favourite photos: summer 2017

It’s been a miserable summer in northern England. I’ve done very little cycling, and even though I’ve taken more than 900 photographs during the past five months, nothing I’ve taken has stood out. What follows is the best I could manage this summer.

I had intended to produce a companion piece to Mellow Yellow while I was in Penrith, but I couldn’t find enough yellow flowers. However, here are two local examples. I first wrote about ragwort in 2015, when I came across a plant that was infested with cinnabar moth caterpillars. This is a particularly large specimen of this poisonous plant, which I came across on Wetheriggs Lane:

Another stridently yellow plant is golden rod. I photographed this stand in the Thacka Beck Nature Reserve (note the pinkish flowers in the middle distance on the left of the path; this is rose bay willow herb):

The next photo was also taken in the Thacka Beck Nature Reserve. It shows a clump of purple loosestrife on the edge of the pond that is the centrepiece of the reserve. Other clumps can be seen on the far bank.

The next three photos were taken within the space of two and a half hours. The first was taken from my bedroom window at precisely 6am. It took three photos to get it all in, and I had hoped to stitch them together to form a single image, but the alignment wasn’t quite right. This is the middle photo of the three:

I took the second photo in this sequence at 7.43am, shortly after setting off on my morning walk. There is more cloud than in the previous photo, but the lineations in the clouds are still visible.

The third photo was taken at 8.26am from Castletown Bridge looking down Cromwell Road. I don’t know whether the two lines in the sky meet behind the hawthorn tree.

It’s a long time since I’ve seen a full, ground-to-ground rainbow, but this one was in front of me once as I walked down Thacka Lane to the nature reserve (the reverse of my normal morning walk):

Finally, I’ve included a photo of an oil stain. This one was more than a metre in diameter, probably because it formed under a parked car. Such stains when seen on open sections of road are invariably much smaller, perhaps as little as a single drop of oil.