#24: [01-Oct-19]

#22: [05-Jan-16]

#21: [02-Feb-15]

#20: [01-Mar-13]

#19: [14-Nov-12]

#17: [31-Jul-11]

#18: [31-Jul-11]

#16: [20-Aug-10]

#14: [19-May-10]

#15: [01-Apr-10]

#13: [25-Sep-09]

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#5: [08-Apr-04]

#4: [08-Apr-04]

#2: [24-Apr-02]

#3: [22-Apr-02]

#9: [29-Jul-07] (incomplete)

09-Jul-2000 -- Having spotted the Confluence website, I had been waiting for several weeks for the opportunity to visit our nearest confluence at 51 degrees North, 00 degrees East. It came, when our daughter Emily (aged 15) went on a 3-day Duke of Edinburgh Hiking Expedition near to the confluence and we were due to pick her up mid-afternoon Sunday. So early on the Sunday morning, my wife Jane and I, set off to look for the confluence, a round-trip journey of about 70 miles.

In spite of being mid-summer in England, the weather was dull and wet. We got to within 3 miles and started following some narrow winding lanes until eventually we came across what the map said was the nearest farm. As has happened so often these days in England, the farm buildings had now all been converted in luxury homes and the nearest farm track had disappeared. We walked back down the road until we found another track and started to walk through the fields of wheat and barley. The confluence was at the bottom of a small valley and just inside an area of dense, overgrown woodland. We walked back and forth trying to get the Garmin Etrex to lock on so that we could get a picture. In the near distance we could hear the driver of a steam train hauling on his whistle as the Bluebell Railway hissed and steamed with its cargo of tourists through the pretty Sussex countryside.

The fields around us were mostly covered in cereal crops but one of the photos shows an increasingly common view - a field of set-aside where the farmer is paid a government subsidy to leave the field to nature - a strategy aimed at curbing the food mountains in Europe.