Up and down a valley
I’ve enjoyed visiting and re-visiting the area around the Hedgeley Lakes in recent weeks. How things change, though! The valley floor looks so different now from the yellow Hedgeley of April 2020:
I’ve enjoyed visiting and re-visiting the area around the Hedgeley Lakes in recent weeks. How things change, though! The valley floor looks so different now from the yellow Hedgeley of April 2020:
Having walked along and thought about the lanes where we live, that prompted a thinking about the fields around us.
an area, usually covered with grass, used for playing sports (Cambridge Dictionary)
I’d reflected recently on the inexorable changes that occur around us and how environmental changes are perhaps more obvious in the countryside: the falling of trees, riverbank erosion and our attempts to halt the effects of erosion.
Whether or not you count yourself as religious, spiritual, agnostic or whatever, the anticipation of Christmas each year seems to me to be a wonderful thing. Today is the first day of Advent 2020 – advent being the time in the liturgical year encompassing the four weeks before Christmas.
What goes around… Groundhog day! Been there, seen that… Déjà vu!
It’s inevitable that, in the countryside, the landscape changes from year to year. Rivers erode their banks, animals eat shrubs and the wind breaks branches and trees.
There is a row of trees near Ingram that I’ve been fond of photographing for several years now. When I took my first photo of them back in February 2012 there was snow on the ground:
The unseasonably warm weather over the past few weeks appears to have encouraged many hedgerow flowers to either keep on flowering or have another go.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus
It’s been a great year for vibrant coloured autumn leaves along the lanes where we live this year. It’s been a real joy to see the ochres, umbers, purples, yellow, golds, reds and russets. But…nothing lasts forever, and the leaves are almost gone now. But as the deciduous trees shed most of their leaves for the winter, the larches are still holding onto their needles as they turn a wonderful yellow-brown-gold. Again, what’s not to like?
At a time during the second UK national lockdown when we were all unable to attend organised Bonfire Night firework displays, it was nice to see from my window that at least one family was making the most of things up on the old railway line in Powburn, well away from anyone. It was lovely to hear the sound of a child laughing and squealing in delight, as the fireworks were let off one by one by their daddy. And you couldn’t help but see the wonderful flashes of light in the near darkness at the back of Powburn near the Dene. Lifted the spirits!
Feels, like a good Halloween one this – finding mushrooms in the deep, dark woods.
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