Sunday 12 January 2014

Winter Wandering...

Yesterday was one of those glorious winter days - you know the ones I mean, sun out, blue sky, and a refreshing crispness in the air, a promise of colder weather yet to come, but for now, it's chilly but not unpleasant. Wanting a leg stretch, we donned walking boots (Mr EH) and Wellies (me) and took ourselves for a stomp off through the woods near to where we live.


We chose the long way round to get into the woods - walking first up the road a short way then across onto this playing field - and you can see why - as I said, G-L-O-R-I-O-U-S!  It rapidly became clear when we realised how sticky it was underfoot a) why MrEH's rugby match had been cancelled and b) that wellies were the sensible-foot-wear-of-the-day. *grin* Anyway, as we were on the playing field we decided to see if we could pinpoint where the Hazel tree was - easy to spot at this time of year...


...and not quite as advanced as last weekends dangly little beauties. Just a small tree this one, and it bore precisely NO nuts last year, so we've issued it with a "must try harder" warning and will check back in late summer to see how it's doing.  The next thing to catch my eye was this gorgeous little moss busily creating its own miniature world on a fallen tree....

 Amazing things, mosses and lichens - one year we returned from the Hebrides with more pictures of lichen than of almost anything else!  Enough of looking down though, let's look up instead...


Take one tree canopy, add a dollop of blue sky, and pinch of white cloud and a dusting of sunshine - just gorgeous and I just bet you can see why it caught my eye! I love these "looking straight up" photos - the trick to getting it to actually look like what you see when you just look up is to bring the camera to resting on your upturned face - never mind that you can't see the screen, trust me on this! Of course if you've got a camera with an *actual* viewfinder, so much the better.


A bit further on, and with the sun behind us now, we got the benefit of all those lovely long wintery shadows. And the colours! Brown from the tree trunks, flashes of bright green mainly from ivy, and the red of the fallen leaves.


Just to finish up, I persuaded the camera back into macro-mode for a quick shot of these rather soggy looking mushrooms. No idea what they are - although I suspect MrEH will identify them at some stage. Wouldn't it be nice if they were edible though! (And yes, before you say it, we are VERY careful about this and only ever eat anything we are absolutely 100% certain about!)

Robyn

4 comments:

dreamer said...

I enjoyed my walk through the wood with you,such beautiful photo's :) Wellie wearing has become compulsory round here as everywhere is just waterlogged.

Robyn said...

We walked our first stretch of Thames Path today and there were points when I wished I had my wellies on again then, too!

Wendy said...

This sounds like a lovely walk in some welcome sunshine, even though it was muddy. I'm fascinated by moss and lichens, too - and how they tell you about where you are and the quality of the environment.

Robyn said...

They really are incredible things wendy - some of those we see in the Hebrides are just incredible - there is a hill overlooking Stornoway, and at the top are a whole load of wind-battered trees just covered in this sort of furry grey lichen, they look totally surreal!