Here are a few photos of some of the helpful signs that greeted us in England and Wales (in photo no. 3, please notice the Welsh text on the left, under Perygl, which must come from the Latin periculum…in Italian, pericolo) just as we were about to embark on a trek up to a ruined castle perched atop a rocky crag or a steep hill overlooking the sea or a valley or a river…or at the entrance of the most rickety castles…

Reassuring, right?

Uhm, did you notice the words (photo no. 2, get out your magnifying glass…): “Ministry of Works”? For one split second, after reading that particular sign, I wondered if we had somehow wandered into Diagon Alley (=for those of you who are not devoted fans of the series, that is a Harry Potter reference)…now, wouldn’t that have given me some excellent fodder for a blog post!!! But, sigh, no, the Harry Potter one was the Ministry of Magic…Still, I couldn’t help glancing about to see if there were any spare wands lying on the ground…

Seriously, though, I am all in favour of safety and accident prevention, and of course Stefano and I were very VERY careful, wherever we were. We never strayed from marked paths, especially on Skomer Island where you have to have eyes on the back of your head in order not to step on any birds (ah yes, the puffins come that close to you!).

For Paula: that is the photo I took of a baby short-eared owl (see previous post). No, silly billy, of course we didn’t upset it! It was happily perched atop a burrow right off the path that we were following early one evening. It was probably no more than five metres away from us. And it just kept sitting there, looking at us rather benevolently while we snapped about a million photos. Yes, that was one verrry lucky shot. This must be a good year for owls (and voles!) on Skomer Island, since last year we didn’t even see one owl, whereas this summer we glimpsed and took photos of at least five…

Oh, as you can see (photo no. 4), the dire warnings written on signs extended to puffins, too…

And, like us, they paid close attention…