I'm surrounded by my favourite colour at this time of year, purple heather in the Yorkshire Dales and purple clover in the fields around home.
In Yorkshire ancient pathways crisscross the land, with stone stiles built into the walls to allow humans to pass (just!) but with the livestock safely kept in the field.
It's the shooting season and the guns are out. On the moor, stone built, heather-topped butts dot the landscape. This hide, unusually, is dug into the ground and looks rather like an archaeological excavation.
We went to collect our daughter from the London train and passed this house with its wild flower meadow. It reminds me how beautiful the roadside verges used to be years ago when they were filled with wild flowers.
At home the clover fields are being harvested. The machines have flattened tracks through the flowers, providing easy walking. We are enjoying warm, still weather and in the early evenings balloons come drifting towards us from the city of Bath.
One just made it to the field below the village and had a gentle landing, complete with Jolly Roger and a skeleton pirate mascot with a parrot!
Three more balloons floated overhead and a little while later yet another came down in the same field.
What a beautiful scene! I love the field of clover --I can almost smell it!-- and the last photo with all the different angles of the landscape.
ReplyDeletemay i just say that i would love to come live with you! everything you photograph & talk about is so quintessentially english that it gives me goosebumps. you live in a dream. or at least my dream.
ReplyDeleteyour dear friend in southern california,
~janet
Dear Rosemary, I have so enjoyed reading this posting and was fascinated to see all of those 'outcrops' on the Yorkshire Dales. But what you say about the way in which the verges have lost so much of their wild flora and fauna is so true and so very sad. However,to be positive, I do not think that they are cut quite as ruthlessly as a few years ago.
ReplyDeleteThank you for commenting on my latest posting and to which I have made reply. I am signing myself as a 'Follower' of your weblog so as not to miss future postings.