River revived

It rained all day until four in the afternoon, so I spent the morning after breakfast working on my Sunday sermon. I decided to continue exploring the Ely river trail, starting from Leckwith hill and walking down river to where it crosses Penarth Road. It's quite a long way back home from there, so I didn't carry on down river to the Bay. I'll keep that for another occasion when I can take the bus out to the same point, as the walk back was on noisy urban roads lined with industrial depots. 

Actually the Ely Trail runs next to the busy A4232, and there's a strip of land covered with briar patches and young trees running down to the water. The construction of the A4232, just fifty metres from the river in places  may have led to the destruction of much of the old flood plain natural landscape. In one place by the river's edge I found a small cast iron object protruding from the river bank, which may have been a mooring post in a previous era, when the river was tidal and navigable to some extent. 

For a century and a half it was heavily polluted and biologically dead, but with the demise of industry in the Rhondda and in the coastal plain, and the advent of modern sewage plants, the Ely, like the Taff has seen the revival of its natural ecosystem ad repopulation with fish and wildfowl. Nobody wanted to own fishing rights to tracts of land along its river banks and nowadays public notices announce that fishing is allowed, something unthinkable in this region when I was young.

On the west bank of the river the trees lining the escarpment down to the water are much older. From where the river runs out of Glanely parish through the coastal plain, it flows more slowly, as meets the water behind the Barrage. Like the Taff, the Ely ceased to be a tidal river at the turn of this century. Perhaps for this reason, reed beds have sprung up along the banks, a great haven for wildfowl. A few of the colony of Swans from the barrage waters make their way upstream here, just as they do on the Taff. It's also desirable habitat for canoeists as well.

So for the second day in a row my daily walk topped twelve kilometres. My feet were really tired when I got back home, and I spent the evening binge watching the rest of the episodes of the German crimmie '23 Murders'. It ends in a way that leaves no uncertainty about the need for a second series, except that there hasn't been one. It was made in 2015, but didn't get screened until 2019. The central story-line is just too implausible to start with, and sub-plots convoluted and hard to follow. Quite bad really, but not in a comic way, as it takes itself too seriously as 'psychological drama'. Quite amusing to watch a really bad crimmie for a change. The fact that it was in German was at least good for my basic language comprehension.

There's been no breakthrough in Ukraine negotiations, but more Russian attacks on cities, with civilian casualties mounting. Three Russian generals have been killed in action so far, plus between two and four thousand troops. With a similar estimate for Ukrainian military losses. The Ukrainian government says that up to two thousand civilians have been killed. Over ten thousand lives lost in two weeks, with signs that things can only get worse, with no respite. How long before the Russians decide that continuing this aggression is unsustainable economically and politically. And what happens then?