River Great Ouse near Stretham

Not for a long time have I walked from the Lazy Otter to Stretham Old Engine (a steam driven engine used to pump water off the land into the River Great Ouse) and back, but have done it a couple of times recently.

It was a misty morning and the images below record the landscape and farming activity.   There is quite a community of people living on boats at each end of the walk - different types of boats though.   I was interested to see the curios which were around the boats at the Stretham end.   Perhaps I shall notice more on the next visit.

On the north side of the river were several tractors engaged in the harvesting of potatoes.   The main tractor was trailing a machine which dug up potatoes at its front end and at the back end had a conveyor belt which was filling up tractor after tractor with very fresh potatoes.   A potato was in a tractor on the A10 (holding up traffic) within 10 minutes of having been dug out of the ground!   I had thought those sorts of time scales were the advertising point for garden peas.

 There was an enormous expanse of solar panels in a field on the south side of the river;  allegedly another form of farming?