Landscape

Frosted Apples ~ Thursdays Special

This first photo was taken in December before the blackbirds had begun to feast on the stash of windfall apples out in the field. My last post featured a shot of how the apples look now. Yesterday when I was passing by, there was a whole flock of blackbirds pecking away – at least four and twenty. I’ve never seen so many all once that weren’t in a pie or singing song of sixpence! They didn’t stay to have their photos taken.

Paula’s prompt this week is seasonal. Please take a look at her inspiring photography:

Thursday’s Special: Wintry

Changing Seasons ~ January To And From The Allotment

The field path behind the house is littered with skeleton apples – windfalls thrown out from a neighbour’s garden. The apples were whole, if a little bruised, back in October when they were tossed there, but it is only this month that the birds have been truly feasting on them. Blackbirds mainly. Little by little the flesh is being pecked away until all that is left is the thinnest skin, and perhaps some fibrous filaments around the core. I was thinking of fellow blogger, Sue Judd at Words Visual as I shot and edited this ‘still life’. She captures beauty in decay with great flair. Anyway this painterly edit sums up January for me.

But then today I decided to go the long way round to the allotment. There was misty sunshine, and so the chance to get enough shots to make a gallery in line with Cardinal Guzman’s alternative version for his monthly challenge. Pay him a visit to find out more.

The long way round involves going up Sytche Lane that skirts the field behind our house. In the top corner Shropshire Council is busy digging us an attenuation pond to slow down the flash flooding when a storm hits our catchment. The town has a long history of flooding, and the Sytche Brook, a generally nondescript trickle of a watercourse, can become treacherous, and has been known to add considerably to the deluge that hits the town centre from neighbouring hillsides. Another pond is being built at the other end of the town. Neither are seen as total solutions, and some would argue that these measures are not suitable in a steep catchment such as ours. Only time will tell. In the meantime, the big digger driver posed to have his photo taken before I trudged onward through the mud.

The path behind the excavations then wends on along the field boundary and into a wood. You are right above the town here, so in the gaps between the trees are some good viewpoints for photos. From the wood I can then drop down to the allotment.

The following gallery shows all the things that caught my eye today. These include – apart from the ‘views’, Jenny’s watering can hung in a cherry tree, Simon’s wheel barrow, Phoebe’s budding rhubarb, my leaning shed with globe artichoke, and Ron’s much smarter blue shed. On the way home the sun was setting in the wood.

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Foxgloves Over The Garden Fence ~ After And Before

This Sunday at Lost in Translation, Paula asks us to show her a black and white version of a colour original. This summer shot was taken from the back of our house looking towards Wenlock Edge as the sun was going down.

Just over the garden fence we have a strip of ground that grows itself each year – mostly self-seeded foxgloves, columbine, corn cockle, moon daisies and opium poppies along with some perennial lemon balm, spearmint and oregano. It’s a treat waiting to see what will happen there every summer. Just thinking of this brightens a rather gloomy January day here in Shropshire.

Now here’s the original colour shot:

And now I can’t resist posting some more transformations in and around Much Wenlock. Clearly, some work better than others, but in any event, as Paula says, it helps one to see with fresh eyes:

On Top On Llanddwyn Island ~ Black & White Sunday

Here’s another view of, and from Llanddwyn Island, taken on our recent trip to Anglesey. It was snapped on high zoom in high wind and thus has pixilation tendencies, much like the snapper, some might say. So I edited it to exaggerate the silhouette effect. I anyway like the stance of this unknown man on the cliff top. He is so well rooted against the gale; so absorbed by the seascape.

I’ve written more about the island’s story at To the Isle of Dwynwen, Welsh Saint of Lovers.

Now please visit Paula at Lost in Translation. Her rendition of this week’s ‘on top’ theme is stunning.

Moving Pictures ~ Wales Through The Windscreen

Nowhere does brooding gloom like Wales on a wet winter’s day. This happenstance shot was taken on New Year’s Eve as we were motoring home from Anglesey. I’d propped my camera briefly on the car dashboard as we’d headed through the mountain pass to Capel Curig. Then randomly pressed the shutter and so caught the cyclist.

This week at Lost in Translation Paula asks us to show her ‘unfocused’. She kindly says she doesn’t mind ‘happy accidents’, so here is mine.

