7 Aug 06 Weekend of walking
This weekend we clocked at least 25 miles/40km on foot!
Saturday was lovely, not too hot, so we ventured from home near Aldgate East to Covent Garden and back. It was imperative we stop in at a hardware store to pick up some mouse poison. Yes, after all our humane efforts to stop the mouse madness in Ithaca we have been ‘forced’ to try alternative methods here. This is a new building, so it’s surprising how quickly these peskies infiltrate. The humane traps you buy here do NOT work and I’ve been trapping on my own with a combination approach: corral the mouse behind a rickety arrangement of cardboard boxes then cup it under a tupperware bowl. I’m a champion trapper! First sign, a couple of months ago, there was only one mouse traveling through the building and accessing the cupboard under the sink through holes around the piping. Then the other day I got quite worried when I spotted no less than three mice… in the bedroom. I was working at the computer and glanced down to see one sitting between my feet! My nerves were a bit shot that day :) I was convinced they had nested under the bed, but after a thorough cleanup found that wasn’t the case. They had created a spawning paradise at the back of our storage closet, behind the water heater, in a gaping hole cut to fit the pipes. So we set the humane traps, but they absolutely do not work. Since Friday night there’s been no indication of a return but we just laid out some poison anyway. Stay away rodents!
Sunday we interacted with different, cuter, and much larger animals: sheeps and cows! It was the first walk we chose to do out of Time Out’s Country Walks (near London) books, Volumes One and Two (not to be confused with 50 Walks to Country Pubs). We traveled an hour by train to Lewes, followed the guidebook out of town, up a hill and across a field, and soon discovered we picked one of the tougher walks in the book :) They may not be mountains high as Banff or BC, but there are some huge rolling hills and valleys through the south and we trekked up and down more than a few of them during that 15 miles! In the UK you can cross through farms on privately owned ‘access land‘ without fear of being shot on sight.
Under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW), the public can now walk freely on mapped areas of mountain, moor, heath, down and registered land without the need to stick to paths.
We came across a farmer and son shearing sheep, walked past them onto their fenced property, and further along met with a large herd of friendly curious cattle. We moaned through layers of sweat as we hiked from the first valley up a 700m hill. Direct sun and humidity didn’t make this experience the most pleasant, but luckily later on the clouds overcast. Before we left home we knew Lewes had a lovely castle, but seeing it up close wasn’t meant to be. This walk was pure country, and after walking the final five miles along the river Ouse, where we counted 38 white swans and passed the spot where Virginia Woolf walked into the river to her death, we had no energy left to climb the (relatively small) hill up to the castle.
Some notes on sheep doo doo and cow pies: Some sheep poop out a bundle of blueberry-sized pellets while others don’t. The contrast between the two types is confusing. Cows plop perfectly round 12-inch pies. Attempts to avoid all these hazards were futile, and I’ll just say a crunch underfoot is so much better than a squish…
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Hi Tiffany - Thought you might like to know that when we lived in Germany (three year old house up in the vineyards - lots of mice in the vineyards)we also encountered mice running across our kitchen floor, eating raisins in the pantry etc…after Henry tried every friendly method of catching them and setting them free (out one door and in the other, I said)he reverted to the ramp leading up a bowl of molasses method. The sweet smell of the molasses attracts them so he was told …supposed to walk the ramp and fall in the bowl which they can’t get out of…not that we know if this really happens as not one walked up the ramp. After much frustration we found out that in Germany the landlord owns the mice and therefore it was up to him to get rid of them. We spoke to our landlord who called an exterminator - the exterminator told me “you see one, there’s a hundred). You might want to check with your landlord! Ours were also coming up the pipe holes under the sink - our landlord sealed it off so it was no longer possible. Take care & enjoy the walks.
Comment by Lynda & Henry — August 10, 2006 #
Wow, I can’t imagine that ramp idea working out so well! I know peanut butter was a hit when we used it in the humane traps in Ithaca, so I could see the molasses doing the trick too.
No more mice since we put out dishes filled with nasty blue pellets… for now they’re off somewhere else, probably downstairs where a new tenant just moved in!
Comment by Tiffany — August 14, 2006 #