It seems a while since I took this group of pictures, but life got in the way, with a few tribulations that involved a boiler sparking out, however that is now behind me, so I have now set myself the task of trying to write up what happened on that weekend.
It was a day that began with the typical early morning mist that signifies Autumn, but warmed up remarkably quickly to present blue skies and puffy white Cumulus clouds which gave Hay Lane a full appreciation of its name, this was the Big Country, largely flat, though with hills rising and falling along a largely straight road, so I pulled over to capture the hill itself and later, the small hamlet that had grown up around a farm and small pond. I wandered with my long lens into the undergrowth beyond the pond on the offchance there might be some wildlife lurking in the scrub or thicket, and did catch a fleeting sight of a dragonfly and a butterfly, and noted the raindrops still on the long grass from the night before. I soon wandered back to the edge of the pond where I was pleasantly surprised by the clarity of the water and the numbers of small fish.
As I wandered back towards my car, I fell into conversation with one of the hamlet’s inhabitants who said I might be interested in capturing one of his sunflowers which had started life with just one flower head, but as the summer progressed had developed green towards its centre and then its edge to produce a total of four flower heads all conjoined. He invited me to see other flowers and also apparently a cluster of twenty four self-set sunflowers. It turns out he had been a Seed Merchant’s lorry driver before retiring to this quiet rural spot miles from anywhere. After a stroll through his garden chatting and my taking pictures, he set off with his wife and I continued to Stagsden which if I understand the sign I saw had once been known as Stachedene.
As I wandered around its church I noted that when the clouds drew across the sun, the angle was very well suited to capturing the building lit and some trees in shadow, but also the clouds were gathering more and so the chances of getting a shot were steadily diminishing. I did succeed in the end.
I then headed back out into the countryside and spotted a dried up pond with a large Weeping Willow, well that is the wrong order – I spotted the Willow and the depression and assumed a pond, but found it dried up. I drove then to the weak bridges at Oakley and the weir on the The Great Ouse, and it was there that I heard the distinctive sound of an older engine and just managed to grab a shot of this red car with its horizontally-opposed twin engine. I completed this trip by wandering quietly along a path and under a fallen tree towards the weir. It was interesting to note it had obviously been decided to leave the tree over the path, which probably gave great entertainment to children playing here.
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