Mist flowing south down the Lyth Valley and out into Morecambe Bay A bright moon last night with clear skies so a hard frost lingered in shadows through Sunday. I wrapped up warm against the winter chill and shed garments up on Scout Scar to sit in the sun contemplating a sea of mist.
The quality of light was different, with a strong sun from early in the morning, Toward Morecambe Bay, Arnside Knott rose dark above dazzling white mist.
Below Burnbarrow Scar, below the cliff, there stands a single ash tree bordering the river of mist flowing down the Lyth Valley and overflowing in translucent swirls, an evanescent ghost tree. The low winter sun takes time to rise high enough in the sky to reach down into the Lyth Valley. By late morning a glimmering faerie light illuminates a pasture white with frost and raked with long shadows, with grazing sheep aglow in fleeting sunlight. The fringe of woodland is indistinct and mysterious, in muted colour, a secret place.
From high on the ridge I could make out dark islets and a discrete plume of mist rising from the horizontal layers, a bright billowing cloud. I know this landscape intimately but mist is disorientating. My steadfast landmarks were Burnbarrow Scar and White Scar, Whitbarrow, and Arnside Knott. A wide river of mist flowed down the Lyth Valley and over Morecambe Bay. A mist of intensifying brightness, fluid and mobile, with cloud bubbling up from its layers and shadowy insubstantial trees. .
Looking toward Whitbarrow I glimpsed a ghost tree down in the Lyth Valley. And a finger of land with a farmhouse in a cluster of trees. Until I see it on a clearer day I cannot locate it. I like the transfiguration. By mid-day it’s warm enough to sit and contemplate the scene.
Out of the sun, shadowy frost pockets held their winter chill from dawn to dusk. But where the sun touched down the feel of the earth beneath my feet changed as frost melted and there was a slithery layer of mud on my walk home.
Out of the sun, shadowy frost pockets held their winter chill from dawn to dusk. But where the sun touched down the feel of the earth beneath my feet changed as frost melted and there was a slithery layer of mud on my walk home.
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