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Shadowed At Wenlock Priory

In its time, the Cluniac Priory at Much Wenlock, Shropshire, did much overshadowing. For one thing it was physically one of the largest ecclesiastical houses in medieval Europe. For another, its Prior ruled over both its resident French monks and the lay populace of peasant farmers and artisans who lived and worked beyond its walls. Then in 1540 came the Dissolution of the monasteries. By order of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s fixer, roofs were stripped of their protecting (highly valuable) lead, and the place, no longer watertight, literally, if slowly, began to dissolve.

Before the end though, the Priory was often a spot for some very shady dealings, forging currency not the least of them.

There’s more about the history in earlier posts Centred at Wenlock Priory and 5 Stories 5 Photos: Hidden Wenlock #2 All of which had me thinking about shadows and recalling the early autumn afternoon when I went to the Priory specifically to capture the ruins in some high-contrast light conditions. I’d taken many photos there in the past, but in the middle of the day. The end products were, without exception, pretty underwhelming.

And so for John’s Lens-Artists’ challenge I thought I’d show a series of different shadowed shots from that late-day autumn visit. I was using a point and shoot Panasonic Lumix including the dynamic monochrome setting for the sepia and black and white shots.

Lens-Artists: Shadowed This week John sets the theme and explores different approaches in his post.

The Power Of Juxtaposition

Grasses, sky and clouds on Wenlock Edge

Sometimes you need to lie down to take a photo; taking this header shot was one of those moments. I wondered how the thin stems of meadow grasses would look against the fiery sky. They had much to compete with. Some more distant treetops got a look in too. Earth to sky: we’re holding our own despite the light show.

And a different take on earthly-aerial juxtapositions; this time a barley field, sun reflecting off the tufty awns that surround the grain. I liked the contrasting textures of spiky crop and meringue-soft cloud; the green against the blue, white-grey contrast:

The colour red always makes its presence felt. Here a single red bird cherry leaf:

The showy crab apples somehow make a lowly snail all the more remarkable.

I do take an awful lot of landscape photos, but perhaps you can have too many ‘good views’. The presence of some living/moving element generally makes for a more engaging shot:

This rather strange view of a Stiperstones tor was shot in monochrome in gloomy midday light. Odd things seem to happen in this mysterious Shropshire upland: so who knows where the sky went. But then I liked the happenstance appearance of the tight-knit group of hikers. They walked into the shot, their group posture conveying group purpose: they will reach the top.

And you want to follow them.

This is another chance Stiperstones photo, taken on the same day. Despite the poor light the tor does seem to radiate something. That’s my other half on the skyline. As ever he has stopped to see what had become of me, dawdling somewhere behind. I was so pleased when he stood still. There he is – a tiny human beside a momentous stack of geology, remnant of the ancient days when this quartzite ridge was crushed and fractured during the last Ice Age.

Back then, two great glaciers (one from Ireland, the other from the heights of Plynlimon in mid-Wales) convened in the Shropshire hills. They kept the ridge company, not covering it, but nudging the tops through alternating periods of freeze and thaw. Needless to say, this would not have been a human-friendly landscape. Even now, in bad weather, it is a brutally exposed spot.

And closer to home, the not quite live elephant on Wintles Hill adds a certain something (if only viewer puzzlement) to this Shropshire autumn landscape. The different layers of sunlight and shadow also caught my eye:

#IAmNotACrop

Lens-Artists: the power of juxtaposition This week Patti at Lens-Artists asks us to consider the power of juxtaposition in our compositions. Please see her super post for guidance and inspiration.

Winter Fields And Hedgerows ~Minimalism in Black & White Photography

I’ve been missing photo-moments in black and white. Things have not been the same since my Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot broke. It had a dynamic monochrome setting, which I used a lot. I haven’t replaced it with another Lumix because they seem prone to acquiring dust spots on the lens, and quotes to have them professionally cleaned seemed higher than the original cost of the camera.

So ever since, I’ve been using a little Canon Ixus, which is fine for snapping, but somehow its monochrome setting does not enthuse me. I can of course do a spot of post-shot editing to perk things up, and there are also times when conversions from colour turn out quite well.

All the photos here, then, are from my archives. Actually I’m quite pleased to see some of them again. The first three were taken around our previous Wenlock home.

This next three were taken in various parts of wintery Wales:

Lens-Artists: Minimalism in Black & White This week Ritva gives us masterclass in monochrome. Please pay her a visit.

