Glastonbury Tor
Trip Start
Nov 27, 2009
1
85
146
Trip End
Ongoing
Glastonbury, England, United Kingdom
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Pootling around the town we, unusually, felt rather mainstream in comparison with the range of alternative outfits. Lots of second hand books on sale and after a few hours of browsing we walked away with an odd book, "Salvaging old barns & houses" from the early eighties. It's all about recovering bits for re-use. So now all we have to do is find something to dismantle. And somewhere to build an earthship!
After a quick trip up the Tor, we headed to a nearby nature reserve. The area is famous for murmerations of starlings. After a half hour walk and another half hour wait, the starlings started arriving in small flocks of a few hundred. They'd pour over the tree tops into the open fields of reeds where they were aiming to roost. They change roosts frequently as they tend to bend the reeds down and they are known to be fickle. They were later to arrive than the previous day and our hopes of seeing the event dimmed with the setting sun. Then a flock came over the trees. And another from a different direction. When the large flocks did fly over our heads, it sounded like the wind was dashing through the trees. Hundreds of humans flanked the canal and stared into the sky as dotted mass joined dotted mass, swooping and turning as they melded into one unit. Several enormous groups formed, but unfortunately they didn't all come together for the famed spectacle of around 6 million birds dancing in unison overhead.
