After, seemingly, weeks or rain, I HAD to go for a walk so I headed out to Morte Point that forms the northern boundary of Woolacombe Bay. I was wondering if the coastal flowers were out or even if I'd missed them altogether. I needn't have worried, there was hardly anything out - spring is incredibly late this year. As a consolation, the sun started to slowly emerge as I made to way to the very rocky end of Morte Point and, after a long wait, I got about five minutes of orange sunset light.
Morte Point presents a point to the Atlantic so the extreme end has been severely weathered. Added to that, all the rock strata are turned up at right angles so, as you can see, they weather in spikes.
It would be exciting to think that Morte Point means "Death Point" as the the rocks are so sharp and dangerous but, as with all fanciful word derivations, it's unlikely to be true and the more prosaic explanation is that it's Anglo-Saxon for "stumpy" as it's the shorter of the two headlands that enclose Woolacombe Bay, the other being Baggy Point.
Have a look here for my pictures of Morte Point and don't forget they're all for sale as prints, canvases or digitally for commercial use, as are all the images in the picture libray.
It's blubell time again when all photographers go off in search of the ultimate bluebell photograph. I'm not going to claim that I've found it but I'll just point you in a few directions.
Bluebells are mauve but such is the force of the word BLUE that we NEED them to be BLUE. It's an English cliche and there's a ritual to it. It's part of the myth of Olde England that, come this time of the year, all our woods are filled with bluebells, just as the beach can only be approached down a winding road in a Morris Traveller and that it snows at Christmas. So pictures of bluebells are made almost as an offering to our audience, just as Christmas dinner would be, and they have to be just right.
Until digital photography and digital manipulation arrived the photographic magazines at this time of year were filled with advice on how to get your bluebells blue. The main thrust semed to be that you should photograph them, unfiltered, in the shade, so that the blue light would impart its blueness to the mauve flowers and they might turn out blue. Alternatively, dawn or sunset light would cover them with a golden glow and would disguise their mauveness. Now, of course, I can just choose the colour they are, and make sure it's blue. It's depressingly like the recent panic to buy petrol - you don't want to join in but you have no choice.
Is that the age old problem solved then? No. Because bluebells must come in "swathes". The frequency of this word's usage goes off the scale in April. Lots of bluebells are simply not enough and they can't be interrupted by brambles and twigs; they have to be a homogenous sweep across the woodland floor. Only then can our cultural panic subside, secure in the knowledge that bluebells have been "done" for another year.
Sadly, I've never come close to finding the perfect bluebell picture but, cynical as I may appear, I do find them as lovely as everyone else does and I would love to find that perfect bluebell picture. Failing that though, this picture was in Beckland Cliff Wood near Hartland in North Devon, one of two woods I discovered the other day that belong to the Woodland Trust. Have a look also at Northdown Wood near Tiverton, and Chenson Farm Bluebells (which is privately owned but opens for a few days this time of year), north of Crediton. Or you could just look at all my images of bluebells by clicking here.
Another spell of good weather and some jobs to do in South Devon have given me the opportunity to climb some tors on Dartmoor and even given me the idea of trying to photograph them all. There are officially 170 tors but some are nothing more than a single flat rock whilst others aren't called tors but "rocks". Quite how practical this idea is, I've no idea but I think I'll research it further...
This tor is Birch Tor, which overlooks the Warren House Inn near Postbridge and the evening was much colder than it looked but the air was exceptionally clear. And two sets of people happened to come along and agreed to pose heroically as well.
To see all of the images of Birch Tor, have a look here.
This is the ruin of just one of the neolithic houses within the walled enclosure of Grimspound on Dartmoor, a few miles north of Widecombe-in-the-Moor. There are 24 houses although only a few can be seen properly, the rest being mounds with a few stone-tops poking out. They're 3.300 years old (1300BC) and from a time when Dartmoor was fertile.
The houses have double granite walls, an L shaped entrance and would have been lined with planks and thatched.
