A couple of days in Peebles

We're just back from a couple of days in Peebles, in the Scottish Borders, one of our favourite places for a short break. It's nice that it's so close, we don't have a long tiring journey and we have more time for walking round the beautiful area.

We stayed at the lovely Venlaw Farm Bed and Breakfast, where you can birdwatch from the breakfast room (spotted flycatchers being the highlight this trip! Spotted flycatchers are sadly declining alarmingly in the UK, but I've seen more this year than any previous year.) Also from the window we saw many other species of wildlife including mistle thrushes, roe deer a nuthatch and lots of swallows.

In the evenings we sat on the verandah and watched the pipistrelle bats flying round the building. We were joined on the verandah by Meg the farm collie dog and Frosty one of the farm cats.

The sunsets were beautiful

We enjoyed walking along the River Tweed

We also went on a new walk! Last time we stayed at the Venlaw Farm B&B we had done a shorter version of this walk, but we decided to do the long version this time. The walk passes through farmland, moorland and woodland offering wonderful views

Lots of amazing fungi in the woodlands

and beautiful wildflowers including harebells, both the traditional blue

and the much more unusual white

We were totally delighted by the variety of insect life, including a fewcommon blue butterflies, here's a female

There were lots of wasps and hoverflies around, wonderful to see! This is a particularly beautiful hoverfly, which I've yet to identify.

and this is the most interesting of the wasps that we managed to get a photo of, again we haven't identified it to species level