Tag: wp photo challenge

Snapshot Saturday: From World Heritage to heritage at home.

Fountain’s Abbey seen from a hillside walk last Autumn.

In 1132, thirteen Benedictine monks from York fetched up in a wild and isolated place we now know as the manicured and lovely parkland setting of Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal.  The Archbishop of York had offered them the land so they could establish a pious community based on silence, prayer and simplicity.

Over the years – over the next four centuries – they built a community with all the trappings of a large village: sleeping, living and working quarters, an infirmary, guest accommodation, a mill, a tannery, quarrying, as well as the daily focus of their lives, the Abbey church itself, where they worshipped eight times a day.

Huby’s Tower at Fountain’s Abbey, built not many years before the Dissolution of the Monasteries

Their principal source of income was from sheep, whose wool came to be valued at home and abroad.  Merchants from all over Europe to buy and trade.

The Abbey site could not sustain enough sheep for this thriving business. Lay brothers (the manual workers of the monastic world) were sent further and further afield to establish small working sheep farms – granges.  During the 15th century they came here, and built the house in which we now live.

The first floor was once the lay brothers’ dormitory. Now it’s our flat. I bet those monks didn’t look out over this lovely walled garden.

It’s changed a bit of course.  Who knows how much of the house is truly original, though the stone-built walls are a traditional, sturdy and strong build?  We no longer live in an upstairs dormitory, as the lay brothers did.

The Victorians divided the place into rooms for the servants of the country house which was built and attached to the grange in the 18th century.  The animals and working quarters are no longer downstairs, though the old, spacious and business like kitchen hearth still exists.

As I make the eight mile journey from here to Fountains Abbey I like to think of the heritage our home shares with this wonderful UNESCO World Heritage site.  Aren’t we lucky?

The Old Grange is attached to the fine 18th century house next door. We seem to have access to their wisteria.

This post is in response to the WordPress weekly photo challenge: ‘Heritage’

Snapshot Saturday: Reflecting in Gateshead

Reflections seem generally to be below us – in water.

The Baltic, imperfectly reflected in the waters of the Tyne.

Or  to the side of us – in plate glass windows.

Sage Gateshead, reflects multiple images of the Newcastle townscape on the other side of the Tyne.

So I was rather taken by these reflections of visitors to the Baltic Centre in Gateshead.  Above us.

Walking into the Baltic Centre, Gateshead.

‘Reflecting’ is this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge.

Snapshot Saturday: Wanderlust for the mountains

This is a bog-standard view of the Pyrenees as they looked near where we lived.

I can’t look at a picture of the Pyrenees without wishing I were there.

When we lived in France, these mountains were the constant backdrop to our lives.  They were our playground, where we would enjoy flower-studded meadows in the spring, clear bright summer heat, autumn colours to rival those of New England, and glittering winter snowscapes.  Winter and summer, we walked these mountains, climbing hundreds of feet to be rewarded over a leisurely lunch-time picnic by views of valleys, forests and dramatic rocks, before we had to descend to the foothills once more.

Caraybat, near Foix, at this time of year.

They were a natural boundary – often a barricade – between France and Spain, and the few roads linking these countries make wonderfully scenic journeys in their own right.

Travelling to our French town from England, we always knew we’d arrived ‘home’ when we caught sight of the Pyrenees once more – almost always as the sun was setting.  The first glimpse of those jagged peaks, whose shapes and names we came to recognise so well always made me as emotional as if I’d just met once more a long-lost friend.

The Pyrenees in summer: near Saint Julien de Gras Capou.

‘Wanderlust’, this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge, means a strong desire to wander, travel and explore.  I know I’ve hardly begun to know the Pyrenees.  They are where I want to travel, to wander, and above all to explore.

Intent on satisfying our wanderlust: hiking near Montaillou, French Pyrenees.

Snapshot Saturday: Earth Day in Colsterdale

The Earth.  It’s tempting, for this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge, to choose lush woodland, productive farmland, dramatic peaks, crashing ocean breakers, or a charming cottage garden crammed with colourful flowers, and on Earth Day, show it at its striking best.

The welcome committee greets us on the path to Ellingstring.

Instead, I want to take you to Colsterdale in Yorkshire.  The soil is thin, acid, peaty. Bitter winds scythe across the hilltops, bending to their will those hardy trees that make it to maturity.  Brackish ditches lurk below the juncus grass to catch out the unwary hiker. The hills, though beautiful, can look barren, apart from the heather which blushes an extravagant purple every August.

But Earth is clever.  This unpromising countryside nurtures thousands of sheep and lambs.  Curlews, plover and geese wheel through the sky.  Songbirds spring from the heather.  There is so much hidden wildlife that much of the area is a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Today is Earth Day 2017.  I’ve chosen to celebrate the hidden dale so close to where we live.  Follow the WordPress Photo Challenge link to see what others have chosen.

