Autumn isn’t just about brown leaves. I think the yellow in this shot is blackthorn. The rest is heather, bracken, ivy and more. This was taken on the Côte d’Armor in Brittany, not far from Paimpol. And slightly further along the coast was this cliff. There’s a lot of green in there, for Autumn. By the way, this post marks a new direction for the blog – using it more like a notebook or sketchbook. So expect to find images […]
May was beautiful. But then June rumbled in, grey and grumpy. Temperatures barely made it to 20ºC, and that was on the good days. So the moment the sun peeked out, Trish and I knew we had to get on our bikes. Cycling is such a great way to see the landscape. You can cover more ground than you would walking, but you’re still fully immersed in the environment, in a way you never are in a car. And when […]
It’s only February, but as so often happens in this part of the world, we’ve been treated to a taste of what’s to come – spring. We still have the vicissitudes of March to survive. Yet pretty much every year, February treats us to a couple of weeks of mild, dry and – above all – bright weather. The birds are always fooled: they’re tweeting away like demented presidents. It inspires a sense of optimism and wellbeing. And you know […]
We’d started to convince ourselves we were in for another mild winter. Maybe it’s wishful thinking: life in a 16th-century house is easier when it’s not bone-chillingly cold. The last couple of days of 2016 disabused of that notion. Two days of exceptionally hard frosts turned the landscape into something resembling one of my recurring dreams. I’ll spare you the gory details of that… You don’t normally see a landscape this white without a fall of snow. Bizarrely – and […]