A glimmer of sun before the mist!

Waking this morning it felt good to have Christmas out of the way and to have a whole day to do my own thing. By lunchtime a glimmer of sun drew me outside to take photographs around the pond which, at the moment, looks like slimy green and brown bouillabaisse. The forecast seemed to imply that sun was highly unlikely all week so I definitely needed to make the most of it.

A few items in the garden seemed worth photographing: the prominent leaves of the Euphorbia with its droplets of rain; the orange berries of the iris foetidissima a huge plant which grows through a tiny crack in the stone pavement; the shining blue pot that holds the Acer Palmatum; the stone face that peers with blank eyes from the edge of the pond. Even the delicate remains of an apple after the pith has been eaten by blackbirds caught my eye.

The slight hint of sun made me decide to take my first post Christmas walk but even as I was donning boots, jackets, hat and gloves a white mist was rolling down on the hillside above the village. Well mist can add a touch of mystery and magic to photographs so undeterred I set off up the hill. Though I hadn't gone more than a few hundred yards before the mist closed in, putting a temporary stop to my photography.

Ours is an interesting post industrial landscape as well as a farming one. As I turned away from the road to cross a very unnatural looking field, which during the 70's had been an opencast coal mine, I thought about the wealth of footpaths in the area and how they once connected the huge mining community that lived in isolated farms, small holdings and hamlets, to the `day holes' where men worked to dig the coal that fuelled our industrial revolution. Coal, water power and iron ore were all to be found locally which in turn led to Sheffield becoming such an important centre of steel production.

Today's blip shows part of the bridle path from Bagger Wood Road to Stainborough Fold. Apparently the holly bushes, which are plentiful on our lanes and bridle-paths, were grown to feed cattle and sheep in medieval Europe. I wonder if even our animals have grown soft - I don't see farmers feeding this kind of fodder today.

Postscript: I spotted two significant birds as I walked today, a sparrow hawk flying low (below the fog?) across the sheep field and a snipe which rose up from near the hedge bottom close to the end of the bridleway.