Night Hikes

My 8 yr old is not keen on the dark, so for him going on a night hike through our woods was a major achievement. He said that when he was focussing on the things we spotted in the torch light - spiders on webs, beetles and woodlice on oak trees, leaves looking beautiful, the veins of leaves so clear with the torch shining through, the shadows and shades of grey of leaf and branch against the night sky, shining eyes which turned out to be a fox, a beautiful skeleton of branches going up the inside of a yew grove in our churchyard - then he forgot about being scared and was caught up in the fascination of our discoveries.
My 11 yr old loves being out in the dark, the adventure and thrill of everything being familiar, but different. She loves how the trees look so dark and stark against the half-moonlit sky when we turned our torches off; how sound is so much more important when we cannot see as well; trying hard to walk silently over crunching acorns; following the eyes of foxy until we could see the beautiful animal clearly; finding fungi on a tree and just the beauty of the woods in the nighttime.