in gardens rather than in the wild, come from South Africa.
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