Easter Part 3; Chocolate Eggs; Chocolate Bunnies; Roaming the Ercall

The time has come, the song is over...  

I'm back at work, ruing the one inevitable mantra in life, "I work to live".  It has been so long that I last had a proper break away from things, and these past 10 days have been just what was needed.  Things got a little wet and miserable towards the end of the week after our trip to Wales, so a lot of time was spent sitting, reading, eating, and feeling generally lazy.  We deserve such things in life though.  Only in small doses.

We took some time out over the weekend to take Olive out of the house to Park Hall Farm in Oswestry.  It was a nice setting, with a great variety of animals, and lots of activities for her to get involved in.  My highlight was the pig racing, which brought back memories of similar events at the Brocklesby Fair when I was younger.  Olive's was feeding the lambs, stroking the bunnies, and her reward for her Easter egg hunt.

This didn't last long... her Mum swiftly finished it

I didn't think rabbits got this big

On the Sunday, I was supposed to go out, and do a 16km run.  I was feeling a little lazy, the weather was bad, and I don't really know the Telford area well enough to come up with such a distance easily... so I gave it a miss.  I made up for it when it cleared a little later in the day, by taking a walk around a couple of landmarks in the Telford countryside, the Wrekin, and the Ercall.

The Wrekin from the Ercall

I believe I have mentioned the Wrekin before in a previous run.  I often come up here when I need my own space, and pretty much know the place like the back of my hand.  What I often omit is the neighbouring 'Ercall', which is a disused quarry, and is now set aside as a place of international geological importance.

The Ercall

The Ercall is significant to geologists, due to the cross cutting formation in the rock that was discovered through quarrying in the area

A closer view of the rock formation in the Ercall

What the rock formations show are on the right, diagonal layers of sedimentary Wrekin quartzite rock, that shows similar rippled patterns to those in shallow seas today.  The more orange Ercall granophyre on the left shows the shift from volcanic to sedimentary rock with a layer of unconformity in between.

The significance of this, for geologists, is it displays a change in the earths structure.  It also displays evidence where before the change life was once aquatic in a form that couldn't create fossils, afterwards fossils become evident showing how creatures began to create harder features.  All this between 520 and 560 million years ago.

All rather interesting stuff, so long as you're not a creationist.  Regardless to beliefs, on a nicer day, I reckon it could all look rather stunning under the right light.  My day out, the murky weather, and my camera did this site no justice.

Time to crack on with some work.