Seasons of Mist

On Tuesday, with the boys at a birthday party and their sister dining at her friends’ house, I found myself at the station on the way home from work with a couple of hours to kill. It wasn’t raining, although it had earlier. In the woods with the steady drip from the trees it might as well have been. It was damp and murky however.

I followed the edge of the wetlands at Leighton Moss, and since the vistas were obscured by the gloom, focused on the close at hand.

I’ve posted a few pictures of bindweed flowers, but this one had twined itself up a sapling, almost out of reach, so that I was forced to shoot from an unusual angle. So much the better.

In the hedgerow many leaves are beginning to turn. But adjacent trees of the same species can be in complete contrast to each other – one with leaves edged with brown, the other green and vibrant and apparently unaffected by the proximity of Autumn. Sometimes the contrast could be seen on the same tree. On one Hazel there were…

…leaves in camouflage motley, but also pale bright leaves which looked like they had just emerged from a bud…

 

From Leighton Moss I took the path that skirts the edge of the Golf Course. It follows the Trough a natural fault line which crosses the area and here manifests itself as a small cutting closed in by rock walls and roofed by the leaves and branches of nearby trees. It’s said that in the time of the Border Rievers the locals hid their livestock here from the marauding Scots. Where the path leaves the Golf Course it passes through a gate into Trowbarrow Nature Reserve, formerly a quarry. Fittingly, the gate resembles a Karribiner…

…which is appropriate, since the quarry is part owned by the BMC (British Mountaineering Council) and is very popular with climbers, and because the the gate is also a memorial to a climber.

Colourful Bramble leaves on the floor of Trowbarrow Quarry

The path from the Quarry took me onto Moss Lane which I followed to Haweswater.

Crab Apples in the woods near Haweswater.

Wildflowers in the meadow by Haweswater.

Turning Horse Chestnut leaf:

From Haweswater a path through Eaves Wood brought me home.

 

A woodland floor leaf.

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Yesterday I made an slight detour on the way home to try again to photograph the Spindle leaves.

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This morning it was misty and the grass was silvered with dew. As I walked to the station, the sun was low in the Eastern sky ahead making the mist was glowing orange. Behind the sky was already blue, a blue interrupted only by a luminous three-quarter Moon.

Having caught the earlier train home, I had time to put Sam into the baby carrier and whisk him off for a wander to the Cove and round the Lots. A few tractors were cutting the hay. Sam was delighted. He also enjoyed the lambs and chickens that we saw, whilst I seem to have been looking for spiders a lot recently: