Upton Country Park and Holes Bay

We did a circular tour of Upton Country Park yesterday. This walk has quite a bit of variety and it can be exciting whichever way you decide to walk.  Yesterday we turned anti-clockwise to take the shoreline trail first along the edge of Holes Bay.  This bit of the bay is also a nature reserve and has a couple of  bird hides beside the trail.

Here we keep Jade on a long lead so that we can make sure she doesn't go off the trail or annoy people we meet coming in the opposite direction. 

She is such a friendly little soul and thinks everyone wants to make friends with her.  As soon as we see someone coming towards us she gets all excited and her tail is going nineteen to the dozen. If I don't get her under control she'll be jumping all over them. Most people like this and think she's adorable, but some just don't like dogs or are nervous of them, even a light weight puppy like Jade.

I am so busy with writing and other projects at the moment, that I don't have enough time to take her as far as I'd like, but we turned up towards the gardens of the house, getting a glimpse of the view I showed you yesterday, and went on through to a parallel path back homewards. But we don't stay on that path with Jade because a lot of people cycle that way. And when we we turn off and go into the woods, we don't meet many people, so we let her run off lead. She dashes around, nose to the ground like the spaniel she is, and sometimes we don't see her for a while, through the undergrowth beside the path, until she comes pelting towards us again. Yetserday at one point, we got quite worried as she was gone so long and we couldn't even hear her, but suddenly there she was behind us having doubled back and found the path again.

When we reach the gate at the end of this path, she sits down patiently and waits for the lead to be clipped on again.  And then it is just a short step back to the road where we parked the car.