Partrishow

...a remote church in the Black Mountains, with the shrine of St Issui, and, in the valley below, a holy well. A good place, and I like going there. There's all sorts of things going on in the picture, but I'll leave them for you to find and put your own story on. (Click on the picture to see it large)

A picture for the year's turning. I've been thinking of how to do this picture for ages, and then just got stuck in and hoped for the best. There are bits of it I'm really happy with, and I'm also happy that I've started the new year with a new picture. Even though it meant I was very antisocial on New Year's Eve.

I've got some prints done, and they are available in my Etsy shop. There are two sizes, small (roughly A4) and large (roughly A3). 

There's a Fibonacci spiral in there somewhere, by the way!

three more hares

three hares , originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

I went back to this picture because I wondered what it would look like with some colour inked in.

And now we know.

We were walking along the coast at Clevedon yesterday. Here is a wild onion, growing on the limestone grassland above Poets Walk. Andrew Sartain thinks that it's a local variant on the Bristol Onion, and I'm sure he's right.

You can see some distinctive mountains in Wales, from the Clevedon seafront. Here, for instance, is the Skirrid, or Ysgyryd Fawr, a very neat little mountain just north of Abergavenny.

get thee up into the high mountain

Christmas Day dawned with not a cloud in the sky, so I headed over to Wales and Ysgyryd Fawr, just north of Abergavenny. I was up there last year, too, but it was misty and windy then. Today it was cold but clear, although the massif of the Black Mountains, just across to the west, had a great fug of fog on top of it, and the Blorenge looked like it was wearing a hat of the same stuff.

There were other walkers, and we exchanged Merry Christmases as our paths crossed, sharing that sense of felicity in being there.

But it was a bit cold for eating lunch (a big lump of tortilla in my bag) on the top, so I drank my flask of hot chocolate and came down again.

Next stop Skenfrith, and St Bridget's church.


I love this church. The windows add gentle hues of yellow and green to the sunlight on the floor's memorial inscriptions. Restoration has touched lightly upon it. And I had the place to myself, in a sense.