The New Guys

Some  pictures to celebrate Spring, which has come in early and lusty this year to the area around my home village.

Up and under

A lamb suckles on a farm overlooking the Creedy Valley

Devon Bank

Wild primroses beside the byway leading down to Shaky Bridge.

Spring Greens

Lush lawns, leafing trees and budding gardens in West Sandford

Bursting

A horse chestnut bud, Sandford Millennium Green

Flotilla

A dozen ducklings on the pond, Sandford Millennium Green.

Wood Anemones

A common wild flower in these parts, I'm happy to say.

The not-so-new guy and the positively old guy

Me and him at Shaky Bridge (pic by Annie B).

Bliss

I love the expressions of the ewes centre left and bottom right.

Hi there

Confident lambs walk towards the man with a wolf on a string. 

Quiet flows the Creedy

Now the winter swells have fallen, the doggy playground of Creedy Beach has been revealed, albeit altered by the surge of the river.

The Promise of Summer

The entrance to a garden, with glimpses beyond, is always fascinating. This is West Sandford; the cobble setts are quite common in the parish
  

Home front - scenes around Sandford

Rose & Crown Hill, from The Linch, autumn 2013

The Village from the blasted oaks in Creedy Park

Shute Cottage in Summer 2013

West Lodge Cross, Autumn

St Swithuns, Winter 2010-11

Busting out

You could feel the tension in the hedgerows for weeks. Buds balled like fists, sullenly awaiting awakening warmth. Now, just a week of winds swinging to the south, and the banks are spangled with shades of yellow, cream and white.

The first time I ever saw stitchwort was on a holiday in the south-west, when it formed a patriotic colour combo with campion and bluebells in the banks of the lanes, threading its way through the tangle of roots and branches that hold them together. I was so taken with it that I grew it in our garden in North Somerset, where it seemed like an exotic alien.

Daffs at Priorton Barton

I love the scent of primroses, as well was their geniality and colour, and am not averse
to falling to my knees and burying my face in them

First flush of blossom I've seen this year

The Ridgeway: winter

The village I live in is strewn over the steepish slopes of a south-facing hill. The roads that radiate from the Village Square (actually, more of a Triangle, to be geometric about it) basically box the compass. Each has their attractions, but whichever way I leave I'm quite likely to try to come back along the quiet road that runs along the top of the ridge that runs east to west just under a mile north of the village. There's not much sense to it as a road: it doesn't really go anywhere, just strolls along, following the contours, with access roads to the farms in the valleys to either side. All the times I've been up there, I hardly ever saw a vehicle, save for farm traffic.

The fact that it gets called The Ridgeway on the Ordnance Survey map testifies that it originated as a path that was made by and for prehistoric foot (and animal) traffic, when lowland Britain was largely wooded and the hilltops, with views either side, were both the safest and most convenient way to travel. That's what makes this lane such a joy to ramble along, and to photograph. It's not just the 360° horizon, although that helps; there's the sinuousity of the road itself, lined as it is in winter by the whited bones of square-cut hedges, and the bleak redness of the ploughed fields and the acid green of the high pastures to either side, while the low winter sun spreads a butterscotch light down the valleys.

And of course, there is a deep sense of history there, a feeling that in tramping along, I'm joining the cycle of the centuries, adding my anonymity to the pile, but I'm not sure I captured that.

The Ridgeway writhes across the landscape

Winter crops just starting to show green

Beyond the gate, views into deeper Devon, looking north-east

The way to NewBuildings

In late autumn the view is dominated by tree colour

I can't believe I forgot to mention the silence, the deep silence that folds its wings around you.
The occasional complaining rook is the noisiest thing up there; occasionally
the sound of some engine far enough away to be a purr

Once the colour is gone, it's the shape and choreography of the trees that catches the eye

The rough textured soil, showing the warp and weft of the plough, makes a pretty patchwork with the silky pastures

I love the autochthonous way the farmhouses sit in the landscape, part of it, logical.

Why are we here?

Most people who come to Devon do so for its spectacular coastlines and equally rugged moorland scenery, as well as the picture-postcard villages, but since I came to live here, in a working village close to the centre of the county, I have come to appreciate its particularly 
feminine beauty, all pillowy hills, lush fertility and looking fine by moonlight.

Chip used to drive us to our favourite spots, but since she died I've rediscovered the joys of walking, striding out into the network of lanes around the village, which lift from lines on a map as they rise and fall, reflecting the choices of the walkers who first found their way and trod them into being, hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. There's no sense of streets being imposed on a landscape, as they so often are in cities, and the illusion of them being set into the earth is heightened by the slick of red mud that coats them (and, inevitably, the shoes of even the most fastidious of walkers – among whose austere ranks I am definitely not to be counted) through the winter. While the high banks and hedges lining most lanes hide the countryside from those in cars, I soon found that even the deepest, the ones that remain totally unsunblessed through much of the winter, there is fascination to be found in the banks themselves and the vegetation that swarms over them, while every field-entrance reveals a photo opportunity: and I've always loved a photo opportunity.

What makes Devon such a delight to photograph is the colour palette. Away from the grey granite moors, most of the county is red sandstone, laid down when this area was a shallow tropical sea (in the Devonian period – I'm pretty sure that it's the only English county with a geological epoch named after it). The earth is a startling red as a result, a rich chestnut-going-on-chocolate when it is ploughed and wet, almost salmon-pink when hot and dry and dusty, and many shades between. It's fertile, too, and the climate is mild and wet, so the grass and trees are a lush green – in fact, several hundred shades of lush green – and spangled in season with flowers, berries and other fruit; apples do particularly well here.  Most of the weather comes straight in off the Atlantic, so the skies are a clear, deep, unpolluted blue, and the clouds particularly white. 

Even well inland, the render on the cob houses are painted with seafront colours, and often topped with thatch in shades from strident yellow when new to damp and saggy browns, patched with mounds of emerald moss, when it ages; all that water that falls from the sky finds its way out in silvery runnels and rivulets and chuntering, leaping streams and occasional temporary earth-red lakes; and there is an extraordinary profusion of wild flowers grow in the roadside banks and field hedges to fill in the rest of the spectrum. On a sunny day in any season, lovely landscape photos sit up and beg to be taken virtually everywhere your eye falls.

Although the main point of this blog will be to show photos I take rambling around with Scrap, here's some I made earlier, mostly on holidays:

Reed thatch is a darker brown than straw

When eulogizing the elements of the picturesque, I forgot to mention the churches, most made of local stone.
The view, from Mamhead I think, is of the estuary of the Exe and the Channel beyond

This is my 'home' hill, the one that I can see from the bottom of my street. I love the way that the ploughing and the shadows of the trees and hedges show its rippling contours, and the way its whole aspect changes, not just from season to season, but from hour to hour. The picture was taken with a long lens (the hill is a mile away) so there is a lot of foreshortening; the trees in the middle third of the picture are only halfway to the hill