Hello my Friends!

Guess what?! I did it again…I really need to learn that when scheduling posts I need to actually set them schedule not draft (rookie mistake!!).

This weeks post comes courtesy of all the lovely weather we’ve been having as I recently spent some time exploring Penhale Dunes.

It was beautiful.

Penhale dunes is an amazing set of really tall (90 metres in places) Atlantic facing sand dunes, the area is classed as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and spans a whopping 620 hectares.

Interestingly Penhale Dunes are not actually owned by the Cornwall Wildlife Trust outright, but is cared for by several different organisations including Perran Sands holiday park (wonderful place for a holiday), the MOD (they use the area for various training activities), Perranzabuloe Parish Council, the local golf club and St Pirans Trust (who own the ancient monuments – St Pirans Oratory and Church).

Its weird that there’s so much green taking over the sand dunes I was completely captivated by this dune pond! There was so much life and beautiful Yellow Flag Iris growing around the edge of the water.

Yellow flowers were everywhere, I love Cowslip they’re such a pretty wildflower and I’ve always been fond of the common Dandelion…so were these green sparkly beetles!!

There were so many day flying Burnet moths around.

The dunes are also home to cattle (I assume they are the dunes official grazers!) but I didn’t want to get close enough to ask!

As a complete side note St Piran is now known as the patron saint of Cornwall and tin miners! And every year of the 5th of March we celebrate the Feast of Saint Piran and the national day of Cornwall.

This particular spot felt like something out of Middle Earth – I half expected to find some hobbit holes in the hills. Everything was just so green and sunny.

On the other side of those wonderful green hills was like a twenty degree slope down the sand dunes to the beach! 

I spotted not one but two new butterflies the first being Brown Argus (Aricia agestis) there were at least fifty of them in the area I explored, these butterflies appear almost silvery as they fly past and are easily confused with the female of the Common Blue (which is actually brown) and have a tiny 29mm wingspan!

Super excitingly I also snapped this really crappy photo of a Dingy Skipper (Erynnis tages) which is becoming quite a rare butterfly and was a first for me! (My photo really doesn’t do it justice). Again they have a 29mm wingspan and to be honest I thought they were just a brown moth – I didn’t actually realise it was a Dingy skipper until I got home and had I realised it at the time I would have tried to get better photos!

Finishing off my post is a landscape shot overlooking my favourite beach at Perranporth, this shot really shows how high the dunes go!

So yeah, that’s it for this week, note to self remember to set posts to schedule not draft int the future. Hopefully next weeks post is either gonna be a new embroidered butterfly or possibly a Fleeting thought…or maybe even some art. 

Thank you so much for reading this post, and I wish you a prosperous week ahead!