Category: North Yorkshire
My plant pots have gone up a size
When I woke up on Thursday, this is what I found at the doorstep.
Normal life’s been disrupted by the snow, even more than Covid has ruptured our day to day rhythms. I occupied some of my day yesterday by slogging through the snow to bring you these photos.
Eat up!
All that snow we’ve been having. It’s so pretty, but I bet those poor sheep were fed up. Look at that featured photo. Not much evidence of grass there. So when I passed a neighbouring farm while out with Virtual Dog on Sunday, I wasn’t too surprised to find any number of sheep gathered round the serving hatch. Nobody needed to encourage them to eat up.
Wrap up warmly … and enjoy
On Friday it snowed. All day. All night, the temperature was -5, and all Saturday it got no higher up than zero. Which was fine, because the snow has been, as it was for King Wenceslas, ‘deep and crisp and even’, and perfect for walking in so long as you were all muffled up, with your best boots on.
More uplifting cheer. More spring flowers
These daffodils appear days after Christmas.
Just beside the village pond.
This year and every single year.
Upbeat Brown
This month, Jude has asked us to find photos featuring brown. Well, I know about brown. Here is brown:
That’s right. Mud. We have mud everywhere.
I could cheer things up a bit however. Look at these. My featured photo was taken near Fountains Abbey only a few weeks ago, and here are more uplifting shots of the world in brown. We’ll start off with some that have been squared up – and can anybody help me identify that butterfly please?:
… and move on to a couple more autumnal scenes from Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal; a fish – part of a wall decoration at the Natural History Museum, London; tree bark: and our logs all stacked up for winter. Click on any photo for a close-up.
When Life with Covid-19 was Still a Novelty
The last day of 2020. We began our year with Emily and Miquel, in Spain. Then – Covid-19 happened, and has dominated everyone’s lives ever since. Optimism and general feel-good is in short supply after all this time, so I choose instead to remember those three months of Lockdown in the spring and early summer. This was a desperate period of isolation, anxiety and money worries for many, so I feel almost ashamed to admit that for me, it was a time when I did little but get out into the fine spring weather and walk, walk, walk, discovering in a way I never had before, the delights of our own home patch.
I was also beginning to get stuck into Jude’s 2020 Photo Challenge, and always took my camera with me to reflect on her latest demands. This review of a year of challenges is only partial: it leaves out all of the later tasks which as the year wore on, relied for me increasingly on archive material. But I’ve discovered a lot about getting the best from a shot – the benefits for instance, of a low viewpoint, or of framing the scene. I’ve had reinforced what I already knew: that fiddling around with dials and apertures ain’t for me, It’s my loss, but I’ll live with it. I’ve discovered too that black and white photos are anything but snaps with the colour removed.
And Su, I’m including this post in your The Changing Seasons theme, even though there are four seasons in every year, not just one. On this occasion, I wanted to remember the best of the year that’s on its way out.
Just click on any image if you want to see it full size. Thank you, Jude, for a mind-stretching challenge during a year when my brain usually seems to be filled with little more than bran. And Su, yours is a challenge I’ll join again too. Next time, I might even stick to the rules.
Organic Geometry.
I am very late in joining Jude’s Photo Challenge #51, but here I am. She invites us to make a collage of images, some of which have strong geometric shapes, others of which are organic in form. I had fun looking back though my collection. And what I soon realised was how hard it is to determine what makes a good photo when those images are so bound up with the memories they represent. I suppose that’s what makes me a snapshot-ist rather than a photographer.
I also found myself choosing photos which were primarily geometric – of buildings and so on, but which were enlivened in some way by more organic forms. So Jude, I may not have quite stuck to your brief (again!) but you’ve made me think (again!)
I like this recent photo of Fountains Abbey, that the severe geometry of the ruined building, its dull grey stone, is enlivened by the informal way the autumn branches frame the scene. 
This photo, taken in Granada, is a favourite too. The extravagant decoration of the window frames softens the geometry of the windows: but as a reflected image, the whole thing dissolves completely into something much more organic. 
This is geometric alright: taken from a viewing platform near the Thames in London. I like that even the frame is emphasised by the vertical lines of the shelter in which this viewing window was situated. 
This doesn’t qualify as a fine photo. More of a Christmas puzzle. This grocer’s shop in Barcelona displays not only its wares, but the buildings and street furniture in the street it faces into. 
Liverpool. I’m looking out from the Catholic Cathedral up the road to its Anglican equivalent. I like all those bright verticals guiding your eye up that unremarkable road. 
I had to have a drystone wall. This Yorkshire feature, solid and strong, contrasts with the distant landscape dissolving into the mist.
The featured photo shows Brimham Rocks in Yorkshire. Nobody could accuse them of being geometric.
Christmas Wishes
Have a happy – and healthy – Christmas!
Let’s hope that, with vaccines developed, next year will end more positively than this.
This photo shows the view from our study window in Yorkshire, in a year when we had snow in England – 2018.
Yesterday, the last day of our ten day tour, I took you to the Pyrenees: to the slopes near Montferrier in the Ariège – you can read all about it here – and to Scaramus, where I had my first experience of snow-shoeing.
Fog and mist, cloud and sun
Weather forecast. Cold, but bright and sunny. That sounded perfect for a walk in Wharfedale. Starting and finishing at the forbiddingly-named Grimwith Reservoir, and taking a fine circular route to and from Burnsall would give us extensive panoramas over the hills of the Yorkshire Dales.
Except that on the way there, an impenetrable curtain of fog descended. To walk? Or not to walk? My friend and I had both made the effort to get there. So we’d walk.
And for nearly an hour, this was our landscape. No hills, no dales, but just the occasional gate, or tussocky grass, or – sometimes – sheep.
Then – suddenly it seemed – this.
The sky lightened and brightened, and the countryside we’d come to see developed before our eyes like those Polaroid photos that once seemed so exciting.
Soon we were at Burnsall, our half-way mark. A hearty yomp up hill brought us to a bench, where we saw in turn black skies, grey skies, blue skies: and views, always with the village below us.
After lunch, a further climb, and then level walking back to where we’d begun our day. But this time we had the views we’d come to see, and at the end, the quiet tints of the reservoir.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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