Sunlit snow crystals and the cloud that made them Siberian weather comes from the east and the air-waves are fraught with warnings of the Snow Queen's coming. The skies over Cumbria are puzzling: an early expanse of sunlit blue slowly patterned with sombre clouds. On Scout Scar escarpment I watch snow-cloud sweep across the Lyth Valley until snowflakes swirl softly about me. Light fades and it's bitterly cold, far too cold to linger long.
On the escarpment, you're exposed to the wind and today's temperatures are zero even without wind-chill. Walking south toward Morecambe Bay, I'm unaware that wintry squalls are gathering to the north. The light fades and it's bitterly cold. Soft snowflakes float through the air. At the moment I photographed the Langdale Pikes they were the sole sunlit peaks on a horizon of fells.
Away from the escarpment and up on the ridge, the panorama reveals itself. All urbanity disappears and there's an illusory sense of miles and miles of unspoiled hill country: the Lake District Fells to the west, Morecambe Bay to the south, the Howgills and North Pennines to the east. There's no one else in the landscape, only solitude and peace. Sometimes it seems as if solitude and freedom were to the west in the snow-clouds of the Langdales but today it is here on Scout Scar.
Away from the escarpment and up on the ridge, the panorama reveals itself. All urbanity disappears and there's an illusory sense of miles and miles of unspoiled hill country: the Lake District Fells to the west, Morecambe Bay to the south, the Howgills and North Pennines to the east. There's no one else in the landscape, only solitude and peace. Sometimes it seems as if solitude and freedom were to the west in the snow-clouds of the Langdales but today it is here on Scout Scar.
Home again, before a wintry squall left a skylight window patterned with sunlit snowflakes. It amused me to photograph through the rapidly melting snow crystals to the clouds that spawned them and sunlit blue. Too late for the geometric beauty of the snow crystals as they trickled down the window pane.
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