From Kentmere Reservoir toward Nan Bield Pass 12 August The clouds parted and blue sky opened up above us, a radiant blue. And sunlight swept over the fellside where we sat beside Kentmere Reservoir, watching the play of light.
The word photography means drawing with light and whoever was on the Divine Lighting Console was having fun. A spotlight fell on a cluster of sheep, startling white fleeces with blue paint marks to tell their owner. Then light played along a ridge, tracing the architecture of the fell. Dark cloud loured and rays of light probed beneath and gleamed off the RIver Kent as it flowed south past a sheep fold. Floodlight softened the grasses, turned them gold. A magical day.
The word photography means drawing with light and whoever was on the Divine Lighting Console was having fun. A spotlight fell on a cluster of sheep, startling white fleeces with blue paint marks to tell their owner. Then light played along a ridge, tracing the architecture of the fell. Dark cloud loured and rays of light probed beneath and gleamed off the RIver Kent as it flowed south past a sheep fold. Floodlight softened the grasses, turned them gold. A magical day.
Our track headed north, climbing to Nan Bield Pass. Once, I had watched a gathering off Kentmere Common as dogs and farmers rounded up their flocks and brought them in single file down to the farms below. We turned off the track and headed for the Ullstone. In structure, it resembled a petrified version of the fly agaric we had recently found: a great boulder capping a stout stem. We sat on the rock-base beneath the cap, looking down the sweep of Kentmere. Water tracks and tributaries of Ullstone Gill drained off the fell-side. A deep cleft gouged into rock, a gill with waterfall. A scree-chute told of former quarrying. This is slate country. Hard to tell scree from quarry- spoil and close by the Ullstone sat a smaller boulder, sharp-edge and split from frost- action perhaps. Man-made and natural are indistinct here.
Fly agaric has hallucinogenic properties, as I said earlier. Later in the day, we reached a barn below Tongue Scar and the flying rowan was heavy with scarlet berries. Rowan has magic properties. A flying-rowan, rooted neither in earth nor heaven, a flogron, is super-magic in Norse mythology. Trace the arc of the rowan bough down into the rock. The trunk of the rowan pierces down through the cleft in the rock, to the earth.
I fear I dabble too deeply in magic and I'm overthrown by it. I'm jinxed. I have a splendid cache of landscape images from Kentmere and they have a mind of their own. They flip upside down, sky to the ground, and will not be righted. No matter how I try. Nothing for it, I'll have to find a magician.
I fear I dabble too deeply in magic and I'm overthrown by it. I'm jinxed. I have a splendid cache of landscape images from Kentmere and they have a mind of their own. They flip upside down, sky to the ground, and will not be righted. No matter how I try. Nothing for it, I'll have to find a magician.
The Ullstone, propped like a mushroom on its stipe . Below, The Ullstone near the source of Ullstone Gill. With a smaller erratic foreground.
Two images of the Ullstone, propped like a mushroom on its stipe. And a sheepfold beside the River Kent with the spoil of Jumb Quarry sunlit left of the river. And the sheepfold looking north, up the Kentmere Valley.
Sunlight flows down from Rainsborrow Cove and over the crag, a glimmering light. Above us are Yoke, Ill Bell, Frostwick, Mardale Ill Bell, Harter Fell, Kentmere Pike and Shipman Knotts: high points on the Kentmere Round. But the mysteries, the secret lives, are hidden away in coves and disused quarries where peregrines breed on the crags, where roseroot tumbles down a rock-face, where saxifrage and violets grow and where the silence of the place belies its history, the slate quarries and spoil heaps.
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