The rather splendid upper entrance gateway still exists, giving the place a much grander aspect than a mere collection of stone huts evokes.
I'm always rather pround that Britain has such things as this, this old, that I can just walk to any time I feel like. If you'd like to read more, here's the Wikipedia link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimspound - and if you'd like to see the rest of my pictures of Grimspound, have a look here.
In the summer we've just had, in other words the end of March, I got a chance to race up on to Dartmoor. I thought I'd take some pictures of Hay Tor and decided to make nearby Saddle Tor my vantage point. In the end though, I found Saddle Tor so photogenic that I ended up mostly taking pictures of it instead.
I can never get on to Dartmoor as much as I'd like as I live in North Devon and Exmoor's rocks are of a conpletely different character. Ever since I was first taken on to Dartmoor, at age 11, I've loved the way that the granite makes it look like a Japanese garden and the sheep do the work of the gardeners, keeping the grass neat and short. And this granite being grey, it takes on the colour of dawn or sunset easily and every tor glows orange.
What's ironic, of course, is that it's the work of Man that's caused this impoverished landscape of rock and poor soil. We cut all the trees down, farmed for as long as the soil had any nutrients and then moved away leaving everything to be washed away and the hilltops to be exposed as tors. We wouldn't countenance letting such a thing happen today but, on the other hand, neither would we consider (if we could) putting it back to the way it was.
To see all my images of Saddle Tor, have a look here.
This was taken at Fistral Beach in Newquay on one of my "Blue Days" where's there's perfect visibility and not a cloud in the sky. It perfectly illustrates how saturated colours can be in the middle of a summer's day. If you've bought bright clothes whilst abroad in the sun, thinking they looked lovely, then got them back to England and thought they didn't look the same here, this is why. Only from mid-May to mid-July does the sun get sufficiently high in the sky to shine this sort of incredibly bright sunlight and then your bright clothes will look their best.
The pale sand and beautifully blue sea of North Cornwall also help enormously, of course, by filling in the shadows with even more light. All my Newquay pictures were taken for Cornwall Life magazine and when I find myself on a beach on a day like this, photographing whatever I like AND getting paid for it, I really do think life doesn't get much better than this. And I have to think that because, of course, the next three weeks will be cloudy.
To see all my images of Newquay, have a look here.
I've just added all my images of Wellington to the website and amongst them is this one: small female figures around the base of Sir John Popham's tomb in the the church of St John the Baptist. It's my "Wonder of Wellington" if you like and I wrote a piece about the town for Somerset Life magazine with the Popham tomb as its focus, so here it is...
"Stepping out in Wellington
People in Wellington like where they are. They like being five minutes from the M5, to travel east or west, and they like being equidistant from the Somerset and East Devon coasts and for the rest of us, by the same token, it’s easy to drop in to Wellington as, sooner or later, we’re bound to be passing.
You can’t miss the 175 feet high Wellington Monument overlooking the town from the edge of the Blackdown Hills but that’s only been there since 1854. Wellington itself (called Weolingtun in the 10th century) has been there a lot longer and probably saw its most prosperous days in the 19th century when Fox Brothers & Co employed up 4,500 people in its wool business, even running a bank, Fox, Fowler & Company where the current Lloyds Bank now stands. They were the last bank in England to issue their own bank notes, a practice that ended in 1921.
Arriving there these days, you’re instantly aware that Wellington has an unspoilt high street, lined with small independent shops that the locals are very proud of. It certainly seems to have weathered the recession well as there are people on the streets and, more importantly, customers in all the shops. If your only intention was to browse in all these interesting and privately owned shops, and have something to eat in the very popular Café Licious on South Street, that in itself would make a worthwhile visit but there’s more…
Don’t miss the tomb of Sir John Popham in the parish church of John the Baptist. Sir John was Attorney General in the time of Elizabeth I and James I and was instrumental in the trials of Mary Queen of Scots, Guy Fawkes and Sir Walter Raleigh. He administered the law with great severity and is commonly, euphemistically, described as “zealous”. He certainly seems to have had few admirers then or since.. The tomb itself is a Baroque edifice made of alabaster, with the figures of Sir John and his wife lying in the centre.