2025 Favourites: Looking Back To Ynys Mon

We didn’t go far last year, but we did spend a week on the North Wales island of Anglesey (Ynys Môn). We often go for Christmas, but this time we were there in late March. As ever, the view across the Menai Strait to the Welsh mainland came with its own enthralling light and shadow show, from the sublime to the mistily mysterious. It was hard to tear ourselves away.

Last Posting For Lens Artists: The Dew Pond Walk

Green lane, hollow way, sunken road: there’s a hint of mystery in these byways, not only in the names, but in the sense of times past, centuries of footfall embedded in the earth between ancient hedges; the passing of cottage folk, farmers, drovers with their herds and flocks; times when most people only had their feet to rely on if they needed to go anywhere.

This particular green lane is one of my favourite spots in Bishop’s Castle. The following photos are ones I forgot to post, taken on a late November walk. It was a brilliant day too, following a brief snow fall and several days of hard frost.

The frozen grass and leaves were crunchy under foot, gripping boots and making the walking easy as we climbed up Wintles Hill. We were heading to the dew ponds.

There are essential landmarks en route of course: a hoar-frosty Long Mynd…

The barns with their rusty roofs that always insist on having their photo taken…

The skyline ash tree that looks like an arboreal version of Munch’s ‘The Scream’…

As for the dew ponds, there are three on the hilltop, one very much in use, as you can see from the well-pocked mud around it…

One dwindling in the next door arable field and so only used by wildlife…

And the largest in a now enclosed enclave where it is producing a fine crop of bullrushes…

I don’t know why this corner of the field has been hived off, access provided by two stout kissing gates either side of it, but the Shropshire Way footpath passes through it.

It’s a good spot for holly trees, which reminds me. Holly was once grown in farm hedges both to shelter stock and as a valuable winter fodder for sheep (and sometimes cattle) when hay was in short supply. And yes, it does seem an unlikely foodstuff with all those prickles, but apparently the leaves become less barbed as the tree grows taller. And so it was the upper branches that were lopped off for the animals to feed on, the holly trees doubtless thriving on the pollarding (if our brute of a garden holly hedge is anything to go by).

Water was the other essential in hill country where streams were lacking. Dew ponds have been used at least since Neolithic times. They were also much used in mediaeval times and in the 18th-19th centuries, both periods reflecting a vibrant market for sheep wool.

Pond construction required skill and heavy labour. First a saucer shaped depression was excavated, about 3 feet (1 metre) deep. The diameter varied between 10 feet (3 metres) to 45 feet (15 metres). The whole surface was then covered with straw followed by a layer of mud which had to be puddled to seal the surface. (Canal beds were sealed in the same way, the puddling usually done by labourers in bare feet). Once sealed, rain and field run-off duly collected in the ponds.

In the past, Welsh drovers would have driven their stock through Bishop’s Castle, and on to the town and city markets of the Midlands. This next photo shows the country they would have trekked through – not so tamed and tidy in the eighteenth century. (Wales ahead, dewponds behind me). Perhaps the flocks and herds were gathered and watered at points like these before the drovers broached the town.

And it was at this moment that thoughts of watering holes had us turning on our heels and heading downhill to town. Toasted sandwiches at The Castle Hotel suddenly beckoned, plus a glass of delicious Clun pale ale.

Cheers and happy festive season to all the Lens-Artists (and their followers).

Many thanks for setting us so many diverting challenges through 2025.

Lens-Artists: Last chance for 2025 This week Patti sets the theme: last chance to post photos that missed previous posting opportunities.

Winging It ~ Chance Encounters With Aerial Kind

In the old tales birds are often messengers, bearers of foreknowledge – for good or ill. They overhear things that humans don’t, come unbidden to help the hero in their quest, although their warnings are not always understood or welcomed.

In Kenya (and other parts of Africa) the Red-Chested Cuckoo is the bearer of good news. Its three note call says the rains are coming – ‘time to dig’, ‘time to dig’. On the other hand, in some interpretive versions, much depends on the geo-location of the call. If you are setting out on a journey and the call comes on the right of the path, then it signifies that all will be well. But if it comes from the left, then there’s danger ahead; better go home and wait for a more propitious day.

I think the two birds in the first photo are rooks. All members of the corvid family (rooks, crows, ravens, choughs, magpies, jays) tend to have a poor reputation on the bad omen front, but since I have a twosome here, I’m choosing to see them as beneficent. I’m also reminded of the magpie sighting rhyme: one for sorrow, two for joy.

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Butterflies also have spirit world connotations. In cultures across the globe they represent transformation and rebirth, joy and happiness. A butterfly may also be seen as the embodiment of a human soul, although a crowd of them might be thought an evil portent. I’m happy, then, to come upon this single tiny Common Blue butterfly, sipping at grasses on a summer’s evening.