Snapshot Saturday: No surprise here – a rooster for Easter

Well, he’s a fine rooster, and just the kind of handsome fellow you want illustrating an Easter-tide post, doing his bit to father the next generation of fluffy chickens.  Not surprising at all to find him here.  All the same, these gaudy colours are quite eye-opening, quite a surprise.  So this cockerel can do duty this week in the WordPress photo challenge: surprise.

Snapshot Saturday: Brimham Rocks – securely unchanging in inconstant times

Once, three hundred and twenty million years ago, a Norwegian river tumbled its way across the landmass then connecting it to Scotland and turned towards Yorkshire, pushing sand and grit before it.  Over the millennia, those sands aggregated to become millstone grit.

More millennia passed. Temperatures in Northern Europe tumbled: an Ice Age.  Glaciers ground and eroded the relatively soft stone which had been dumped so many centuries before. Seeping water froze, thawed, froze again, splitting the rocks.  Cold strong winds buffeted away at rough edges. Those rocks assumed strange shapes, balancing improbably in the landscape.

Time moved on.  Man arrived, farming too, and industry.  But this little patch of Yorkshire, known as Brimham Rocks remains itself, untamable, unchanging, offering a feeling of security that some things remain constant for those of us lucky enough to live nearby this weird and fantastical playground.

This is my contribution to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge: Security

Snapshot Saturday: a view of densely-packed London from the River Thames

‘Redoubt’ tugs cargo-laden barges down the Thames. The river is as much a busy highway as it ever was.

I had to be in London, because it’s not every day my son gets a chance to sing in the Royal Festival Hall. Admittedly, he was only one of some 400 singers from Lewisham Choral Society and the Hackney Singers, who’d combined to perform Bach’s B minor Mass.  What a privilege to hear so many voices give such a finely tuned and moving performance.

The other treat was that I was seated between my daughter-in-law, and a new friend made entirely thanks to blogging.  She’d discovered my blog after following up a comment I had made on the wonderful ‘Spitalfields Life’.  She commented – often – on mine, and eventually we met. I do like this blogging malarkey.

London, as seen from dry land the start of my journey.
…. which changed to this, as we started, ploughing through the water at a busy fast rate.
Views from the deck.

Anyway, I got to the Festival Hall from Greenwich by way of a commuter trip along the Thames.  And on this journey I got a sense of densely packed communities, sometimes in tower blocks; and of the densely packed offices of Canary Wharf and the City.

Something old, something new ….

I saw too the Docklands area, where once tobacco, ivory, spices, coffee, tea, cocoa, wine and wool were unloaded from densely packed ships along the quayside to be processed in wharfside buildings – once busy, crowded industrial sites, and now transformed into desirable apartments and businesses.

Once a busy hive of industry, these wharfside buildings are now dwellings for people who would never have chosen to work there.

I saw the Tower of London, with the city behind showing itself developed in a manner unimaginable to the many unhappy souls who entered, never to return to life as they had known it …. or to life at all.

The Tower of London, with the now almost equally famous Gherkin behind.

This journey is a treat which some lucky Londoners can enjoy every day as part of their regular commute.

My response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge: ‘Dense’

Snapshot Saturday: It’s easy being green … when it’s this wet

It wasn’t our best walk.  Chris and I set off to ‘do’ part of the Nidderdale Way on Thursday.  Thursday was fine.  Wednesday hadn’t been.  Nor had Tuesday.  There’s been an awful lot of rain lately.

Even as we started out, we realised that mud was to be our constant companion.  And water, trickling along slippery, sticky oozy paths.  We forded streams which according to the map simply didn’t exist.  If we wanted to go onwards, we had to wade through running water, or totter across from unsteady stepping stone to unsteadier fallen branch.

It was tiring.  Finding not-too-soggy resting places was challenging too. We had our sandwiches in a wood alongside what should have been a babbling brook, but was in fact a raging torrent.

A normally quiet woodland stream.

And that’s when I noticed these stones – and trees.  I’d expect boulders and branches like these to have a few tendrils of dry ash-grey lichen clinging to their surface. Instead they were thickly carpeted in vivid green. These specimens (and I don’t know what they are, despite a spot of Googling) were healthy, fecund and spreading very nicely thank you.  It’s easy being green in such a damp, shaded and sheltered environment.

This is my response to this week’s WordPress photo challenge: It IS easy being green!

The green pastures of Nidderdale.

Snapshot Saturday: a heartfelt wish

This week’s WordPress photo assignment challenges us to share a wish.

Seokbul-Sa Temple, near Busan

I have chosen an image of the cheerfully optimistic and colourful prayer lanterns we saw so often suspended from the ceilings in the Buddhist temples of South Korea to illustrate our family’s wish, which will come as no surprise at all to regular readers of this blog.

We’d like my daughter Elinor, aka ‘Fanny, the Champion of the World‘, to be cancer-free by the time her twin boys become twelve.  Then they, and we can truly celebrate their birthday, shadowed since they were eight by the cancer firstly of their father, then of their mother. It’s chemo-time at the moment.  Not much fun, but all in a good cause.

It’s everything to ask.  But surely neither greedy nor unreasonable.