Spotted yesterday at Studley Royal: new life – burgeoning; the devoted parents moving forward – often – to protect their young by hissing threateningly at passers by who paused to admire the new babies; renewing and reconstructing the bloodline.
Yes, Becky’s Squares photo challenge has returned – hooray! The only rule is that the image chosen has to be square. This month’s theme is Renew. Or Burgeoning. Or Moving Forward. Or Reconstructing. You get the idea. So here is my first offering.
The photos is also my Last on the Card for Brian. It has of course been doctored to form a perfect square. This is against the rules. But Brian knows I invariably break the rules.
Last week, I invited you to join me in Spain, and hunt for the symmetrical. This week, we’ll stay closer to home, and have a countryside wander looking for the asymmetrical for Dawn’s Lens-Artist Challenge.
What we’ll do is start off in the Yorkshire Dales. Let’s peek over a drystone wall and look at the patchwork of small fields that has evolved over the centuries, way before agri-business and the space-gobbling demands of giant machinery.
Conditions are harsh: not too many trees then. But those there are battle to reach maturity and stay upright against prevailing winds. Symmetry is the last thing on their minds.
Look carefully. At the right hand side of the hollow trunk, some fond grandfather (I’m guessing) has fashioned a door to the hollow trunk, to make a very special tree-house.
Let’s hurry back to civilisation, before darkness falls. Here in Studley Royal is a blasted tree that always reminds me of the antlers of the red deer stags who call this area home.
And here too are ancient tree roots, complete strangers to symmetry: some of the older stumps house fungi.
Oh look. Darkness is falling.
Let’s hurry into town. Bright lights, big city. Perhaps we could grab a warming mug of hot chocolate to thaw out our chilly fingers. And that’s where I’ll leave you for now. See you soon, I hope.
It’s a bit of a stretch to get from Studley Royal to London in time for the final photo-op of the day (250 miles). Photographer’s licence.
It’s mid October. Autumn should be well-advanced. But it isn’t. It’s hardly started. To give us a taste of what we should be enjoying just now, I’ve dipped into the archives, and have planned a walk round Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal, so you can enjoy with me the autumn colours of leaves still clinging on to the trees, leaves that have fallen, equally tawny fungi, and stags poised to battle it out to be King of a Harem, and father of the next generation of red deer .
Huby’s Tower glimpsed through the treesThe Water Gardens from Rustic Bridge.Surprise ViewGazing back towards the Abbey from Surprise ViewThe High Ride, Studley RoyalFungi in Studley RoyalA flooded area in Studley RoyalRed deer.
This week, for the Lens Artists Challenge, Tina invites us to show off ten of our all-time favourite photos. Not only must we explain why we like them, but they have to be technically top-hole too. I can’t do it. When an image is freighted with memories, whether happy or exciting or astonishing, unpicking these from technical considerations is something this snap-shot-ist can’t do. I shall be disqualified. I can live with that.
I first ‘needed’ a camera when I had the chance to spend a month travelling in India in 2007. I was even more point-and-shoot than I am now. Here’s just one memory, taken from my hotel window in the French quarter of Pondicherry (as it was then called), Builders, both men and women, unstacking their consignment of bricks to begin their day’s work at 6.00 a.m. Some of my best memories come from staring out of that window: such as the women who cleaned the streets at night, sitting right in the middle of the road at 2.00 a.m. cheerfully chattering during their break.
Delivery from the Builder’s Yard
By then, we were already living in France. How to pick just a few shots from that period? Let’s have a go. I’ll choose pale and delicate wild daffodils in the mountains just outside Foix, in such profusion it was almost impossible to avoid treading on them. I’ll choose pristine snow, many feet deep, just waiting for a Sunday snow-shoeing outing. The only sound was the snow itself, squeaking softly as we trod it down with our raquettes. I’ll choose a dramatic , never-repeated sunset which glowered over our small town one spring evening.
