Tag Archives: valley

Welsh Valley Alpacas

My Walk this Week – Welsh Valley Alpacas

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My walk this week includes alpacas! My friends Steve and Sue Heatherington run Welsh Valley Alpacas and, as the name suggests, they are situated in a Welsh valley. The alpacas are wonderful creatures and the valley is beautiful.

Alpaca close-up

I cannot tell you the names of those featured here but Sue and Steve know every one of the 39 (approx) alpacas individually by name and character. They are fascinating animals but not the only ones in the valley. The family of geese have been watched closely from when they started looking for a suitable nesting site toContinue reading→

Uplands landscape

Punctuated By Ice at The Waterside

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My walk this week has been around the lake at The 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.

Icy Punctuation

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→

Icy grass skirt

Clothes of Ice

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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.

Flouncy ice

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→

water freeze

My Walk this Week – Icy Textures

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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.

The Waterside in Winter

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→

River Dulais bridge

Out of the Light and Into a Rhododendron Tunnel

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Having risen towards the sunlight at the start of this walk, I then had to descend again, and in doing so took a route that led me through a natural tunnel rhododendron tunnel.

This is the final part of my walk this week and a slight change of format. I am no longer going to post a review of the walk each week so if you want top see the rest of the walk you will have to visit the two previous posts.

Rhododendron tunnel

The tunnel is dark but feels fabulous and the middle of it is the quietest section of the walk. While the images below cover only the last part of this walk, the soundscape is from the whole walk which starts and ends with the sounds of the Dulais River or Afon Dulais.Continue reading→

valley fog

Sunlight, Sheep and Fog

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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!

Goppa sheep

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→

Misty Valley

My Walk this Week – Misty and Bright

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My walk this week is a long awaited bright one, albeit misty at the start. It was cold and bit frosty but the sun was rising and as my elevation increased with a climb up a local hill, I was able to look down on the fog laying the valley below.

Hazy woods

It was a beautiful morning only marred by the level of fly tipping on the slopes beside the Dulais River 😡 What is wrong with the people that do this? Apart from the damage it does to the environment, wildlife and oceans, are they also blind?Continue reading→

Valley mist

Valley Frost Revealed – Reviewing the Walk

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When I arrived at this viewpoint near the start of my walk this week, the valley was filled with a thick fog. Now, having had a peaceful walk through the forest, the valley is revealed, and it is cold with frost.

Valley frost

In a couple of my posts about this walk I have described the woodland as peaceful, and indeed it was. The background sound of traffic on the motorway is almost always there but there are a few pockets of peacefulness that allow virtually complete escape from that sound.Continue reading→