favourite photos: summer 2022

At the end of each summer spent in the UK, I compile a collection of what I consider the most interesting photos that I’ve taken during this period. As usual, I haven’t included any photos that I’ve used to illustrate other posts. I usually compile these collections before leaving, but this summer Paula and I did several new bike rides, and by the time I’d written the accounts of these rides, it was time to leave. Then, having tested positive for covid-19, I wanted to write about our travails first. However, here, finally, is my photo selection for summer 2022.

I take a lot of photos of flowers, but I was particularly struck by a tight clump of yellow flowers on a wall at the start of the path that leads from Gilwilly to the Thacka Beck Nature Reserve. I haven’t seen anything else like it; it almost looks as though it was planted here deliberately by someone:

I also take a lot of photos of graffiti, although I have to say that Penrith isn’t notable for the quality of its graffiti. However, I found this example, on the unnamed road that leads from Brunswick Terrace to the ‘wooden bridge’, wryly amusing. It had been painted over a few weeks after I took the photo:

I don’t know who placed this foxy animal doll on a gate next to the road that leads from Thacka to Newton Rigg. Presumably, it is guarding whatever is in the field behind:

I don’t seem to see many oil spills nowadays, but I always photograph them when I do see them:

At the beginning of July, Paula and I decided to follow a public footpath to Stainton, a large village a couple of miles west of Penrith. The landscape here has changed beyond recognition in the past 60 years, but the footpath still exists. This is how it crosses the motorway nowadays:

The continuation of the footpath is through a wheat field:

This ‘tag’ is on the opposite side of the railway bridge over the motorway. It is very basic in execution, with none of the artistic flourishes that are standard in the graffiti that I’ve seen in places like Manchester:

Another public footpath that we follow regularly is between Beacon Edge and Carleton, where I took this photo of Highland cattle taking a rest, with the Pennines in the distance:

Whenever we cycle south of Penrith, we ride down Frenchfield, which is a dead end for motor traffic, and pass underneath the A66 via this short tunnel:

When I was growing up, the path to Stainton (see above) started from the end of Myers Lane, which runs alongside the railway. This first section still exists, but nowadays it leads only to the Penrith Industrial Estate. This photo was taken near the start of the path and shows a large stand of rose bay willow herb, a common flower on roadsides and railway embankments:

This summer, I took quite a lot of photos of the sun rising or setting from the top floor of our house, which I intend to compile into a separate post at some stage. This is the only sunset photo that I took away from home, on my way home after an afternoon in the pub. If you’re familiar with Penrith, you can probably guess which pub I’d been drinking in:

As you’ve probably already realized, I like to take photos that are, on the face of it, quite bizarre. The next photo was taken near the Friargate end of Bishop’s Yard and shows what is ostensibly a private garden. The sign next to the straw-stuffed figure on the left reads ‘A Faithful Friend’. I had no idea what the sign on the bench means, but when I googled it, I discovered that Utrinque Paratus (‘Ready for Anything’) is the motto of the Parachute Regiment:

Although we covered a lot of new ground cycling this summer, we cycled to Ullswater on just one occasion. I took this photo as we descended from Bennet Head Farm:

We did cycle to Howtown, on the far side of the lake, for the first time on this ride, which is where I took this photo of a solitary duck:

I photographed this large stand of golden rod in the Thacka Beck Nature Reserve:

Our house in Penrith is in an area of Victorian terraces, and I took the next photo from our back door. It shows a large number of starlings on the roofs, chimney pots and TV aerials of the houses in the next street:

The next photo was also taken in the Thacka Beck Nature Reserve. It shows Paula trying to get a close-up photo of one of the cows that had been brought in for the summer to graze the central area, which is fenced off. This practice had been suspended for the past two years, presumably because of covid restrictions. I don’t know what breed these cows are, but we’ve been seeing more and more in the past few years. We just refer to them as ‘banded cows’:

I don’t usually include videos in these collections, but after taking the previous photo, I turned my attention to the large number of ducks on the pond:

The next photo was taken from Langwathby Bridge and is a view of the River Eden downstream from the bridge:

…while this photo was taken on Langwathby village green. It shows a bracket fungus on the remains of a tree stump next to the bench where we always stop for a brief rest when cycling through this village:

