Wellingtons!

From the moment I woke and looked out this morning I just knew it was going to be a wellingtons type of day. Mist and fog clinging to everything, heavy dew in the grass and on the tree’s, shrubs and early season flowers, damp was going to be the order of the day, or at least the morning.

I hated wellingtons as a child, for no particular reason that I can remember, and then as an adolescent they were a distinct fashion ‘no-no’, guaranteed to destroy your ‘street cred’, far better to suffer wet feet than to wear wellingtons.

Now, living here in rural Dorset, I’ve come to view them as almost indispensable, to the extent that who needs four wheeled drive when you can have wellingtons? With the amount of wet weather we’ve experienced here in recent weeks they have become a godsend and so it was again this morning.

Drawn again to the silvery thread of the River Stour I set off in the mist. The moist air hanging from catkins and the trees, droplets falling from branches causing a myriad of ripples on the waters surface with the occasionaly deeper, more powerful ripple indicating the run of a fish just under the surface or the panicked thrashing of a moorhen, disturbed in the reeds at the water’s edge. The mist, dampening sounds and diffusing the early morning light , came and went, swirling on the slight breeze, one minute enveloping everything and the next almost disappearing to the horizon.

I was not the first person to pass along the Stour Valley Way from Sturminster to Cutt Mill this morning, as evidenced by the footprints disturbing the heavy dew, and I would likely not be the last today, the river margins being a lovely place to wander, but, in the early morning light, I was the sole recipient of all that Nature had on offer.