Butterfly Meadow at Reddish Vale Country Park

I’d decided that we would have a quiet day – the children have had a busy couple of days and we could all do with a bit of down time. However, friends were meeting up at Reddish Vale and, as the weather looked to be nice, it seemed a shame to not go too.

So, we headed across mid morning and met up with friends to take a wander around the butterfly meadow in Reddish Vale. I haven’t been to Reddish Vale for a long while so we popped into the visitor centre and picked up a trail map for the children. These are free but I did leave a small donation as they’re such good quality and the children wanted one each.

We headed off to the butterfly meadow and we soon spotted lots of butterflies darting about. There were ten children in total – so perhaps not the best for searching for butterflies! We did manage to get a good look at the butterfly in the picture below. I *think* it’s a speckled wood butterfly – but happy to be corrected if it’s not!

We then headed for a walk around the pond. This is somewhere we will come back to in the spring to do some pond dipping I am sure. We spotted a grey headed heron which you can just make out in the picture below – it’s where the purple tipped bushes are.

We then had a stroll across to the field and community garden where the children had a good play and run around and explored the bug hotel. I think they spotted a wood louse and a spider – it probably needs a little bit of stuff adding to the bug house area to really attract lots of insects.

We had a little picnic in the community garden before heading back out and home. I had hoped we’d get to walk along the other side by the lake and near the viaduct but Mr H was having a grumbly day so we needed to head home. We popped into the visitor centre to tell the ladies what we had seen and I picked up a Pied Wagtail pin badge – I love these little pin badges and for £1 it was nice to donate something back.

The children had a great time wandering around and ticking off the things from their tick sheet that they had spotted. We might head back again next week to explore some more and try to find all of the brass rubbings and some more items on the checklist.