What makes this tomb extraordinary however, are the many little figures praying around the base – there are his parents, his six daughters, three maidservants, his only son and his wife and their thirteen children. Were they the only people he felt he could appropriate in effigy to pray for his soul I wonder? If they were, they can’t have been happy with their depiction as, despite the tomb itself being nicely finished and proportioned, the figures themselves are quite primitive and almost comical, certainly not the work of a craftsman whereas the rest of the tomb might have been.
Everyone in Wellington is very proud of Wellington Park, given to the town by the aforementioned Fox family, opened in 1903 and restored and reopened in 2000. Showing off its colourful formal flower beds, the park hosts special and community events throughout the year and especially on Sundays in the summer.
The local Tourist Information Office can supply a guide to the Park as well as dozens of leaflets detailing local walks such as the West Dean Way, a 45 mile circular walk through the varied countryside of the Vale of Taunton Deane.
Although it’s not possible, at the moment, to see the view from the top of the Wellington Monument, the countryside and woods along the escarpment of the Black Down Hills are well worth a visit for their spectacular views across the Somerset countryside to the Bristol Channel. "
To see all of my Wellington pictures, have a look here.
I've added quite a few more images of Combe Martin to my picture library and here's the best one. It's the beach, with Lester Cliff behind it. Obviously it wasn't taken yesterday in March but at the beginning of June on what I call a Blue Day.
A Blue Day is when the air is crystal clear, with not a cloud in the sky, all day. On such days (which are my favourite sort of light) the sky (because of the lack of haze) is a deep blue and everything stands out beautifully in the contrast between sunshine and shadow. It's actually the shadows that make Blue Days so amazing because the blue light from the sky fills the shadows in blue rather than just grey and the strong sunlight is slightly yellow, undiluted by the white light from clouds. And if you can take a picture towards evening, at right angles to the sun then every colour is saturated and every object stands out sharp relief.
Sadly, as we live in a murky, cloudy country, there are only about half a dozen of these days a year but when they occur, I have to make dawn to dusk use of them.
To see more Combe Martin pics, have a look here.
North Devon has two huge flat beaches - Saunton Sands and Westward Ho! - and they both share the facility of providing a huge mirror surface. Any day of the week, it's no problem to get a perfect reflectiion of the sky and it allows allows for simple compositions like this one, almost Japanese in their simplicity. Another advantage is that both beaches face west so if the sun keeps shining it will light up any object with sunset light until the very last moment.
Westward Ho! was so named after Charles Kingsley's 1855 best seller of the same name, set in Bideford. Entrepreneurs, eager to exploit this interest in the area, built a hotel and houses here and called the whole lot Westward Ho!. Further buildings held on to the name and hence the village acquired its name. The only other place in the world that has an exclamation mark in its name is Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! in Quebec.
To see more images of Westward Ho!, have a look here.
This is the beach at Spekes Mill Mouth, the next beach south of Hartland Quay but, unlike Hartland Quay it doesn't have a car park, pub, hotel, shop or toilets. It has none of these. There's a lane that goes to within a mile of it and then you have to walk, or there's an EXTREMELY rough track that you can drive along from Docton Mill but I've never had the courage to use it. A few intrepid camper vans do though.
This shoreline and others like it represent the last vestige of genuinely wild Britain. Everything else bears the hand of Man. All the wild rocky uplands of Britain are that way because the first stone age immigrants to Britain cut all the trees down and the fragile soil all washed away. Only the space between high water and low water is truly wild so this is our last connection to how the land, the coast, would've looked thousands of years ago.
There is a Mouth here, the waterfall tumbles over it but who Speke was, or where the Mill was I don't know. To see all of the images of Spekes Mill Mouth, have a look here.