Category: Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal

Some Favourite Photos

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?

What’s in the Frame?

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.

Venerable Trees, Ancient Trees

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.

For Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge #12: Trees

Spring in Yellow, Lemon, Gold, Amber

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 …

Otto the tree-feller

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.

Postcards from 2022

How to summarise 2022 in just a few photos? That’s what the Lens-Artist Challenge demands of us this week. What makes it so hard is that a memory is invested in every photo. My own favourite photos may demonstrate no particular skill, but can transport me – and not you – straight back to a treasured moment. Ah well, let’s give it a go, and see what I can find that we can all enjoy.

Let’s book-end the year with ordinary pleasures: Fountains Abbey in springtime, and in late autumn…

Let’s remember summer with – here – an extraordinary sight: Scar House Reservoir, almost unable to do its job of providing water.

Scar House Reservoir in August 2022.

Let’s have a look at happy moments: Ripon’s first Theatre Festival took to the streets, Masham’s annual Sheep Fair returned after a couple of years’ Covid-hiatus. And my family enjoys one of life’s simpler pleasures: curling up with a good book.

Memorable May: a fantastic few days in the Balkans: North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, to enjoy its wildlife. A very few photos stand in for the whole experience of this area, still in many ways rooted in its traditional past.

Shepherds on the move all day and every day. leading their sheep and goats in quest of pasturage.

… and not forgetting the stars of the show: peacocks at Lake Ohrid.

The header image shows Lake Prespa, and the island of Agios Achillios, where we spent a few days.

In Catalonia with The Barcelona Branch of the family, we had an unforgettable trip to what may be The World’s Best Museum, CosmoCaixa, Barcelona.

We’ll finish off with Christmas lights at Eltham Palace. It was so cold, no wonder my fingers slipped!

Walking in fog

Yesterday was foggy. All day. Yesterday, when I took a photo – the header photo – at Fountains Abbey, it was so murky I thought it could pass for a sepia image. I’m going to chance calling it monochrome anyway. And since we could barely see ahead of us, we focussed on the ground below. And were rewarded. This is rather a fine tree trunk, I think.

And these Giant Funnel Fungi are rather fine too. Regular readers know that I am keen on foraged food, but I’m glad I didn’t bring these home. Here’s what the website Wild Food says: ‘A large chunky mushroom which can be found in fairly large numbers and is edible to most but can cause gastric upsets in some. This doesn’t really matter as the mushrooms are usually infested with maggots, even when young, making them more maggot than flesh. Not so appetising then … but look how huge they are! That’s a bit of my boot at the bottom of the frame.

This is the last day of November, a month in which Becky has been encouraging us to get out walking, whatever the weather. I’m glad I’ve joined her, and everyone who’s participated in Walking Squares. Thank you!

And I’m going to see if my header photo squeezes in as a Mid-Week Monochrome.

I nearly forgot. It’s destined for Jo’s Monday Walk as well.

Ignore the rain and walk anyway

For her Walking Squares challenge, Becky is encouraging us to walk whatever the weather. On Thursday, I had no choice: I was on duty at Fountains Abbey. The rain was so vertical, so clamorously unrelenting that getting out camera or phone would have been foolish. Once I’d faced the fact that that I’d drawn the shortest of short straws, I quite enjoyed the ceaseless drumming of the water, dodging the puddles as they became rivers, and watching the water birds demonstrating by their surly inactivity that even they thought it was all A Bit Much.

Unexpectedly, a quarter of an hour before it was time to go, the rain stopped. The sky lightened, the puddles offered up reflections, and – thank goodness – I turned round, in time to see this rainbow. Probably just past its best, but at least I saw it.

Here are the final minutes of my afternoon.

For Becky’s #Walking Squares

and Debbie’s Six Word Saturday

Monday Fog, Mid-week rain, mid-week Monochrome

Look out of the window any day this week, but particularly yesterday, and you’d have seen a scene in glorious monochrome. Leaden skies, rain tumbling from the skies, hour after hour. As the header picture shows. Monday hadn’t been as rainy. Instead we had fog. Monochrome fog.

Some of the pictures were taken as I spent time at Fountains Abbey out in said rain – and against expectations, enjoying every soggy moment of it.

These though are taken at various locations in North Yorkshire, and in fog rather than rain:

And here are three more, for Becky’s Walking Squares:

I couldn’t resist a few more (sodden) tree roots from Fountains, but the water shot, and the desiccated cow parsley come from walks – who knows where?

Bren’s Mid-Week Monochrome #114

Becky’s Walking Squares