Cloudscapes from Scout Scar

Clouds mass over the Lake District Fells

Encircled by fells, Scout Scar is all about vistas.  On a day of clarity it's spectacular.  Clouds rise up over the fells and a wet summer ends  with resplendent cloudscapes.  The day is still and warm with a herbal fragrance and there's a play of light through  clouds which form and reform, illuminating the earth for a moment, then casting pools of shadow.  Fair-weather sunlit clouds against a foil of blues.   Grasshopper are loud, raven are vocal and goldfinch flit through skeletal ash-trees. Ash die-back  looks stark  when trees should be in full leaf.   

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Felwort  flowers are sure to be open to the sun so I seek them out at the special locations where I've always found them.   My best site has two plants with white flowers-   Autumn gentian or Felwort can be either mauve or white.   Later, I find a second with white flowers and trumpet-shaped buds of purple-pink. The plant grows in short turf but it's small and not showy so you need to search for it  The flowers are lovely and it's a speciality of the limestone grassland of Scout Scar and Whitbarrow.
The butterfly of the day is a female brimstone in a favoured spot thick with bramble bushes - it's a good year for blackberries. An​d the butterflies will overwinter in ivy which swathes the trees.

Photography means drawing with light.   And these images  are made of transient light and colour.  In flight, that brimstone can seem somewhere between yellow and white.  When she settles her underwings show green,  dazzling sunlight bleaches them white.   Those white gentian showed pinkish-mauve last summer.  What  determines  the colour?  As for the skies, the cloudscape was constantly changing with subtleties of form and colour.  A dome of blue opening up overhead with the mass of cloud gathering over the fells.  The most intense blue is always high above, fading to pallor on the horizon.