Calleva Atrebatum is certainly worth a short trip, perhaps a longer one if interested in the subject - the entire circuit of the walls still exists, if in varying degrees of crumbling, and the amphitheatre is very atmospheric. It’s also free to park and go round. I’d perhaps not recommend it for younger children - no facilities, shop, play area or anything like that, and they could easily fling themselves off the walls - I’m not sure I spotted any safety railings at all, and the paths are more flint strewn tracks. The Calleva Arms in nearby Silchester will do you a pint and a nice meal.

As to bird life in mid November - pretty disappointing, apart from the above delight!

That’s a very nice phone camera! That, or I’ve an even poorer phone camera than I thought (on the grounds of having a full-body camera). You can probably find free apps for your phone that do simple RAW edits, but I can’t offer any advice. Dedicated cameras tend to come with software of varying quality (Canon is quite good!).

Nice capture of the wing feathers. Have you tried playing with your editor packages’s histogram tool (especially if you have a RAW format image) to see if you can recover more of the colour of the bird? This scenario of dark bird against bright sky always sees me tweaking things, often resulting in over-exposing the sky, which I don’t care about, to see more colour in the shadows of the bird (it’s what I was doing in my recently posted “Kite Seeking Kompany”).