A Proper SEnse of DAcorum

I arrived in Tring, Hertfordshire on Tuesday and have spent the last few days staying on the houseboat of my friend Anita. Much like my cousin Miriam, she moved to the UK in the 90s, met a British lad, and never came home. Her new life is most unusual. 

Dacorum is a council area featuring Tring and Hemel Hampstead. The top of the canal system through the Chilterns runs through here, and Anita and her guy Nick live on the Grand Union canal, on a restored coal barge called the Hood. I'm sleeping in the back cabin. Nick runs a bronze foundry nearby. The area features great birding, canal walking, and a maze of public footpaths leading to a myriad of hamlets. It's farmland but with frequent patches of forest. The weather has been sunny, and warm for England but still perfectly manageable. 

Yesterday Anita and I went to the nearby town of Berkhampstead and saw a ruined 'Mott and Bailey' Castle from the 12th century, where the Black Prince was once besieged. The mott (moat) is still mostly intact but waterless and the castle walls still stand, although the keep is long gone.

​Then we took in two Iron Age hill forts, with which I have become slightly obsessed. The first one was Whelpley Hill, and it was so lame that Anita and I barely even knew we had seen it - it was just a slightly lumpy round field near a dull village of the same name. Moving on, we found Cholesbury Camp further to the west, and were prepared to be equally disappointed. We entered a similarly dull field with a slight suggested of mounds and nearly gave up and went back to the car, but then on a whim, we passed through a hedge and found the real thing. The camp is a large multivalate (twin-walled) structure surrounding the field we had entered. It's quite awesome. Both forts were built by the Catevallauni, the same tribe who built the structures I had seen further south. Nearby at Ivinghoe Beacon stands the easternmost of their line of hillforts. Pulpit Hill is another fort in the line, is found beyond Cholesbury to the west. 

Done with forting, we went to look at butterflies in the ancient woodland at Finnsmerre Wood, which is actually in a different county (Bedfordshire)  but it all looks the same to me around here. Anita and Nick are keen butterfly watchers. I went in hope of spotting a new bird and didn't, but forest walking in the balmy evening was lovely. I'd already snagged Red Kite, Buzzard, Jackdaw and Rook during the day so I was not disappointed. 

Today Nick dropped me in the town of Wendover and I walked back to Tring along the Wendover Arm, a disused canal. I'll let photos speak for themselves on that one. Now I'm chilling out on the banks of the Grand Union near the houseboat and making preparations to go to Portland in Dorset, a bird and butterfly paradise. Can this get any better?