Category: North Yorkshire

A Nice Day Out .. or Six Months Inside

Ah, how idyllic … Bolton Castle in Wensleydale.  Perfect for a summer’s day out.

Not if you were Mary Queen of Scots though. She spent six months imprisoned here in 1568.  Although even that incarceration was relative.  She was attended by 30 of her household, which included  knights, servants, ladies-in-waiting, cooks, grooms, a hairdresser, an embroiderer, an apothecary, a physician and a surgeon.  The remaining 20 or so lodged in the nearby village of Castle Bolton.  She went hunting.  She had her hair done.  She learnt English, since up to this point she could speak only Scots, French and Latin.

Imprisonment.  It’s all relative.

Square Perspectives

Out and About with my Virtual Box Brownie

Back in the Good Old Days, did you have a Box Brownie?  Do you remember hiding yourself in a darkened room to fiddle with the film, threading  the spool into your camera and winding it on, only to do the whole thing in reverse twelve shots later when you had to get the thing out to be developed at the chemist’s shop?  Do you remember spending your pocket money to have two whole films – that’s twenty four shots – to last you the whole holiday, and the frustrating wait of a week or so before your photos were developed?

Kodak Box Brownie much like mine (Wikimedia Commons)

Jude has asked us to remind ourselves of those days in this week’s Photo Challenge, by asking us to limit ourselves to twelve shots.  Jude however is profligate.  She’s allowing us to use all twelve shots in a single outing.  How improvident!  Even so, even with this quite generous allowance, I remembered the old anxieties.  Should I take this?  Would I regret it because there was something better round the corner?  What if I ran out of shots?

Here’s my offering.  A friend and I walked on Tuesday (socially distanced, of course) from Ripon to Bishop Monkton by the Ripon Canal, along some country lanes, then back to Ripon alongside the Rivers Ure and Skell. We enjoyed many quiet moments appreciating the waterscapes, the landscapes reached on foot from our starting point in the city centre.  Nine miles under our belts, renewed and refreshed.

As a homage to my Box Brownie Days, I’ll show you the photos first in monochrome, then in Glorious Technicolor.  It didn’t feel right to edit them in any way (apart from translating them into monochrome).

Most look neither better nor worse in my eyes in the two different formats – just different.  A couple don’t seem to work, and back in black-and-white days I probably wouldn’t have taken them.  Just one works better I think.    This journey into the past, thinking more carefully before pointing-and-clicking has been an illuminating and surprising pleasure which I’m sharing with Leya’s  Lens Artists Challenge. Click on any image to view full size.

This new perspective on photography would have been perfect for Becky’s Square Perspectives: but my pictures aren’t square.  I’ll choose one and square it up.  Maybe …. this one.

 

2020 Photo Challenge #26

Square Perspectives

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #103

 

 

 

 

Perspectives on a Field of Barley

It’s time for July Squares, for a month of Square posts on our perspective on … perspective, and hosted by the indefatigable Becky.

 

Four different perspectives on this barley growing in a field near me.  But there are others too:  those of  –

  • The farmer, for whom this barley represents a season’s work, and a chunk of his annual income.
  • His seed merchant, ditto.
  • The field mouse and other creatures, to whom this is home.
  • The ecologist, who may wonder why this field contains not a single poppy, not a single weed.
  • The rambler, who quite simply enjoys the view.

Click on  ‘Square Perspectives’, and you’ll find perspectives a-plenty this month.  Browse and enjoy!

Square Perspectives

The View from the Train Window

These days, weeks and weeks into Life-with-Covid 19, I crave a nice quiet dinner with people I know, tea parties with friends, or a chinwag in town over a good cup of coffee and a fresh-from-the-oven buttered scone.  And I can’t have any of them.

Instead, I’ll settle for memories of a tea party from a few years ago, when we met with good friends to celebrate a couple of birthdays.  No tea shop for us, but instead a jaunt on the Wensleydale Railway, a Heritage Railway which runs in normal times through the heart of the Yorkshire Dales .

As we rattled along, enjoying countryside views, smart serving staff plied up with elegant little sandwiches, properly fattening cakes, and the all-important scones served with jam and cream.  And tea, of course.  And prosecco.

It’s not often that afternoon tea with all the trimmings includes an ever-changing bucolic view through the window.

Read the whole story here.

Monday Window.

Quiet Moments

When all this is over, I’ll remember the quiet moments …

… the early evenings in the garden, as the birds chattered tunefully among themselves …

… the woodland walks, where I was soothed by the changing patterns as, day by day, green leaves unfolded above me, and the flowers of spring, then summer, came and went alongside my path.

And I’ll remember this walk too, from Monday this week, when I exchanged my bosky local landscape for the wider vistas near the North York Moors National Park, where a long slog up a long hill rewards with far-ranging views. And maybe the chance to take a photo requiring depth of field, for Jude’s current photo challenge.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #102: A Quiet Moment

 

Six Words? Twelve Words? All nonsense.

Fish – clutter – drain – banana – starling – umbrella – buttermilk – sky – walking boots – bibulous – carbuncle – brain.

Just look at that.  Twelve words. I have to weave those twelve random words into a single poem.

Our U3A writing group is one of the few things that’s continued throughout lockdown.  It’s a positive activity at a somewhat negative time.  But what CAN you do with a list like that?  This, it turns out.  I’m not too displeased.  And here too are a few photos to illustrate the day.

Colsterdale

Wanting to de-clutter

my brain, I drive to

Colsterdale.

Walking boots? – Check.

Map? – Check.

Sandwich? – Check.

Banana? – Check.

Umbrella?  Don’t be silly.

 

No starlings here, but

curlews, skylarks

crest the sky –

that cobalt sky, patched

with buttermilk clouds.

 

A chattering brook

drains into the reservoir

where fish silently dawdle

and spongy bibulous mosses

make soft mats beneath my feet.

 

Contented now, 

I drive back to town.

I pass that new carbuncle and see

a socially distanced queue 

snake round the recently-opened 

supermarket.

 

Jo’s Monday Walk

Six Word Saturday

The Tree House. Just One Window, Just One Door.

If you go walking in Wensleydale: if you go for a walk from Jervaulx to Jervaulx via Thornton Steward, you’ll come across this tree home, at the edge of a field, commanding views over the valley.  It has just one door and, importantly for Monday Window, just one window.

It’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but I always like to imagine a doting grandfather, tall and rangy from a tough life’s farming and probably reminiscent of the BFG, lovingly creating a little refuge for his grandchild in this hollow tree.

A first glimpse ….
… a second glimpse …
… and the whole thing.

I couldn’t fit in it, neither could you.  Perhaps the grandchild is too big now.  But I know a couple of young people who’d love to play there.  Perhaps you do too.