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And as for the bees, most of us know that, as pollinators alone, they are absolutely indispensable. The value of their produce too is inestimable. They are admired for their busyness and sound work ethic; the therapeutic hum in spring orchards.

It’s not surprising, then, that in many ancient cultures they were revered. They conferred blessings even on the gods. For instance, Apollo’s gift of prophecy was bestowed on him by three bee maidens, or in older pre-Hellenic versions of the tale by a trio of bee goddesses. Other texts see the bee’s origin as dramatically supernatural. One Ancient Egyptian version has it that they arose from Sun God Ra’s tears as they fell on desert sand. What an image. I think I believe it.

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Lens-Artists: Wings This week Beth at Wandering Dawgs gives us a fabulous theme to work with.

Caught In Time…

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

This tiny British butterfly is a male Common Blue. It’s about an inch across. And while it might be among our most common UK butterflies, having one pose like this is a rare occurrence. They’re usually pretty skittish, so you only catch a glint, a flitting chink of summer sky, and then they’re gone. This was a chance encounter on a summer’s evening.

Expectations are like clouds – beautiful from afar, yet vanishing when you reach for them Monika Ajay Kaul

The light does not stay… Tennessee Williams

There’s that moment as the sun disappears when there’s just enough light to take a photo.

So passeth, in the passing of the day, of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre

Edmund Spencer

The glory of a Morning Glory is so brief, half a day at most. And you need to be up early to catch the best of it. I’m not sure how long the runner bean flowers last, perhaps a couple of days before they’re fertilised and begin to transform into beans. I must pay more attention next summer.

mutation of weathers
and seasons,
a windfall composing
the floor it rots into

Seamus Heaney North

The wind shall blow them none knows whither

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Foolhardy or deeply ironic: a dandelion clock for a timepiece? But then it always was such fun, huffing and puffing, seeing how far those little parachutes would fly. A sure way to annoy a gardener.

Leaves are the verbs that conjugate the seasons

Gretel Ehrlich The Solace of Open Spaces

Two seasons on Much Wenlock’s Linden Walk. Watching the leaves come and go through the year is another kind of time-keeping. The quiet sort.

Lens-Artists: Ephemeral This week Tina sets the theme. Call in to see her thoughtful and inspiring post.

Musings On Time Past ~ What Do We Make Of It?

Remains of Pentre Ifan chambered tomb, Newport, Pembrokeshire c. 3,500 BCE

We humans have problems with time: too much of it; not enough; the wrong kind for a planned action or pronouncement; then there’s ever that tale of elders who forget what they had for breakfast, but recall in minute detail events of decades past.

We try to pin it down of course, have long done so with all manner of devices. Most likely the late ‘Stone Age’ people who constructed Pentre Ifan above, had contrived the means to keep track of it. For instance, the placement of so-called standing stones, the particular configuration of megalithic circles, the siting of tomb entrances, whence to observe the movement of stars, the angle of the sun, and so know where they stood in relation to the earth’s perceived cycles. A time to plant; to make a journey; to hunt; to trade; mark seasons for rites and festivals.

Mitchell’s Fold Bronze Age stone circle, Shropshire-Powys border

We don’t know who these prehistoric (pre-literate) people were. There is no apparent connection between us and them. How do we even begin to grasp what five and half thousand years actually means. Most of us, unless we spring from some dynastic household that records family pedigrees down the centuries, or derive from some close knit community where little has changed for generations, cannot name our four pairs of great grandparents without the help of genealogy.com. We certainly have no true idea of how they lived day to day, unless they kindly left us their diaries; and even then…

As L.P. Hartley says in the opening of his novel The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ And for most of us, too, our generations of ancestors left no mark, but were ever caught up in ‘big people’s’ histories; the machinations of church and state.

There are anyway far bigger pasts than our human one. Here in my home county of Shropshire, in the borderland known as the Welsh Marches we have some of the planet’s oldest parts. Seven hundred million years old, in fact.

Set against such a monumentally unimaginable timescale, the history of humanity, including that of our primate ancestors, is not even a magnified dot on the horizon.

This is what Peter Toghill has to say about the Marches geology:

The beautiful landscape of the Welsh Marches
is underlain by a rock sequence representing ten of
the twelve recognised periods of geological time…
This remarkable variety, covering 700
million years of Earth history, has resulted from
the interplay of… (1) erosion and
faulting which have produced a very complex
outcrop pattern; (2) southern Britain’s position near
to plate boundaries through most of late
Precambrian and Phanerozoic time; and, most
importantly, (3) the incredible 12,000 km, 500
million year, journey of southern Britain across the
Earth’s surface from the southern hemisphere to
the northern, caused by plate tectonic processes.

