In search of Brambly Hedge

I first encountered the magical stories of the mice of Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem, when my sister, brother and I were given a Brambly Hedge book treasury by our much loved “babysitter” for Christmas one year. The stories are based around a community of field mice who live together in the beautiful tranquil surroundings of the English countryside, underground, in stumps and huge tall trees. I adored them from the very first read, I still do! It is the illustrations that as a child made the stories come to life for me!  Every last detail is included in all the illustrations from the winding stairs, to individual patches on the patchwork quilts on the tiny beds.  They really fed my imagination as a child and later on even inspired one of my art GCSE pieces.

I love these stories so much as they hold such happy memories for me that I have since bought “A” her own Brambly hedge books! We read just a page at a time every other day or so as I don’t want to overwhelm her but she already loves looking at the pictures and will pull the book out from her book box herself and open and close it and look at the pictures for a few moments.

So one slightly windy afternoon this week after reading our little snippet for the day I decided to wrap “A” up and set off around our garden and field in search of our own Brambly Hedge!!

Wrapped up and ready to go!! (as you can see from the t-shirt hubbs doesn’t ever seem to feel the cold!)

We walked down and had a look at our lovely big tree! She had a little feel of the leaves, then tried to eat one so that was the end of playing with those! I told her that inside our lovely big tree lived our own brambly mice i called “Lord and Lady Springhill”! I’ve decided i’m going to keep this up or attempt to over the years to come and make her a book/scrapbook with a few little stories about our own little mice in our field and some pictures from the field and some painted of what the houses inside our trees and banks look like! ..

Our own lil rabbit Burrow and little stream

 We wandered further and had a peek a the rabbit burrow we shouted hello but unsurprisingly they decided not to come out and say hello back today!

So we threw some leaves and sticks into the stream and watched them float a little while instead!

We have much to my delight a resident Foxy Loxy! I know a lot of people do not like Foxes for what ever reasons, but I love them. I think they are such beautiful animals and I really think it’s so special to have an animal like this living so close to us. I have seen it a number of times in late evening. I’m hoping “A” will be able to see him/her  sometime soon too! But we did see the fox track! It uses the same little track up the side of our field and through the hedge to the fields beyond every evening or so. We have been looking at a few fox pictures from flashcards and a picture book but i’d love to see her reaction to the real thing!

It started to get a little too cold and we decided we’d head back into the house to warm up in front of the stove!

Fox track- the line of brushed grass going into a little hole in the hedge to fields beyond

All in all we had a great wee wander if a tad bit windy but it wouldn’t be October in the UK without a bit of wind 😉

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