Tish Farrell Writer

Thursday’s Special: Seaside Disorder

For some reason we mostly go to the seaside at Christmas, and not at all in high summer. Of course a beach can be a dramatic place any time of the year – changing and unchanging all at once, figuratively and physically. How we treat with it reflects our current mood or emotion – heightening or lowering it, depending on our inclinations.

This photo was taken on Ynys Mon, the island of Anglesey in North Wales. It was Boxing Day. The wind was perishing yet spirit-filling too, but then I always find ‘going to the beach’ exciting, in much the same way as I did when I was four. You just never know what you will find there in the margins between land and sea.

So here we have a tumble of razor shells embedded in a beach stream that was running off the marshy hinterland. I think there’s a viscid quality about the stream in the winter’s light, as if the shells have fixed there by the water rather than by the shift of sand. I like the slashes of greyish-white across medley of ochre shades. An intriguing state of disorder, then: the beach endlessly creating its own artwork.

Thursday’s Special

August’s Changing Seasons: Fruitful

Who wouldn’t be tempted by such a perfect apple? I came upon it yesterday as I was leaving the allotment. It’s growing on an very old and lovely tree that every year puts on its own magnificent Garden of Eden of show. We allotmenteers share the apples. They are crisp, juicy, sharp and sweet all at once. I don’t know the variety.

It’s important to keep tabs on the crop though. The window of opportunity for gobbling is brief since the apples don’t keep very well. I’m already thinking that they might be good in Tarte Tatin that most delicious of French classic deserts. I usually use Coxes Pippins later in the year, but since this August feels so autumnal, it’s an excellent excuse to make it sooner. I have a deep cast iron frying pan, which works a treat, both for the initial caramelizing of the apples on top of the cooker, and the final cooking with added the pastry lid inside the oven.

I should also say these apples have the most delicious fragrance too – lemon crisp. They anyway sum up August for me: the garden’s rich harvest.

Changing Seasons: August Every month around the 20th Cardinal Guzman posts a Changing Seasons challenge. There are two variations to choose from, so follow the link for further instructions. They are easy-peasy.

The Railway Men: Black & White Sunday

The Talyllyn Railway in mid Wales is the oldest preserved steam railway in Britain. Over the past half century it has inspired many other such ventures and there are now some 500 miles of restored lines across the country.

That they are there at all and can offer us steamingly enjoyable train rides is mostly down to armies of enthusiastic volunteers like these chaps in the photo. It’s an enterprise fraught with responsibilities too; the health and safety implications are momentous: track, rolling stock and passengers all to be kept in good order.

And in case you missed it back in June, you can read more about Tish and Graham’s big train day out at:

Partners in steam on the Talyllyn Railway – Woo-hooooo

This week at Black & White Sunday Paula’s challenge is COMPOSITION. Please visit to see her own very fine composition, and the other entries it inspired.

My own photo was composed in Dynamic Monochrome.

Big Sky Over Wenlock Edge

I am always fascinated by silhouettes. I also seem to do a lot of sky watching these days. This shot of a farm hedge in one of the fields behind the house was taken late one winter’s afternoon using the Dynamic Monochrome setting on my Lumix compact camera. There was just enough light left. I added the blue-ish tint in Microsoft Picture Gallery.

This week for Black & White Sunday Paula asks us to post a favourite b & w photo, so this is one of mine. You have the rest of the week if you want to join in, but please visit Paula’s blog where you will find more ‘favourites’.

Does My Beehind Look Big in this?

Up at the allotment the globe artichokes we did not eat earlier in the summer are flowering, and the Red-tailed Bumblebees think all their breakfasts have come at once. In fact they’re trying to scoff them all at once too. The flower, after all, is a VERY BIG thistle. This makes me wonder if the huge expanse of ultra-violet attractant doesn’t over-stimulate the foraging impulse, thus explaining the manic bee rootling that has them scrabbling, bottoms up, through the petal forest to reach the sweet stuff beneath.

Those with longer legs seem to cope best, but I’ve already had to rescue two. They seem to become mired in the petals. Either that or they’re simply spaced out on the sugar rush.

Macro Monday over at Jude’s

Today In My Garden

Never mind the Olympics, it’s all gold in and out of the garden on Sheinton Street. Over in the field the wheat is ready to harvest, and inside the hedge the Rudbeckia is towering up a good six feet tall. This morning it is rather windswept, but the yellow flowers look good against the blue.

Its parent plant once grew in my Aunt Miriam’s much loved Devon garden. That’s her fork in the first photo. The tines are twisted, making it unfit for gardening, but we keep it permanently planted as a keepsake and also as a perch for the local robin.

Beneath the Rudbeckia the feathery plumes of Golden Rod have just started to flower, and below them the red hot flowers of Helenium are making their own carnival parade. All the stems (below and above) belong to a single plant. They pretty much have the red end of the spectrum covered. The bees love them too.

Happy weekend everyone!

Cornish Christmas Seascape: Port Wrinkle

Thursday’s Special: Seascape

A Frog Whispering Kind Of Morning

And I’ve the pictures to prove it – the frog whispering that is.

