Tag Archives: england

Blue Door

Blue Door
“Blue Door” — Blue door, brick wall, cobblestone street, Shrewsbury, England.

I made this photograph the English town of Shrewsbury. (More about that place below.) If a photograph is “about” something, this one is about more than one thing. To be sure, it is a record of a specific spot in a particular town, a doorway to a building with a sign for “Alfred Mansell & Co. Auctioneers.”It is perhaps a record of some history, too, given the old brick walls, the weathered doorway, and the cobblestones at the bottom of the frame. But most of all, I think it is about color, the “temperature” contrast between the warm tones of partially-sunlit bricks and the very cool blues of the doorway in shadow.

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Wheat Field, The Cotswolds

Wheat Field, The Cotswolds
“Wheat Field, The Cotswolds” — Trails cross a large wheat field in the Cotswolds.

At the end of May and beginning of June we waked for a week through England’s Cotswolds district hills. Our route took us from town to town, and each night we stayed in civilized accommodations. Yes, this is a lot different that the Sierra Nevada backpacking that I’ve done for decades! This area is, it seems, vacation country for a lot of Britons, and some of those towns can be pretty busy. After a day walking the green hills and woods, it can be something of a shock to enter them — but then again, there were comfortable beds and good food!

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Old Tree and Cotswalds Woods

Old Tree and Cotswalds Woods
“Old Tree and Cotswalds Woods” — Old tree in a clearing in a Cotswolds forest.

I have written about my fascination with the very old and often very large trees that we saw on our weeklong spring walk in England’s Cotswolds. Many of the large trees stand apart, often in open areas or in rows between fields and pastures. This one, however, was close to a managed forest of smaller trees, which I presume are destined to become lumber when they grow larger.

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Cotswolds Sky

Cotswolds Sky
“Cotswolds Sky” — Cloud-laced sky above Cotswolds trees and fields.

We didn’t have blue skies every day on our spring walk in the Cotswolds, but when the weather was clear it was often beautiful. We did a weeklong walk there on the last few days of May and first few of June. Yes, there was rain — though nothing approaching a deluge, aside from a few minutes on our last day. But on this morning we had a spectacular sky, blue and streaked with clouds, as we walked through this area of fields and pastures.

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