Llanddwyn Bound ~ Crossing To The Isle Of Lovers

It was blowing a gale, wind like ice on our faces. But that did not stop us – nor a hundred like-minded souls, all intent on the secular pilgrimage of walking off Christmas Day excesses, giving the family dogs a much needed airing, and heading to Llanddwyn Island while the tide was on the ebb. Anyway the sun was out, the light crystal bright, and the mountains of mainland Wales across Menai Strait looking their dreamy best. So why wouldn’t you head for the sea shore.

Newborough Beach was positively crowded. Not only that, the sands were coming to meet us as we set off to the island. It was the strangest experience, which along with eyes full of wind-tears played havoc with one’s perceptions. It was rather like going backwards on a forward moving pavement.

And so at this point, seeing a chap on a bicycle seemed most surreal. But then why not ride your bike on the beach? So much space. No grouchy motorists on your tail. All that sand for a soft (well soft-ish) landing.

I’ve written about Llanddwyn (roughly pronounced ‘hlanthwin’) Island before. We were here two years ago, on Christmas Day, but then the tide was too high for us to reach the island.

In fact it is not an island at all, but a long, slender peninsula, poking out into the Irish Sea like some dragon’s tongue. And it was here that St Dwynwen, daughter of a Welsh king, withdrew from the world to form a convent. This was in the fifth century, around the time that Roman rule in Britain was coming to an end. You can read her story at the link above, although there are many versions, and they mostly have to do with spurned or thwarted love, and so are used to explain how she came to be the Welsh patron saint of lovers. Her day is celebrated each year on 25th January.

During the Middle Ages, as poets and pilgrims were drawn to Llanddwyn Island, so the accounts of their visits helped grow Dwynwen’s reputation for mystical powers of healing and divination. Even her well was said to be inhabited by sacred eels, and through the cunning reading of their movements, you might predict the future. On the other hand, if the waters boiled up during your visit you could be assured of love and good fortune.

We, however, were not enticed from the path to see this for ourselves. A very pungent odour wafting our way suggested something had died there. Perhaps the sacred eels? Instead we took the cliff path and enjoyed the thrill of stepping out above a stormy sea.

There is anyway much to explore on this small promontory. At every point, as the sea recedes, there are enticing coves – some rocky, some sandy. There are many man-made features too: a Celtic cross of nineteenth century vintage, another marking Dwynwen’s death in 465 C.E. There are the ruins of a Tudor church built on the site of Dwynwen’s own church which she apparently built herself from beach stones, and so doubtless did not stand the test of time and wild Welsh weather. There is also a beacon, a lighthouse and three cottages built for the lighthouse keepers and their families. In the nineteenth century the export of Welsh slate was a thriving industry, and the lighthouse served the slate ships in particular, keeping them off the dangerous Menai Strait sand bars.

On the long walk back up the beach, the wind was behind us. Now we were walking with the moving sand. But it was still a very odd experience.

Crossing

Early Morning On Menai Strait

Happy New Year Everyone

There may be dark days ahead, so I’m sending out some magic light in advance.

Keep it somewhere safe.

Solstice Sky And A Fine Quotation To Match

I dashed up to the allotment this afternoon while it was still fine. The weather forecast is promising us storms tomorrow so I thought I’d better get the Christmas parsnips dug up fast, and the Brussels sprouts and red cabbage gathered in. The ground was very water-logged and the plots looked dreary, and naturally there were no other mad gardeners around but me. But as the sun went down, just a fraction later after the shortest day, the light over the town was magical.

These photos were taken with lots of zoom, and in the next one the sky looks to be on fire.

All of which reminded me of an Albert Camus quote which I read on a writing blog earlier this week. It was so hope-inducing I thought I’d pass it on at the first opportunity. It’s especially apt for all you creative people out there, which would be every man Jack and Jill of you. More power to your making in 2017:

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

Some Favourite Horizons ~ the Silurian Sea Effect And The Changing Seasons

Here in the small English Midlands town of Much Wenlock, we live in the lea of an upthrust ancient sea. (I may have mentioned this once or several times before). As I took this photo I was standing on the petrified flanks of Wenlock Edge – the compacted deposits of shallow tropical waters that teemed with giant sea scorpions, sea lilies, corals, trilobites and all manner of brachiopods in the long ago age before fish, or indeed, before life as we know it.

