A day on the bay

I can't remember the first time we walked the rugged section of Purbeck which is Ringstead Bay, though I know whenever it was it stole a piece of my heart and there after countless memories have been created in its steep and roughly folded rocky terrain. Always on the 'A' list of places to walk, its walks have featured friends and family, as well as many solo missions. Today I was walking with my middle yoot and a couple of his chums, who were amazed to hear how we scrambled about these steep grassy slopes and along this rocky coastline before my boys were into double figures. It warms me that my boy feels a connection to this place, and wants his friends to experience it too. The idea that I may have sowed a seed, and that seed could be an annual and that he too may bring his children here, makes me feel good. Giving our children a love for and respect for and of nature was something we'd always hoped to do. It struck me today, thinking of all the years of missions here, how much the landscape had changed. I remember on our earliest walks a lot of the western section of the Ringstead folds area being bare soil after substantial slippage, though now it's all covered in flora. The folds were grassy, with a few hollows of bramble and bush, with the occasional clump of primary colonizing shrub, now the folds are becoming choked.  Those hollows are now established thorn thickets, and bramble and bush continue to spread. More careful consideration is now required when choosing a route. Some of the paths we used to follow have been swallowed, all but disappeared, nature has no respect for our nostalgia, change is its engine.  The Deer who made the tracks we followed still inhabit the thickets that nestle amongst the folds, though now they forge new paths for us to follow. Time marches on, nothing stays the same; but it does if you zoom out, it does.  The same, but different, is an apt phase I heard someone use once.