Late night extra

There we were sitting at our mooring last night and admiring the warm sunny evening when we thought "it's perfect; let's go cruising!"
So at 8.15 p.m. we did. Untied and headed off for another hour or so before mooring at the start of a strange low-lying landscape called Whixall Moss, uncannily like the Fens we know so well. These Mosses are actually areas of peat, now no longer harvested - if that's the word - but turned into wildlife reserves rich in plant and insect life. Including mosquitoes, though they'd gone to bed by the time we arrived.
It's a weird contrast to the rolling green pastures of Cheshire, with their black and white cows and handsome farmhouses. Instead there are a smattering of squalid homesteads struggling in flat, semi-barren fields.
These peat bogs were formed as the last ice age melted, the great chunks of receding ice crushing the land below. The same ice also melted to former a number of much more attractive lakes or 'meres' which you pass on the way towards Ellesmere - itself, as you can guess, the home of a 'mere'.
But before reaching it we had our own adventure....