In fact, as the photo well shows, we sit in a bowl, lodged between several folds in the landscape. It is a place of naturally rising springs, which is probably why St. Milburga’s family of Saxon Mercian princes founded an abbey here in the seventh century: pure water and the presumption of godliness going hand in hand. The town also has several other holy wells besides those associated with Milburga. It seems to have been the equivalent of a calling card. Every saint who visited Much Wenlock left us a well to remember them by. Then in the 1930s the good burghers of Wenlock decided they were a risk to physical well being and had them all capped.

Milburga’s Well, though, had especially enduring powers. As I have also mentioned before, the legends that tell of the life of this Paris-educated abbess, are routinely associated with springs bursting hither and thither. In fact so potent is her association with pure water sources that even in the late nineteenth century, rain collected from the roof of the parish church – a building founded on the remains of Milburga’s abbey, was still considered to be an essential ingredient for beer brewing (never mind the additional mossy deposits). Likewise, water from the actual well was absolutely expected to cure all manner of eye disorders, as well as reflecting in its glassy surface the identity of husbands-to-be to the lovelorn Wenlock lasses who, come May Day, would rush to look there for signs of their future partners.

Anyway, I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that there are certainly great disadvantages to living your life in a hollow. It can limit your vistas in every sense. But there are advantages too. In our case it also means that whichever way you strike out of the town, you are always in for a fresh horizon. In every direction we have them; one for every moment of the day. So here are some of my favourites.

In June to the south of the town we had an outbreak of poppies. It was stupendous:

Then in late summer, standing at the southerly end of the town, among the wheat fields and looking north, I discovered this fine view of the Wrekin. Some trick of the light/perspective/geography has made it seem extraordinarily looming and close:

When it comes to the other quarters, if walk from the town centre, in an easterly direction, down the Bull Ring and out past the ruins of the 12th century Cluniac Priory, you will find the once monastic parkland where the Prior went hunting before the place was asset-stripped and sold off to Henry VIII’s faithful servants, and thereafter to generations of would-be gentry. This photo was taken a few days ago. A winter’s view then:

And then looking east from the north end of the town – this time from Windmill Hill:

Also there are the ever-changing westerly false-horizons as seen from our house that backs on to the foothills of Wenlock Edge:

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Finally, if you leave the town and climb on to Wenlock Edge itself, and if you can find a suitable gap in the trees, you can look west across Shropshire and towards the Welsh borderland:

And the reason why I’m posting all these views?

Well, this week the WordPress photo challenge invites us to pre-empt the New Year making of resolutions and post a photo impression of what that resolution might be, or if not a resolution, then of some envisaged new horizon; to look ahead beyond life’s present busyness.

This made me consider my own horizon-watching habit, which daily fills me with a sense of wonder.(For one thing I am very lucky to have the time to do it at all – a luxury of luxuries). It is a form of day-dreaming, or watchful meditation and a good way to rest a racing mind. I also enjoy posting views of my homeland landscapes because I believe we cannot love the world too much. But I’m wondering, too, if we don’t do altogether too much ‘looking ahead’, ‘looking for more/the next/the new.’

The fresh horizons we may be seeking are not really OUT THERE. “Look within to the universal self.” Inside each of us, that’s where all the work needs to be done if we want to see real change. I know I can change myself, though I recognise that I might need some assistance. I also know that I definitely cannot change others, much as I might wish to in these times when too many people appear to define their identities through their fear, envy and hatred of others. If anyone ever wants to know where hell is, then it is there.

New Horizon

Today From Wenlock’s Old Railway Line

December 7 and at noon we had sun and 12 degree warmth: a spring day in winter. Graham and I headed out over the fields and came back down the old railway line. He strode off ahead while I stopped here to take this photo. It is for my U.S. Buffalo chum, Kathy. She and Jack come each year like swallows to spend the summer in Wenlock, away from Buffalo’s heavy heat. This is the walk she often walks with me, and we always stop at this fence, lean awhile, churn over world events, sometimes rant a little. And then at last simply look, taking in the view – the ever-changing unchanging landscape. (At least for now).

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge