Sunset over the Shire

It was a lovely day today - clear and cold. We had to take the dogs to the groomer in Stratford this morning so there was no time for sunrise photographs, but I was hopeful of a sunset shot if the weather held. In the event there was too much cloud - at the moment I took this the sun should have been disappearing behind Bredon Hill, which is the murky mass in the distance on the far left of this shot - but the colours and cloud forms were so pretty that I was happy anyway. 

Though a shot as wide as this does odd things to the perspective, you might have spotted from the trees in the near foreground that I was standing on the top of a steep hill; there is an excellent view from there across the Vale of Evesham, but every car that passed the static caravan park and climbed the ridge reminded me of how high up I was. The ground was muddy and slippery and I was feeling extremely cold and slightly vertiginous, so I didn't stay up there for very long - as soon as I was confident that the sky colour was fading I slid gracefully back down to the car and came home to thaw out.

The river in this shot is the Avon, which is flowing from the right of the photo towards the left. It takes a rather odd course here, making a sharp S-bend, and splitting to form two islets: one to the right of the caravan park (largely masked by trees), and one to the left. Also somewhere behind those trees is a weir, which I will try to find and photograph one day. The silvery structures on the left of shot are glass houses and polytunnels, and though I'm not totally sure I think that the greyish-blue area on the far right is polythene sheeting, laid on the ground to speed the process of warming it for crop sowing.