The adventures of members of the ERDG walking group continue boldly where no men (or dogs) have been before (well not recently).

Desperate to keep up our fitness levels (and to have a good old natter), we continue our weekly walks – this time in the Brearton and Scotton area. I am being a bit vague about the geography because I opted for a start from the latter, when everyone else was agreed that we were meeting at the former! Luckily they are quite near to each other, so that was easily rectified.

A new member of the group joined us for the first time, It’s long been rumoured that Abbie would come with us when she (and/or Bill) had been suitable trained – and today was the day! In the meantime she had grown enormously – I don’t know what Bill is feeding her!

It made an amazing difference to the walk, having Abbie with us. We had all the usual chat, plus the discoveries of the natural world around us (a huge flight of geese (a gaggle?) doing an overhead flypast, making more noise with their chattering than we could possibly manage.

Plus we had a new focus of attention.

Bill produced the longest, most luminous green ‘lead’ for Abbie, in order to avoid any strange encounters of the sheep kind.

It meant that Bill, normally our walk leader from the back of the line of walkers, was immediately promoted to the front with Abbie’s need to search out new smells and sounds before the rest of us got there.

With the intricacies of Abbie’s constant movements, – backwards, forwards, sideways – she soon had Bill, in the first instance, doing moves that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Strictly Come Dancing, skipping, twirling, looping, changing hands etc.,

With the length of the lead, we were soon all involved in the strange dances, and the occasional sudden dash by Abbie into a field of maize, or a hedgerow hiding a pheasant, kept us all on our toes.

The piece de resistance of the walk was when Abbie discovered a number of large dead bushes/small trees that she felt she needed to bring along with her. Only the intervention of Uncle Steve, her new best friend, enabled the untangling of the lead and the completion of the excvellent walk.

I think we all loved having Abbie with us, and hope that she becomes a fixture on our walks.

Now I’m off to practice my newly learned dance moves, ready for next week’s walk!