A walk in the countryside: Chew Magna
In mid-September Mr C and I went on a country walk with friends. Living in Bristol we are lucky to be a short drive away from a number of great places to visit. We decided to take walk from Chew Magna to Chew Valley Lake and back again. We wanted to combine the walk with catching up with friends, a pub lunch and the chance to pick blackberries on the walk and hopefully sloes if we could find them. I bought Mr C a handy little book, Food For Free, last Christmas and we took with us as it fitted perfectly in Mr C’s back pocket of his trousers.
The weather was perfect for a walk, cloudy at first and later on the clouds broke to deliver a little bit of sunshine. It took us only about 30 minutes on our walk to stumble on a bountiful crop of berries. At first we started to collect blackberries...
and to our surprise found sloes growing close by!
Inspired by the opportunity to make apple and blackberry crumble and our own sloe gin we set about collecting the berries. We took so long picking berries during the first part of our walk we managed to miss lunch in our destination pub, so instead we had a half pint of cider and some crisps to tide us over until we got back into the village. Later on during the walk we found elderberries too and also picked some of these.
We walked through some lovely parts of the local countryside, through fields of cows...
a field full of the clover with the largest leaves we’ve ever seen...
and a recently harvested field...
We got back to Chew Magna and had a late lunch in the quaint garden of a cafe on the high street...
