Sensational Learning with Penguin

Last weekend, we went out exploring around the Scotney Castle estate. We did a similar walk around the grounds of this beautiful National Trust property in January (click here to read more about that visit), and it was lovely to now come back and see it in a different seasonal shroud, just at the transition from summer to autumn. We have visited Scotney Castle on several other occassions to, but on those visits we’ve always stayed within the actual castle gardens (and you can find out more about that in this older post of ours!).

We took a very similar route to last time, although at one point not long after the start of our walk, Penguin set off in a different direction than we took last time, and frowned when we tried to suggest it might be the wrong way to go. So we followed his lead, and it turned out fine as the path he’d chosen actually linked up with the path we took last time, further along.

As we plodded on, we took notice of different types of trees, such as oak, beech, hazel and larch. We also encountered some sheep and cows, as well as other humans. Some of the latter were accompanied by dogs, and luckily this time all the owners were well-behaved and kept their dogs from running up to us, which is something that can make Penguin panic, and cause great stress to us as parents too. So a big Thank You to the lovely and thoughtful dog owners we met this time.

There were lots of rosehips on bushes along the way, and to our surprise, Penguin decided that they were absolutely delicious. I wouldn’t normally recommend munching a load of them down straight off the bush, but thats what he did! They’re perfectly edible as they are, just not very tasty in my opinion. They are however packed with many valuable vitamins, minerals and other nutrients, so I’m delighted that Penguin enjoyed them so much on this occassion.

Towards the end of our walk, we discovered something that we hadn’t noticed on our previous visits to Scotney Castle: A ’Wilderness Camp’! This was a great nature play area in the forest, and Penguin really enjoyed it (there were a few other children and adults there too, including a dad who’d gone all in with camouflage face paint!).

One amazing aspect of the play area, for us, was a rope swing that had been hung up between two trees. This was highly reminiscent of a swing hung up in the forest by a cow called Mamma Moo and her friend Crow (who is indeed a crow), in one of Penguin’s favourite Swedish children’s books. And if you check out our post about our January walk at this same estate, you’ll find that we found a clear reference to that same book then, too!

Before leaving Scotney Castle, we popped into the walled garden. There we found pumpkins almost ready for harvest, little caterpillars munching on some kind of cabbage plants, and very tasty organic apples grown on the estate, which were for sale at the price of 20p each. Penguin chose one of a variety called ‘London Pippin’.

Did you know that the word ‘pippin’ means a tree grown from the pip (seed) of an apple, rather than having been reproduced through grafting? I only learnt that yesterday!

Thank you so much for reading. If you have any thoughts, comments or questions related to the content of this post, please feel free to comment below! x

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