Primroses in the walled garden at Southerndown, Christmas Day, 2014
It was a glorious blue-sky Christmas Day, so we went for our traditional walk at Southerndown, on Glamorgan’s Jurassic coast. Here are a few pictures of what we saw – including quite a few flowers spotted hanging on late in the season or blooming very early…
View of Southerndown as we walked down from the top car park – VERY bright sunshine!
More people than expected were walking their dogs on the beach
Yellow gorse was in flower all around…
As sunny as the day…
A close-up of the gorse
We went into the walled garden, which is very sheltered from the sea winds…
Figs????
Planes still fly on Christmas Day…
Well-developed Buddleia seedpods
Just one Daphne shoot in flower…
Bergenia in bloom
Spotted-leaved Pulmonaria (lungwort)
Lingering Yucca flowers…
…and here are the leaves
We sat in this shelter (summer house?) and ate our special Christmas Day sandwiches – wholemeal bread with garlic pate, tomato, cucumber, gherkins and onion chutney – and we left a few crumbs for a robin that was loitering
This is the view from the summer house – a folly in the corner of the walled garden
On the wall of the shelter is this rather poignant poem, written out and framed by Caroline Shankland but composed in 1873 by two London solicitors who were staying with the Earl of Dunraven, whose walled garden this was, when his castle stood nearby on the end of the headland:
Dearly I love Dunraven Bay
Under its cliffs by night or by day
Near me the waves on the golden sand
Roll widely in foam as they dash to the land
At times it’s so still, I fancy I hear
Voices of lost ones, melodious and clear
Even the drift wood seems to say
Never forget life is ebbing away
…and you may note that the first letters of each line taken together spell out Dunraven.
There were more people than we expected wandering around the gardens, and this was a good thing, as I wouldn’t have noticed the primroses in bloom in front of the summer house had I not seen someone else stooping to take a photograph of them…
Primroses on a sheltered bank in the walled garden…
Not perfect, but such an uplifting sight in midwinter
Wall pennywort (Umbilicus rupestris)
Winter trees beyond the walled garden…
Possibly sycamore?
This is the bark of one of the sycamore-like trees
All around beneath the trees was hart’s tongue fern (Asplenium scolopendrium)
Beyond the wooded area is a viewing place, where the sun was burning brightly on the sea beside the Jurassic cliffs of the Glamorgan Heritage Coast…
The Jurassic cliffs…
The tide was very low…
Another view
On the way back up to the car park I saw these strange succulent leaves with raised bumps, growing among the shattered shale cobbles. Any ideas?
There is more information about Dunraven Castle in my blog post from this time last year, when I was taking pictures with my old Olympus camera, not my new Sony. I think I like last year’s better!
The Squirrelbasket 
Amazing photos and has prompted me to actually go for a walk over there. but keep saying “I must” so 2015 “I will” Primrose out -amazing.
Mary
Yes, a crisp winter walk is well worth it – with or without a canine companion!
All the best 🙂
Regarding the gorse, you know what they say – ‘When gorse is out of bloom, kissing is out of season’.
Here’s a photo from my Christmas Day walk. It shows the soon to be developed fields of Fairwater. https://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_seligman_cardiff/15918396379/
Merry Christmas.
Nice one – the saying and the picture. Funnily enough we drove through that Fairwater area the other day and realised it was all going to be covered by houses soon. I assume they are leaving the Plymouth Woods area untouched?
PS – here’s one of my old photos form the same area you walked today: https://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_seligman_cardiff/5335966855/ – fantastic rock formations
Lovely – I so admire that view. Did you see they found another ichthyosaur on our Jurassic coast recently?
Very beautiful, we have been so lucky with the weather this year. It must be very mild where you are: I checked the lungwort here this morning and there is no hint of any flowers.
I think that particular walled garden is in a very sheltered spot indeed.
Yesterday we went to Carmarthenshire and the white frost stayed all day, which was pretty…
Figs???? The low tide photo is quite wonderful.
That is a particularly good lookout point for that stretch of coast 🙂
Beautiful. Thanks for taking us along on your walk.
Thank you Bill. I look forward to exploring more of your land with you in 2015, too 🙂
I’m amazed so many flowers were blooming on Christmas Day!
Very mild hereabouts 🙂
Beautiful photos! It is fairly exotic for me, the Christmas with such abundance of flowers (whereas our Czech winters are rather cold and white or sadly grey-brown). So. The Daphne is rather Viburnum farreri (= fragrans), and the spotted succulent leaves among the cobbles, try look at Anchusa arvensis or other Anchusa species.