our day out

We are on holiday in the Lake District for the first time since we moved away more than seven years ago. It has given us the opportunity to visit a friend, who has a gift of healing, who I met fifteen years ago when she was one of the speakers at a day's teach-in on Contemplative Prayer/ Christian Meditation. But more of her on a future blog.
Today after our earlier appointment, we made use of the longer day and having decided to walk up Muncaster Fell, we ordered packed lunches at the guest house in which we are staying.
The weather was glorious; the sun was out and there was a cloudless blue sky with a haze in the distance and it was difficult to realise that it was still March.
The first part of our walk was up a long straight bridle path, where we saw a buzzard and then a goshawk (or was it a Marsh Harrier?) flying quite low.  The path then curved around a tarn where we stopped to take on extra fuel; a flapjack for me and a sandwich for him. As we sat just a foot away from the edge of the tarn we noticed frogs under the water, sunbathing on the bottom. At the far side were mallards with their brilliant green iridescent heads and although it looked peaceful the silence was broken by geese which made such a racket; we assumed there was some squabbling among the males as to which was going to get the female!
We continued on our walk to the trig point where we tried to name the tops of all the fells to our right while noticing Sellafield on the shoreline to our left!
We found a sheltered spot to eat the remainder of our lunches and enjoyed a musical entertainment from a skylark - beautiful!
We then treked on a little further as he wanted to see a Victorian table that he had read about. It looks like something from Stonehenge but was built for some Gentleman's picnic! It was difficult getting there as we could see no footpath and then we were confronted by a bog, which we crossed by stepping onto the Grandma Giles shaped tufts of dried grass, and taking a different path back we had to cross a narrower but deeper bog by leaping from stone to stone - great fun and our feet were still dry when we got back.