Sheep on Boxing Day

View from inside the quarry on Riddlesdown, with Jacob sheep on the skyline.  26 December 2014.

There was a Boxing Day walk on Riddlesdown, along to the abandoned chalk quarry where the warden, Matt, counts the sheep every day.  There are 40 Jacob sheep grazing here to keep down the secondary growth, which allows the rare chalk plants and butterflies to survive.

The quarry is fenced and locked, so it's good to get inside occasionally.  I was last in Riddlesdown Quarry in the summer of 2011, a very interesting time to see it.  Not much is happening in midwinter, but we had a good look at the sheep.

View from inside the quarry on Riddlesdown, with Jacob sheep on the skyline.  Closeup.  26 December 2014.

This is part of the same photo at full size.  The sheep were baaing loudly.  Matt gives them some pellets to get them to come and be counted; they were clearly reluctant to come down that slope, and not intelligent enough to go around.  There used to be some goats in the quarry that would have come straight down with no problem.

(Here you can see the typical jpeg compression blockiness that is a shortcoming of the iPhone camera.)

Geologists love this place because so much of the chalk stratification is exposed.

Diagram of exposed strata in Riddlesdown quarry.

This is an iPhone photo of a handheld photocopy.  This shows the good points of the iPhone camera - it's still quite visible and legible!   The view at the top is at the left side of this diagram, showing the gully.

We clearly could not count the sheep from this viewpoint, so we went to find them.

A walker feeding sheep in Riddlesdown quarry.  26 December 2014.

This is at the top, not quite the same place shown above because they came running to us, more so when they heard that bucket being rattled.  We learned that counting 40 sheep is only possible if they stop running around.

Before the walk I had a look around Coombes Wood, near the car park, and saw this pretty late season fungus:

Mycena rosea, Rosy Bonnet.  Coombes Wood, Riddlesdown, 26 December 2014.

 There are not many annual fungi around this late, but it has been a very mild December.