An introduction to 700 million years of earth history in Shropshire and Herefordshire

This distant view of the Stiperstones from Mitchell’s Fold stone circle, shows two of the Ice Age tors along the five mile summit, (Manstone the highest point on the left). This hill was probably formed from the laying down of quartzite sand when the whole of Southern England lay in the southern hemisphere, somewhere near the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean. That was around 500 million years ago, about the time when it began to move north. The tors themselves were exposed far more recently, by the repeated freezing and melting of glaciers that nudged up against them during the last Ice Age (115,000 to 12,000 years ago).

Makes me think we humans sometimes think too much of ourselves and what we think we have achieved. Maybe the planet has the edge on us by a few hundred million years. It’s certainly done some momentous shunting and shifting.

Lens-Artists: Ancient

Scavenging The Old Africa Album

This week at Lens-Artists, Anne from Slow Shutter Speed sends us on a virtual scavenger hunt. I haven’t been in the old Africa album for a while, so I thought I’d have a rumage there. A virtual mini safari as well then.

‘Wavy lines’ tops the list. The header thus features a wavy profile of hippo ears, eyes and noses in a wavy Lake Naivasha in the Kenya Rift Valley.

This herd of Maasai Mara elephants was in a very peaceable mood. They walked around us as we were parked up eating a picnic breakfast. I’m thinking elephant hide would feel pretty ‘bumpy’ should one ever dare to try it, especially the trunks.

Whereas cheetahs must be wonderfully ‘soft’. They also wear nice ‘circular’ spots. This female was having an afternoon siesta when we pulled up beside her in a safari truck. She didn’t look at us, but simply posed like a professional, well used to having her photo taken.

And more ‘patterns’. This time stripes. Zebras come with wavy ones:

And then there’s another Kenyan speciality, patterns-wise:

Cotton kanga wraps come in pairs with vivid designs and snappy Swahili slogans on the hems, here worn by Digo girls on Mombasa Beach.

Now for ‘smooth’ water and a smooth dug-out canoe on Tiwi lagoon. A Digo fisherman under the midday sun. I’m guessing he’s looking for reef lobster.

And as for ‘cool shadows’, here’s me escaping to some at a Tiwi beach bar. Not so much too hot, as too bright to see out on the white coral sand. Aaah! Those were the days.

Lens-Artists: Virtual Scavenger Hunt This week Anne at Slow Shutter Speed sends us on a photo quest, five to ten of the following: wavy lines, bumpy or soft texture, patterns, things circular, rectangular, smooth, made of glass, something with water in it, with green eyes, a wheel, a camera, cool shadows or jewellery…

After The Harvest: Of Stubble And Straw

Come August and this year’s harvest has already been and gone. A good month earlier than usual. And somehow we missed it, we who live in the midst of rural Shropshire. In fact, when we drove out of Bishop’s Castle last Saturday, it was quite a shock: wherever you looked the wheat and barley fields lay shorn, the straw baled, or rolled in roundels, the remnant stubble pale and parched. Fields stripped.

How could we have missed so much activity and industry. Did we not hear the combines’ drone?

Along the lanes, too, the hedgerows had that dull and dusty out-grown look of late September. Dock and hogweed gone to seed: russet and deep umber shades of autumn. And again: how could this be? Had we been asleep, Rip-Van-Winkel-like, and lost a chunk of summer? Or had time skipped a month or two?

No. Simply distraction on the home front, gardening and household pursuits. Letting the world pass us by through weeks of day-on-day sun and rainlessness, which of course is the reason why the harvest was so early.

But now it has me reflecting on the beguiling looks of stubble fields, and thus a posting of photos of harvests past, of pared down textures, bare lines and simple colour palette of monocrop farming. I find myself attracted to the spareness of these humanscapes, although wary, too, of the high high-techery that produces such results. This is not the kind of farming I grew up with, the cut wheat stacked in stooks to dry, the arrival of the threshing machine, a monstrous sight over our garden wall, the contraption that, hung in sacking shrouds, throbbed and shuddered, spewing out clouds of chaff as it garnered precious grains from stalks and husks.

Hey-ho. More time slippage.

[The header and final photos were taken mid-September last year above Bishop’s Castle. The in-between shots are from Townsend Meadow, below Wenlock Edge]

Lens-Artists: Lines, colours, patterns Johnbo asks us to explore these tools of photo composition.

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge