Brueghel on Scout Scar

Scout Scar escarpment

Snowfall transforms Scout Scar into a Breughel landscape. The Hunt, perhaps.  Alarm calls from pheasants  in the woods below the escarpment, and  the sounds of gunfire.  Snow gleams on the distant fells.  Breughel knows that an inspiring landscape needs mountains, so he conjures them out of thin air. Cumbria has  the real thing. 
Through a sequence of images the cloudscape is changing on a glorious February day.
Yesterday might have been  Breughel's 'A Gloomy Day': low cloud and mud everywhere.  

---

Two contrasting days. First the inspiration.

The Gloomy Day. Sun broke through far too late in the day. I'd given up on it, by then.  Kendal Race Course was deep in muck. Mud everywhere.  The Welsh Black cattle up on Scout Scar were silent and docile, as always, on a still morning.  Vistas were lost in low cloud and mist.  Weary of slipping and sliding through mud, I detoured into tussocks where I might avoid it.  Picking a way through low-growing blackthorn, I came upon an unfamiliar erratic and was struck by patterns of lichen fused into rock. I circled the boulder, taking photographs.  Found an infill of quartz, like white teeth. Hints of pink and golden lichen.  Bright colour tells this erratic is composed of Borrowdale Volcanics.  Its solid mass confirms it.  The boulder sits heavily on the younger limestones with a shallow indentation at its base. Erratic: a wanderer carried here on a melting glacier in the Ice Age, from Borrowdale.  It's geological composition is unlike the limestone of the place so the lichens which grow on the boulder are different too.
I spent so long circling the erratic and looking closely at lichen growing out of rock  that when I set off for home I was momentarily disorientated!