After a weekend of Storm Darragh, our car needs a litte TLC. On the way into town this morning, we’ll have a session at the car wash, and enjoy the view through the window as the suds and brushes do their work.
For PR’s Monday Window.
A sunrise captured in one of our downstairs windows one December morning. This image always makes me happy, so I’ll make it a bonus post for Ann-Christine’s This Made Me Smile challenge too.
For Brian’s Monday Window,
And Ann-Christine (Leya)’s Lens-Artists Challenge #326 – This Made Me Smile
On Tuesday morning, I was quietly dreading my shift as volunteer Roaming Ranger in Studley Royal Deer Park. ‘Raining’ was an understatement. As I was driving over, the wipers sliced savagely across the windscreen, ineffectually sweeping away the rivers of rainwater cascading over the car. Signing in, we volunteers on various parts of the estate commiserated wanly with each other, and went our separate ways.
But outside, the rain had suddenly and unexpectedly decided to stop. Instead, familiar trees, now turning autumn gold and russset could just be perceived through the mist. A familiar autumn scene, especially here where we have three rivers in town to add to the general miasma of an October or November day.
Much later in the morning, as I was completing my shift in a much cheerier frame of mind, autumn’s third and best mood showed itself. Omnipresent autumn colour in the form of leaves cascaded to my feet to be eagerly shuffled and crunched through as I willingly connected with my inner child.
I offer a selection of photos to illustrate these different moods. I didn’t take my camera with me on Tuesday. The weather and the forecast were so very poor I just didn’t dare expose the poor thing to the elements. More fool me, to believe the weather forecast.
My featured photo is looking through our kitchen window on Tuesday morning. There’s more of the same on the way …
For Ann-Christine’s Lens-Artists Challenge #319: Setting a Mood
Any UK readers will have had plenty of occasions to recite a favourite childhood ditty this week.
Rain, rain, Go to Spain,
James Howell, an Anglo-Welsh historian added this verse to the traditional English rhyme ‘Rain, rain go away/Come again another day’, as a reminder of the failed invasion of the powerful Spanish Armada in 1588. They had intended to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I and restore Catholic rule over England.
Never show your face again.
Like now, for instance. But we’re all safely indoors, so let’s peer out at a few rainy shots. I hope you have an umbrella.
Count the brollies in these two shots, and they’ll add up to seven.
And here is an all-too-typical English shot.
For Leanne’s Monochrome Madness.
And Becky’s Seven for September.
This week, A Canadian blogging pal, Rebecca of Rebecca’s Reading Room reflected on re-reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It made me think of a post which I wrote six years ago, in which I described a walk in Emily’s footsteps. Now it’s not really playing fair to re-post something I published before for the Lens-Artists Challenge: Tourist Attractions Near and Far. But I’m going to do it anyway. How many walking routes does anyone know in the UK where the way-marking is in any language other than English? Here, they’re in Japanese. This wild and often unforgiving part if England has become an unlikely tourist Mecca for devotees of Brontë’s story of the passionate and tumultuous love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.
28th July 2018
Haworth: a charming village on the top of a high and steep hill, in an area of high, bleak and steep hills; home to the Brontë sisters and the surrounding moorland countryside of Wuthering Heights.
Everyone knows that you can expect ‘weather’ when you come here, whatever time of year you arrive. As you stumble along the church path to leave the village, slashing rain tumbling from sullen hostile skies needles your skin, slicks your hair to your face and saturates your clothes. As you set your face against the wild wind, your boots sink into the sodden peaty turf as you trudge onto the moor. If you dare to glance up, you see unending moorland before you: bleak, barren and bare, with sheep huddled against the dry stone walls which march across the landscape. This is Nature-in-the-Raw, and we expect no different.
I went there earlier this week. None of the above applied.
We are in Week Five of a heatwave. I doubt if either the Brontës or even Heathcliff himself had ever seen the like. Brittle coir matting now carpets the brooding moorland fells: and several weeks early, the heather is almost in flower, rich and purple. Yellowing grasses replace the dense green turf the sheep prefer, whispering and rustling in the light breeze.
There’s a little brook in the valley here. Angry peaty water jostling officiously along its path has been replaced by still, clear shallow pools.
The Brontë sisters would cheerfully have paused here to rest, reflect and write a little. Then, like me, they would have slogged on, up the peat-and-stone pathway that leads upwards, ever upwards, towards Top Withens.
Top Withens may have been the isolated upland farmhouse that Emily Brontë pictured Cathy Earnshaw and family living in when she wrote Wuthering Heights. It’s a ruin now, the roof torn off in a violent thunderstorm in the 1890s. Just as you’d expect.
