My walk this week features frost and a song thrush who seemed oblivious to the cold and sang in the sunshine as though it were already Spring.
It isn’t Spring yet by any means, but there are signs that it will follow on eventually and it is so good to hear the birds singing on a bright day.Continue reading→
My walk this week is another one from the past – a cold walk taken in the first week of December a few years ago and now reviewed with the envy of being able to get out regularly.
This is a walk route I have often posted about and one I never tire of, whatever the weather conditions. Cold, crisp and frosty, some of my favourite details of the walk are below along with the soundscape created at the time.Continue reading→
My walk this week has been around the lake atThe Waterside – Felindre and seems to have been punctuated by ice. Indeed, the whole language and grammar of the posts has been dictated by the freezing icy conditions.
Influenced as I am by the things I see and hear around me, I look at the light and shade, the patterns and textures, and I wonder what it would feel like to touch, to run my fingers along some of the surfaces of frozen water, hard ground lightly dusted with snow or old reeds and rushes from last year as they poke through the semi opaque sometimes mushy lookingContinue reading→
The top end of the lake round which I walked last week seemed to be wearing a range of icy clothes. I suppose I might be forcing it a bit, but the idea came to mind when I took the shot below and thought this rock in the stream had a flouncy skirt look about it.
And then I saw the submerged half frozen grass at the edge of the silt pond and thought “Wow! What great effect.”
The last two shots in this short sequence are clearly not references to clothing,Continue reading→
My walk this week is another cold one around the lake at The Waterside – Felindre. It was very icy and the range of textures within that ice was fascinating. We had been led to believe there would be snow but as you can see, the forecasts were wrong for this little pocket of the country and a light dusting was all we got.
This was another short walk as my hands felt as though they would fall off with the cold and it was only a new pair of gloves knitted by my daughter that allowed me take the photos. Taking a close look at the various ice formations revealedContinue reading→
My walk this week braves the bitter wind blowing across Britain from Siberia. I have never seen ice like this on our local river, the Afon Dulais, but despite this and the fact that the rest of the country was under thick snow, we had next to none of it! The “beast from the east” and Storm Emma brought high winds and bitter cold but we were disappointed not to get any snow when seemingly all around us a colour, texture and acoustic change was taking place across the land.
Never mind, despite the ice feeling like it was inside my fingers, I still enjoyed my walk and the sights and sounds were still different to normal, but more of that later in the week. There was still someContinue reading→
My walk this week took me through Swansea University’s Bay Campus to the open view it has of the expansive Swansea Bay. The combination of the natural and man-made had a number of crossover points – one of these was how cold it was with the wind chill coming off the sea, exposed as I was both in the open and amongst the buildings.
Other overlaps of the natural and man made came in the birdlife and young trees planted around the buildings, the moat-like sea defences (I suspect that, one day, these will not be enough), the rusting structure of an old disused outlet pipe onto the beach, and the industrial view looking east to Port Talbot.Continue reading→
The route of my walk this week took me around the back of working buildings in Penclawdd on the North Gower coast. Although it was bitterly cold in this area shaded from the sun and the beautiful views across the salt marsh were obscured, there were still fascinating finds to be made. I guess they are everyday things at this time of year – frosty grass, icy pools and so on – but looking at the patterns the cold weather creates and the colours affected by the light on this day, I found there were any number of things to record, both sights and sounds.