Ascending to Brunt Knott 5 January 2017 A photographer's day, with clarity and sunlight that coloured winter heather and bracken. As we headed for Brunt Knott we looked west above a pastoral landscape where sunlight gleamed a white farmstead, highlighting contours and green lanes. In the distance rose the Lake District Fells. Heather moorland in winter sunlight is a subtle mix of colours and a hatching of shadows patterned pale grass tussocks. My haul of images should have been memorable. If witchcraft had not intervened.
Sub-zero temperatures as we set forth, but the sun soon warmed us. Shadowed ground held fast to frost. We approached Gurnal Dubs, overlooked by a bank of ericas and with a rowan tree of powerful magic. A flogron, a flying rowan, rooted neither in earth nor heaven. Flogron in Norse mythology. The tree rises from the cleft in a rock, a glacial erratic riven by frost then prised wider as the rowan took root and began to grow. Brian Bowness whose sheep graze on Potter Fell tells me he remembers the tree when it was a sapling and that a raven carrying rowan berries must have perched here and cleaned its beak on the rock, or defecated and left behind the seed. Up in the branches of the January rowan there is nest from last summer. Deep shadow emphasizes the cleft in the rock and the rowan bark gleams in the sun. It's a living sculpture and I circle the flogron to capture the day. I love this tree and it's in my photo archive but today the light is perfect. And my companions are impressed by the novelty of a flying rowan with its hint of magic. ' I'd have walked by and not noticed,' said one.
Words, words, words. Why don't I simply show you those marvellous pictures?
Home again, I downloaded images from my camera phone. That tell-tale pink across the computer screen spelled disaster. On a day of strong sunlight it's impossible to see the touch-screen unless I stop, take time, be disciplined and check photos as I go. But this is a Ramblers' walk and photography is incidental to its purpose, if not mine. A touch screen is all very well if you can see what you're touching. Selfie-mode is never my intention and I accidentally nudged into it. Not hatching of sunlight and shadow in grass tussocks and heather, not the flogron, but my hand!
Somewhere in my photographic archive I know I could find the flogron if I were to devote the entire day to the search. But that nest in the bare branches was unique unto the season and the light was so special. The images that get away are the perfect ones, of course.
So, my slightly late New Year's resolution is to have camera discipline and check along the way. Meanwhile, a dense fog is descended since that outing to Gurnal Dubs, yesterday and today. The flogron breathes fog, unseen.
Words, words, words. Why don't I simply show you those marvellous pictures?
Home again, I downloaded images from my camera phone. That tell-tale pink across the computer screen spelled disaster. On a day of strong sunlight it's impossible to see the touch-screen unless I stop, take time, be disciplined and check photos as I go. But this is a Ramblers' walk and photography is incidental to its purpose, if not mine. A touch screen is all very well if you can see what you're touching. Selfie-mode is never my intention and I accidentally nudged into it. Not hatching of sunlight and shadow in grass tussocks and heather, not the flogron, but my hand!
Somewhere in my photographic archive I know I could find the flogron if I were to devote the entire day to the search. But that nest in the bare branches was unique unto the season and the light was so special. The images that get away are the perfect ones, of course.
So, my slightly late New Year's resolution is to have camera discipline and check along the way. Meanwhile, a dense fog is descended since that outing to Gurnal Dubs, yesterday and today. The flogron breathes fog, unseen.
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