Walking Ghyll, 24 May

Quiet evening, breezy and warm. A couple of lone, highup clouds: one of the first proper days of summer. Out in sandals and bits of gravel keep getting stuck under my feet. When I let Ghyll off the lead, he browses lazily in the field. I climb up one of the mounds and notice some black sheep in the field across the way, which over the winter was enclosed with a new wire fence. That’s new.Down on the lines the ground is covered with wooly catkins. I point my phone at them and ask Claude what they are, and it gives me 4 different answers, none of which seems right. Then I ask the Woodland Trust’s tree ID app and it claims alternately oak and whitebeam (rare). Turns out that it’s goat willow.Lots of folks walking dogs this evening, enjoying the setting sun. It's still warm even as our shadows stretch dozens of feet out ahead of us. When they pass, Ghyll and I step off to the side and he sits calmly as they go by. But when we get near home he starts pulling because he knows that Sam will…