Eden Valley walk - The River Medway

After dropping Simon off in Leigh to catch his lift to the airport for his cricket club tour to Portugal, I moved on to the other side of the village to walk Monty upriver along the Eden Valley Path towards Penshurst. Most of the walk was on the Penshurst Estate owned by Viscount de Lisle. The first stage was along the North bank of the River Medway which is quite narrow here, although we are only a few miles upriver from Tonbridge:

The river lies in a valley that is controlled by the Tonbridge flood relief scheme,

and from time to time the whole area is deliberately allowed to flood to prevent the waters rising in the middle of Tonbridge - hence these barriers used to close the road when the flood gates are closed to block the flow of the river a mile lower down, just upriver of Tonbridge

The banks of the river are very steep and the river looks as though it is quite regimented and "canalised" but there is still quite a good mix of vegetation, such as teasel, willowherb, ragwort, the exotic Impatiens and many others,

The Impatiens noli-me-tangere is particularly popular with bumblebees, despite being a non-native:

There is also the occasional clump of hemp-agrimony Eupatorium cannabinum with its pinkish flower-heads each with 4 - 6 tubular pinkish flowers gathered into much larger loose umbels, not very daisy-like in overall appearance. One of the give-aways is the Y-shaped stigma that you can see projecting from some of the flowers, unusually long in Eupatorium

As the flowers develop. more and more Y-shaped stigmas project, until the umbels as a whole look covered in white fluff.

There was also one patch of yellow loosestife with a few flowers left. but most have now been fertilised, producing the odd rather distinctive globular fruit (one celled capsules, each with many seeds) with their clasped sepals and projecting styles. This is indeed a rather strange member of the Primrose family!

On the river itself the banded demoiselles Calopteryx splendens dance along like little helicopters with wings a-blur over the water weed

The river is also lined on one or both sides with poplar and ash trees, with the occasional dead stump left with an inviting woodpecker hole, perhaps useful for bats, or even a little owl,