It was the perfect picnic spot for me. The moorland stretched before me, its hillsides rhythmically rising and falling. The world was silent: not that silence in which there is no sound, but that of the living countryside: the low susuration of the swaying grasses; the humming of the wind in my ears; the occasional complaint of a bird sweeping overhead. Beyond the moorland, greener fields lay, chopped centuries ago into rough rectangles by drystone walls. Some held sheep, some cattle, others recently cut hay. The sun warmed my rocky seat, and I was perfectly content.
Except for the sky. The day was sultry, sweaty, but freshened by a soft breeze. I knew the sun might be chased away by gusty rain. Ash-grey clouds swelled and receded, revealing granite tones behind: and beyond that, cornflower blue once more. It was a signal. Haworth takes weather seriously. Never be tempted to climb these uplands without a very capable waterproof in your kit.
The moorland I saw this week was not the Brontë’s moorland. It’s been a little sanitised. There are helpful finger posts pointing the way at every junction, in English and … Japanese.
The pathways the sisters trod are no longer springy peat tracks, or sticky muddy gullies. Instead, heavy slabs line the way, to prevent footfall damage to this fragile area from the hundreds of people who tramp these paths looking for the Real Brontë Experience.
My day was far too comfortable for that. I was not returning to a draughty parsonage with self-destructive brother Branwell to worry about. If you want to see the Brontë’s life through his eyes, read Robert Edric’s ‘Sanctuary’. You’ll be glad to get back to bustling tourist-destination Haworth for a nice cup of tea.
This post should qualify for a mention in Jo’s Monday Walk, I hope.
We went to a barbecue last week. It was already July, remember? Mid-summer. I wore, on top of my underclothes:
- a vest
- a polo-necked jumper
- a winter-weight cosy jumper
- thick socks
- and to top it all off, this ...
I was – just about – warm enough.
The header image comes courtesy of Andrik Langfield: Unsplash.
You want water in motion, Sofia, for your Lens-Artist Challenge? You’ve come to the right place. We speak of little else in England this year. Look at this.
Or this, taken through the windows of Christ the King Cathedral, Liverpool.
But without this rain, we wouldn’t have those glorious tumbling riverside views: these are both from Yorkshire: I’m focussing on England for this post – it seems appropriate.
Water’s playful too: especially in the hands of a sculptor. Here’s Atlas with his sea gods at Castle Howard, Yorkshire. A fuller image is shown as the featured photo.
And a child in Granary Square, London is certainly having fun.
But we’ll conclude with a more typical London view, overlooking the River Thames.
Whether the weather be cold,
Or whether the weather be hot,
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not!
Traditional
I thought I’d put together Anne’s Lens-Artist Challenge #286 – Weather – with the aid of children’s rhymes.
Rain, rain, go away,
Come again another day.
Rain, rain, go to Spain,
Never show your face again!
Traditional
It’s not just children who’d willingly sing this these days. In the UK it’s rained pretty much constantly all this year. But in Spain, they’d cheerfully take some of our surplus. In Catalonia, in mid-winter, the reservoirs are a mere 16% full, and water-use restrictions are in place.
When the wind is in the east
'tis neither good for man nor beast.
When the wind is in the north,
the skilful fisher goes not forth.
When the wind is in the south,
it blows the bait in the fishes' mouth.
When the wind is in the west,
then 'tis at the very best.
Traditional
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbour and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg
I can’t claim that Carl Sandburg’s is a children’s rhyme. I couldn’t think of one. Can you?
The north wind doth blow,
and we shall have snow,
and what will the robin do then, poor thing?
He'll sit in a barn,
and keep himself warm,
and hide his head under his wing, poor thing!
Traditional.
This hardly-there snow is pretty typical of wintry conditions in England. And I know that a robin lives pretty close by: this field almost qualifies as my back yard.
Red and yellow and pink and green,
purple and orange and blue:
I can sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow too.
Arthur Hamilton
All three of my children used to sing this one – often – at assembly in primary school. I wonder if it’s still going strong?
So that’s it. Oh, hang on, I’ve forgotten something. Sunshine. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? It’s February in England, and famously sunless. Let’s show British sunlight, rather than the full-on sun of the holiday of our dreams.
And most children can sing the less-than-traditional The Sun Has Got His Hat On by Noel Gay. So let’s leave you with this cheery version.
I glanced up from checking my emails twenty minutes ago, and this is what I saw.
You have to seize the moment. In half an hour it’ll be raining- a proper deluge with fat splashy drops tumbling relentlessly down for the rest of the day (just like yesterday). So I went for a mini-walk.
Just in time. Now it’s like this – and becoming more sombre by the minute.
For Johnbo’s Cellpic Sunday
And for Johnbo’s Cellpic Sunday.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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