This handsome amphibian and I gave each other a shock on Sunday morning. I was tidying up the overgrowth of self-sown columbines and lady’s mantle outside the kitchen door. And there he was under a columbine leaf. We both froze, until I thought to grab my camera. By then he was on the move, but froze again as the Lumix closed in. Being Sunday I was finding it hard to focus, and thinking he was about to flee, I started talking to him very quietly. And darn me, if he didn’t sit right up and listen:

I don’t know how well frog-human relations have been documented beyond that seminal work of the Brothers Grimm, but I can report there was no clinch, and thus no princely transformation. And it being an unfocused Sunday morning, as I said, I soon ran out of things to talk about and so returned to garden work, while he hopped off to his drain pipe in the wall. A brief encounter then. We will probably never meet again. But at least I have the photos. I can dream…

Weekly Photo Challenge

Incy Wincy Wenlock Crab Spider For Ark: Macro Monday

The flower is a wild corn cockle, and in real life it’s around an inch across, or two and a bit centimetres in alternative dimensions. The spider is utterly minute then, and the smallest I have spotted so far in the Farrell garden on Sheinton Street. In fact I only started noticing this species at all after Ark at A Tale Unfolds introduced me to the ones in his Johannesburg garden. Please check out his blog for more of his astonishing garden photos, though be warned – some of his close up arachnid shots might give spiderphobes a turn.

Also please visit Jude at her Macro Monday slot for more wonderful work. She’s featuring geraniums whose intricate beauty we perhaps do not appreciate enough.

Now here’s a less macro shot of the spider though it’s still larger than real life: hard to spot it beside the dewdrops:

Sun And Shadows On The Linden Walk And Olympic Games Connections

The Olympic Games begin in Rio today – cue views of Copacabana Beach and Corcovado Mountain with its astonishing statue of Christ the Redeemer. Now switch scenes to a small town in rural England, to a meadow in Much Wenlock, and turn back the clock to 1850, for this is where it began – the source and the inspiration for the modern Olympic Movement.

The town’s physician, Dr William Penny Brookes was the man behind the revival of the ancient Athenian games. His objective was clear:

for the promotion of the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the town & neighbourhood of Wenlock and especially of the working classes, by the encouragement of out-door recreation, and by the award of prizes annually at public meetings for skill in athletic exercise and proficiency in intellectual and industrial attainments.

He had already started the Agricultural Reading Society and been hard at work raising funds from Shropshire’s gentry to establish a working man’s reading room, while lobbying every famous writer of the day to donate copies of their works to the cause. Much of the library still exists in the town’s archives and includes some heavy-going and esoteric histories of far-flung lands. It is hard to guess the appeal of such books to farm hands and quarrymen after their long day’s labours, but at least they would have had decent light to read by. Brookes was also behind the founding of the town’s gas works.

Wenlock’s Olympian Society grew out of the Agricultural Reading Society. The very first games were held on the town’s race course but in later years took place (as they still do every year) on the field below Windmill Hill, now known as the Gaskell Recreation Ground, or as Penny Brookes himself called it, the Linden Field.

Nor was it any rustic village fete affair. The local MP J M Gaskell provided seating on Windmill Hill to give everyone a fine view, and the event was heralded with much ceremony, the town streets decked out from end to end, a parade of competitors, flag bearers and officials all marching with the local band. From the start, then, pageantry was a key part of the games, lifting people from their humdrum, hardworking existences. And although there were many fun contests and traditional country sports, the athletic events were taken seriously, and attracted competitors from all over the country. Prizes included silver cups and ink stands presented by local worthies and Penny Brookes designed elaborate medals – gold, silver, bronze, and had them made at his own expense.

News of the games spread far and wide, and indeed were spoken of in very high places. In 1890, when the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Courbetin had been charged with finding ways to improve the fitness of the French Army, he was advised to go and see the Wenlock games. He stayed in Brookes’ house on Wilmore Street during his visit, and what he saw and also learned from Brookes inspired him to found the International Olympic Committee. The IOC held their first games in Athens in 1896, and although Brookes did not live long enough to see the extent of his influence, de Courbetin gave him due recognition:

If the Olympic Games which modern Greece did not know how to establish again is revived today, it is not to a Greek that one is indebted, but to Dr. W P Brookes.

We the people of Much Wenlock are also indebted to Dr. Brookes for his planting of the lime tree avenue alongside the Linden Field where the games took place. As I’ve said before, it is one of the town’s enduring treasures. The trees are over 150 years old, and still in fine form. There is no time of the year when this avenue is not beautiful. In winter it is deeply mysterious, a colonnade to another reality. But whatever the season, there is always a play of light and shadow. And there is windrush in the high canopies, and crow call. And in summer the soporific scents of tiny green lime tree flowers.

Here, then, are a few more views, and so when you see the grand and glamorous opening of the Rio Olympics, give a thought also to this place and the Shropshire doctor, who with the well being of his townspeople in mind, inspired the modern Olympic Movement:

This post was inspired by Paula’s Thursday’s Special theme ‘shadow’. Please visit her blog and join in this week’s challenge.

#2016OlympicGames