Holiday in Somerset - Kilve Beach

Its the second full day of our holiday in Somerset, and today we paid a visit to the village of Kilve, a nice little town on the coast between the towns of Bridgewater to the east and Minehead to the west. Taunton is also close by. Here's a fun fact- Kilve lies within the Quantock Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the first AONB to be established, in 1957. The map below shows where Kilve lies within the county of Somerset...



This website gives more information on the town of Kilve. When we got there we headed to the path along the shoreline and the rocky beach. Since we've been here, we've heard chiffchaffs almost all the time. So it was no surprise to hear them when we got out of the car at the start of the coast path in Kilve. I got a number of photos, but none were very good. They're one of those birds that are difficult to track, either sitting at the back of a tree out of sight or flitting around too quickly that they're difficult to track.

The photos below were all taken along the coastline path:

According to wikipedia, "The beach is part of the Blue Anchor to Lilstock Coast SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest). Along this coast the cliffs are layered with compressed strata of oil-bearing shale and blue, yellow and brown lias embedded with fossils". The limestone and mudstone rock pavements on the beach were an interesting site. Don't ask me how they formed, as I'm clueless!

We then headed down to the beach itself for a closer look at the rock formations on both the cliffs and the beach itself...

After looking at the geology of the place for a while, I became aware of a small group of birds flying around on the rocks. I could see that they were pipits but didn't know what kind at the time. Getting near them to get photographs was difficult as they were quite shy. I did end up getting a few record shots to look back on when we got back to the house. It turned out they were rock pipits. Correct me if you think I'm wrong :)

This turned out to be a bit of a mammoth post, so well done for reaching the end! That's all for now, I do have another post tomorrow as well with more photos from the holiday :)