17th November 2011. Pray forgive me, for imposing myself on this shot. It is purely to give scale to the photograph. To my right, you may see a small, overgrown ditch? This is the River Rea, or at least the incipient River Rea. We are in the Waseley Hills Country Park, near Frankley, on the extreme south west of Birmingham. The source of the Rea (which is an ancient river name, probably of uncertain meaning) is a couple of hundred yards away. It’s a tiny spring, basically a large muddy puddle, which apparently never dries up. Although after this incredibly dry summer, it contains the merest trickle.

Many people have walked the River Rea, and uploaded a whole set of photos. of it. We don’t intend to be that ambitious, so here it is after another few hundred yards. It’s still only a few inches wide. The bit of green garden hose at the bottom left will give you the scale.

About 200 yards further on, it opens into a large boggy area. I rather like this shot, with the bridge reflected in the admittedly almost stagnant pool below it. We found some fine filamentous algae in that pool, and will examine it for diatoms. One way of collecting diatoms is to brush off brownish algae from stones in lakes & rivers. This works fine, but there is often a lot of very fine silt too – at least in this district – which makes it hard to separate the diatoms. My best samples so far have been taken from water plants and above all, filamentous algae. We use 15% Sodium Hypochlorite (with great caution!) to dissolve the chlorophyll and other organic parts of the algae, just leaving the diatom shells. (Click the Nature Study tab, then ‘Pond Life’ for images & videos of diatoms moving around.)

Also from the Waseley Hills, we decided to take a zoom shot of Frankley Beeches – indicated with the vertical red arrow. If you travel up & down the M5 around Brum, you’ll know of the Frankley Services. In the above, the big shadow in the foreground is me, sat on a bench – the sun is low, it being an afternoon in November.

If I say it myself, the shot is quite good – the camera was a Fuji HS30 which served me well for several years until I dropped it onto a stone floor… Grrh!! Then we remembered, we had a shot of Brum taken from Frankley:

This has been cropped to make it more panoramic, though it’s just a single frame.

And this is the zoom shot, concentrating on the then brand-new Queen Elizabeth Hospital building at Metchley. (There once was a Roman Fort there…) The Bartley Green reservoir is in the foreground. I suppose we’re about 5 or 6 miles away from the centre of Brum. And yet: in the upper image you see a farm, with cattle disporting themselves – or mostly chewing the cud – just that few miles away from the teeming city. Yes, it’s back to exteriorization again – a couple of hours was spent in the open. By the way, Frankley Beeches (which is a few yards behind us) is obviously an excellent vantage point in practically every direction. Marconi used Frankley Beeches way back in the 1920s for some experiments in early ‘VHF’ radio. I think he sent some ‘beam’ signals to Bristol from here.