Westonbirt Arboretum

This weekend I had my eye balls burned by too much colour! We took a drive to Westonbirt Arboretum which is basically a huge tree reserve that looks like a wild forest but was in fact all designed and planted to look wild and unruly. Again an example of everything here being groomed within an inch of its life.

We clearly had missed the most spectacular show of colour coming into Autumn but there were enough leaves still on the trees and ground to do some serious retina damage. The yellows, browns and oranges were just ridiculously fluro bright. Just fabulous, I can only imagine what they would have looked like a couple of weeks back. I’m quite partial to maple trees and they looked magnificent at Westonbirt.

In a couple of weekends time they are starting the evening walks where the trees will be lit up, carol singing, mulled hot cider and roasted chestnuts so we will bring you some more news and pictures on that in the coming weeks.

On the way home we did a bit of a detour to a Roman Villa that was advertised on the road side near Tetbury. We never did make it inside the villa (a cost of 7 pound each to see holes in the ground – ouch, no thanks) but we did see an incredible number of pheasants in the area. I’m talking at least 30 in one field alone. Pheasants always remind me of the Roald Dahl book – Danny the Champion of the World and the stuffed pheasant mum and grandad have back home. They have quite amazing colours and can run like heck (which we found out trying to get photos of the cheeky things).