National Trust – From Pyrenees to Pennines

It’s Daffodil Time at Fountains Abbey

An Asymmetrical Amble

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.

Autumn Colours

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 .

For Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge #31: Autumn Colours

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.

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.

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.

And lastly, another view which didn’t work as well as I hoped, through a chink in a drystone wall in the Yorkshire Dales.

Viking raiders meet early Christians

I sent a postcard from Heysham in Lancashire on Monday (pronounced Heesham, by the way, not Haysham). And I found myself drawn to this spot time and again during our short stay.

A scrub-tangled cliff-side looked across the stony, muddy shoreline of Morecambe Bay and to the mountains beyond. This was the view the Vikings had as they landed and began to make their homes here. This was the view the early English had as, in the eighth century, they built a chapel right here at the edge of the cliff, and dedicated in to Saint Patrick. Yes, THAT Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. Born in Cumbria, he was captured and enslaved in Ireland. After six years, he escaped and fled on a ship bound for France. But the ship blew off course and wrecked on the English coast – here in Heysham . From here he went to France as planned to continue his religious education before returning to Ireland to convert the population there. The reason for the chapel was probably as a place of rest for those pilgrims who visited the rock-cut graves I showed you in my postcard – and now again, here. As the years went by, the chapel was enlarged and the ground around it became a burial place – over 80 bodies have been found.

And what about those rock-cut graves? Despite their human shapes, it’s thought the bones kept there were disarticulated, and may have been those of local saints and important Christians – even perhaps Saint Patrick himself? That’s why they became a place of pilgrimage. Once, they will have been topped off with heavy stone slabs, and those sockets at the head of the graves would each have held a cross

Almost next door is a church. This church, dedicated to Saint Peter also has 8th century origins. I wish we could have gone inside to explore, but we didn’t manage it. Now it’s the parish church, with a graveyard below sweeping down to the sea.

Something about the site ensnared me. Isolated, and with atmospheric light and views, it’s become my choice for Tina’s Lens-Artists Challenge #254 this week: Spiritual Sites.

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.

The Last Day in January

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.

For Brian (aka Bushboy)’s Last on the Card.

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.

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.