Gaining the top of the hill on my walk this week from fog to sunlight, I was followed by a flock of hopeful sheep looking expectantly at me – I suspect the farmer was due or perhaps the sheep though he was overdue!
My route took me past familiar objects both natural and man made. The rhododendrons perhaps have an element of both – they are natural but not native to the UK and can take over a whole hillside as they have in this location.Continue reading
The darkness of my walk this week in the rain provided me with a creepy atmosphere from time to time. This tree was one of those presenting itself as a ghoul in the gloom of the woodland as I climbed the footpath to Swiss Valley Reservoir.
Even the more open areas of the valley floor were gloomy and what light there was created and aged effect on the subtly coloured branches of an orchard.Continue reading
While away over New Year I enjoyed an exploratory walk around York University campus. This isn’t the campus! I set out rather later in the afternoon than I had realised and it was only seeing how low the sun was in the sky as I walked towards the university that I realised the time.
The low light levels didn’t help my photography but there would be no point in presenting bright shots of a walk in dim light.
The patterns I saw on my walk this week were wonderful. Both natural and man made, these objects were clear and crisp against the most significant aspect of the views – the blue sky. Whether it was the near fractal patterns of a bare tree or the electrical loops of power lines, the bright blue sky made them stand out and I was in awe at the complex beauty around me.
The old iron railing on the footbridge which I crossed on my walk this week will be familiar to those who saw my posts a couple of weeks ago about my previous walk on this route. I wasn’t originally going to include the sound clip below because it’s just water flowing under the bridge – but then on listening to it again, I changed my mind!
The sounds of that flow have three distinct stages: the first part has a lot of bubbly texture to it, including trickles and tickles, gloops and bloops, splashes and plashes (in preference to more technical language), the second is more even with those highlights less noticeable, and the ambience of the third stage has greater weight on the right hand speaker but with a gloopy base returning in the background – and then the sound fades to my footsteps climbing a dry leafy slope.
Water Under the Bridge
The wind that produced the wildness in the growth of this tree was becalmed on this day of our holiday in Scotland. The wild hawthorn trees that take this form are wonderful descriptions of the weather and the bleak looking hill in the background are not a place you would wish to be in foul weather.
But this day was completely still and everything in the landscape and seascape held a tranquility and peace that for all we knew could have been the precursor to a storm.
The sun was trying hard on my walk this week, to lift, or at least thin the thick mist that surrounded me and obscured so many details of the landscape. The foreboding atmosphere of the holloway footpath in yesterday’s post is repeated here with this naked tree at the edge of a field.
But as becomes apparent in the photos below, the mist is also influenced by a breeze and is therefore constantly moving. Continue reading
