Another walk (with Olympic complications and photos)

[ffutures]

I had to go to the post office today, which took me towards Kensington Gardens, so I decided to carry on through the park to Marble Arch, have lunch at the Tyburn (since it's their curry club day when they do some very nice dishes), then walk down to Praed Street and home along the canal. In the event this did not go entirely as planned.

Basically, my original idea was to walk to the Italian Gardens, then follow the Long Water and Serpentine to Park Lane and from there to Marble Arch. This started out OK and I got some pictures of some nice-looking little birds (I think another species of coot, but I'm not 100% sure)

Later timill tells me these are moorhens, which are close relatives of the coots.











After that I wanted to see the big statue from my last park post from the other bank of the Long Water and if possible find out who it is by - unfortunately it turned out that there was no information there. What I did find there was a heron, which someone began to feed, so it came quite close to the path.












I carried on, but when I took the tunnel under the road into Hyde Park I found that the bank was closed after 50 yards or so - a big chunk of the park is still closed off due to the Olympics, which made it impossible to continue around the water. So I decided to cut my losses and head towards Marble Arch, had a nice lunch, and headed home.

On the way back I decided to take a look at the new Paddington Station booking hall on the canal bank, and ended up taking a train home - probably quicker to walk, but I wanted to get some pictures of the Crossrail support machinery from the station platform at Royal Oak. This is a massive system of conveyor belts, gizmos to extract fluid from the spoil, etc. that is several hundred yards long, extending from the tunnel entrance opposite my house to just east of the station. I could only get pictures of the eastern part.

First, a panorama stitched from several pictures
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crossrail_conveyer_system.JPG

Second, a detail of this machinery, not quite sure what this does but I think it extracts fluid from the spoil.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crossrail_Conveyer_system_detail.JPG

So, not quite the day I had planned, but worthwhile.

Comments

[timill]

Moorhens.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK, thanks - I'm really not a very good ornithologist. Cute little buggers, aren't they!

[were-gopher.livejournal.com]

definately.

[mkillingworth.livejournal.com]

Himself neglected to tell you about the time that we came home to find a completely intact moorhen in our library. They are not small birds, so we were a bit mystified. All we could think was that one of the cats pushed while another one pulled through the cat flap. There was hardly a feather ruffled.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

How long did it take to clean up afterwards?

[inamac.livejournal.com]

The sculpture is Henry Moore's 'Arch' - I remember seeing it when it was set up in 1980 (I may have some pics from back then somewhere) and hadn't realised that it had been dismantled in the 90s and only just returned as part of the Olympic arts project (which shows how much attention I've been paying on my walks through Hyde Park).

Very photogenic heron.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I'd sort of guessed Moore, or school of, but beyond that I was stumped.