Quiet walk

 Yesterday's walk was unusual in that it was almost completely silent.  Not a sound to be heard - no cars, no farm machinery, no birdsong, no cows or cockerels.  

Random blue flower

The corn is as high as an elephant's eye.  Plenty of rain this year has made for healthy corn.  Most is fed to cows; people here are surprised to know that people eat it.

To scrump.  What a wonderful thing is the English language.  It has a word that means to steal, but it applies only to stealing apples, and only from a tree.

Random butterfly

The barrage at St Pierre sur Erve

It really is a spectacularly ugly dam, holding back the water for a mill that no longer exists.  When you buy a house in France that has a garden backing on to a river, you own the river until halfway across, where the person who owns the land on the opposite bank becomes the owner.   So normally a dam like this will have two owners.   But this one extends for a bit upstream as well as from side to side, and the middle bit has a third owner.  In order to destroy it, you need permission from all the interested parties.  Mission impossible.