Moving home…

We realised when we arrived on the land yesterday that it was time to take down the big tent up top because it was getting hammered by the weather and now looked like this:

Steve threw me lots of dirty looks.  Mea culpa.  Sorry.  We should have taken it down in the autumn hun.  You were right.  I was wrong.

We set about dismantling it reliving fond memories.  It was our home for the best 2 months of last summer when us & Nik slogged to get the campsite ready and the tent was our field kitchen, our bar, our ‘living room’ when it rained & the canvas that our 2-man tent snuggled inside.  We hoped we would salvage enough from the wreckage to be able to re-erect it on the main campsite. Mmmm – most of the canvas is rotten beyond repair and the tarps we used to patch up the leaky roof last year are shredded but most of the poles are still (incredibly!) intact.

Poor tent had even got struck by lightning – well that’s the only explanation we can come up with for the burnt canvas right below one of the metal poles:

Turns out that the tent was home to a bunch of other creatures and we (inadvertently) evicted a load of tenants!

A family of ants:

A pair of spiders (well – way more than a pair but these were the biggest and most photogenic!):

A beautiful scarab beetle that shone like a gem.  Unfortunately it had ‘beetled off’ by the time I had retrieved the camera from its dry place out of the rain (yep, nothing like a little grey drizzle to make the already difficult task of tent dismantling even more treacherous – lots of slipping about & wet, muddy bums!).

A salamader-type-thingy dude (sorry – don’t know the exact species – just got lost in the labyrinths of herpetelogical classification and …. aaargh!!):

And most exciting of all… an ickle bat.  We think it’s a Common Pipistrelle.  Sooo cute.  Soft too – I stroked it:

And here’s the site with the big tent gone…