Mt Edgcumbe in midsummer

And here it is, midsummer. The shortest night was last night, and from now on it's all downhill to Christmas...

Doesn't seem like all downhill, though. In fact, it promises to be quite a good summer from the traditional point of view of nice weather for the beach and the bbq. Yesterday and again today there was a complete reversal of the normal Cornish morning. Normally we start with a cloudless blue dawn (winter as well as summer) which rapidly deteriorates into cloud at best. Overcast dawns like today's, however, sometimes give way to glorious sunshine...

Yesterday's overcast dawn turned into one of the hottest days of the year so far. Ty and I went walking at Mt Edgcumbe, a country park estate overlooking Plymouth Sound. There were four people and five dogs, as we were joined by the giant poodle and the hyper springer, back down here on holiday. We all had what we thought were ample supplies of water - about four litres between us - but that was all gone by the time we stopped for our picnic! The dogs especially got very thirsty, and there were no streams along our route, which is quite unusual for Cornwall. We stopped for lunch almost at the top of the valley that leads to Maker church and were treated first to the sight of a green woodpecker flying back and forth across the valley and then to a couple of fallow deer running across just below the top of the hill. They stopped and stared (or probably sniffed) at us in that classic alert pose for just long enough for Micheal to take a couple of pictures, then carried on running across the hill down to the trees.

I had never seen a woodpecker in flight across open country before - if we hadn't first seen it in classic profile against a tree trunk I wouldn't have been sure what it was, as its back shone golden in the sun in flight.