And sea-voyages. We’ve had a lot of those – back and forth to France when we lived there and came back here often to see family. Nowadays it’s because we need to get to Spain where my daughter and her family live. There’s often a dramatic skyscape.
Sunset near Santander
And now North Yorkshire’s home, with its stone-walled Dales, its meadows and hills, its autumn fogs.
And then there’s Fountains Abbey, where I spend so much time volunteering. Can’t leave that out. We’re just coming into autumn, which may be my favourite season there. So the Abbey in Autumn in my featured photo.
So these are my choices today. Yesterday I might have chosen differently. Tomorrow I’d choose other shots.
PS. Can anybody tell me why WP is no longer always allowing me to centre my photos?Or – now that WP have made it impossible to comment directly onto a post, how to comment on a post that’s more than a couple of days old, such as Tina’s one about this challenge, and which is no longer reachable on the Reader?
This week, for the Lens Artists Challenge, Amy asks us to consider ways of framing our shots. So my featured photo doesn’t do that. The frame shown here, at Brimham Rocks IS the subject of the shot.
Sometimes, the photographer finds a frame has been fortuitously laid on. Here we are on the Regents Canal in London, in maritime Barcelona and at Harlow Carr Gardens in Harrogate.
A band plays on the floating bookshop, Word on the Water, on the Regent’s Canal, London
Sometimes a window – an actual window, or a suitably-shaped hole-in-the-wall provides that frame. Here’s the South Bank in London, a shot taken while sailing to Bilbao, another view at Harlow Carr, and a convenient window overlooking the River Thames near Blackfriar’s Bridge.
In her post about framing, Sarah of Travel with Me fame took us to Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. We’ll go there too, but wander through the wooded area of the High Ride, and into the parkland of Studley Royal, allowing the trees themselves to frame the picture.
Fountains Abbey in autumn.
And lastly, another view which didn’t work as well as I hoped, through a chink in a drystone wall in the Yorkshire Dales.
The tree in the feature photo is a cherry tree in the deer park at Studley Royal. This is a shot of it in flower, as it has blossomed every year for the last four hundred years. By rights, cherry trees don’t normally live beyond thirty years old. Forty is pushing it. This tree has a pedigree, and can prove its longevity, but as you can see, it’s in quite a bad way, and may not last much longer.
Our home patch is home to many vintage specimens. Look at this oak tree about a mile from our house. It could have been pushing its first tender roots down into the soil as William the Conqueror was sailing to our shores in 1066.
Come and have a look at some of our wonderful local trees, shaping the landscape, and now accorded legal protection: a right they surely deserve.
Even when their lives are finally over, their majestic fallen trunks and branches continue to feed the earth from which they came, and the creatures who call them home.
I have probably posted one or two of these shots before. Too bad. I think these trees deserve more than fifteen minutes of fame.
Last week, I offered you a monochrome spring day. Today, because Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge also asks us to celebrate the spring, I’m going for colour. Just one colour though. What shouts ‘spring’ as cheerfully as the many flowers which emerge over these weeks in every shade of yellow? Look at Fountains Abbey in the header photograph – it’s just carpeted with sunny daffodils. But there’s more …
Last Thursday night, Storm Otto raged furiously across the northern part of the kingdom. He spent much of his anger in Scotland, and in the far north of England. By the time he reached here, he was wearying, but rallied sufficiently to squall and blast at 65 miles an hour. Trees fell. Branches toppled, ripped away from the fabric of the parent trunk.
When we walked through the deer park at Studley Royal on Monday, we found casualties . Despite the destruction, I found beauty in the ravaged branches.
Click on an image to see it full size.
Here’s another:
This ancient tree however, hasn’t suffered at all.
It’ll take more than Storm Otto to fell most of these sturdy residents of the Deer Park.
A bright, cold, breezy day at Fountains Abbey. My last photo of the month is the feature photo: it suddenly went all dark and mysterious, just for a few moments. Before – and after – that, it was all sunshine and snowdrops.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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