The next image is a telephoto of Blencathra taken from the summit of the Beacon. This mountain is visible from many of the higher parts of Penrith, although the Beacon is the only place from where such an unimpeded view is possible:

We walked up the Beacon via what was the only path to the top when I was growing up, but there is now an access path that starts near the Roundthorn Hotel. We descended via this path, and on the way I spotted this impressive example of bracket fungus by the side of the path. There is also a cluster of toadstools on the bottom left, and the tiny grey/white dots to the left of the hollow in the tree stump also appear to be toadstools:

The next four photos were taken from the footpath between Beacon Edge and Carleton, from where I’d taken the photo of Highland cattle earlier (above). The first is a general view of the path, with two horses on the left and some Highland cattle on the right. The second shows a Highland calf suckling, while the third and fourth are close-ups of the horses, which were very friendly—they liked being stroked, which may be why they were standing next to the path in the first place:

I don’t often take general photos of Penrith town centre, but then I rarely get a chance to stand in the middle of the road to take a photo, and I’d never previously noticed that the steeple of the former Congregational Church in Duke Street is visible through ‘the narrows’, the reason why Penrith was such a notorious bottleneck in pre-motorway days. I don’t know why there was no traffic on this occasion:

The last photo in this collection—and the last that I took in the UK before we departed for Hong Kong—was taken in Manchester Airport. It appears to be some kind of advert, although I don’t recognize the make of car. The slogan ‘It’s a steal’ seems to imply that the two humanoids suspended upside down are in the process of trying to steal the car:

favourite photos: summer 2018

The title of this post may seem slightly odd, given that it’s November already, but for the past two years I’ve published a collection of photographs to coincide with my annual sojourn in the UK, and I’ve had to delay my departure for Hong Kong by four weeks this year. There is another difference this year: previous collections have focused exclusively on my time in Penrith, but this year I’ve included photos from visits to Cologne and Manchester in June. As usual, the photos are presented in chronological order.

I’ll start with two photos that I took in a park near our hotel in Cologne:

Nothing out of the ordinary; I just like the reflections.

Paula took this photo of a stone toad in the same park:

The next photo is of the cast iron side door of a church in Cologne. It depicts episodes from the Bible:

Starting at the bottom and working up, left to right, this is what I think these images represent:

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden / Noah’s Ark / Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego being cast into the fiery furnace / Cain and Abel / Moses and the Ten Commandments / baptism of Jesus / ? /the Last Supper / birth of Jesus…

I have no idea what the two images in the top right panel depict. Do you agree with my interpretation of the others?

I’ve included the next photo because I like the juxtaposition of secular and sacred. The exotic building in the background is Groß St Martin, one of the twelve Romanesque churches to be seen in the mediæval part of Cologne. The latest date for its construction is circa AD 1250.

My final photo from Cologne presents something of a mystery. The original image was a fairly unremarkable piece of street art, but why has someone spray-painted ‘HACF LTN’ over the key section of the image? I can only guess, but it seems likely that some kind of encroachment by the original artist on someone else’s turf is involved. Whatever the truth, the addition is as obvious a piece of vandalism as you’re ever likely to see:

You may have some difficulty interpreting my first photo from Manchester:

It shows reflections in a glass-walled building in the city centre.

The subject of the next photo is more obvious. It’s a Victorian railway bridge spanning the Rochdale Canal:

I didn’t have time to take a closer look at Manchester Cathedral, but these photos, taken from a distance, are a reminder that I should rectify this omission the next time I’m in the city:

This is another photo of a section of the Rochdale Canal:

I did think of turning this one upside down. Or is it already upside down? Note the graffiti along the towpath.

My final photo from Manchester is of an unusual modern building—unusual in that this is a city where most of the interesting buildings date from the nineteenth century.

A few years ago, I wrote about my discovery of caterpillars of the cinnabar moth on a clump of ragwort, and ever since I’ve been looking to see whether I could find more, without success. Until this summer. I took the following photo in my next-door neighbour’s garden:

I rarely photograph oil/petrol spills nowadays, but this one was so intense that I took several shots. Here are two:

Although such pollution incidents can be spectacularly colourful, it’s important to bear in mind that the pollutants will eventually end up in the sea!

I always seem to find at least one interesting scene to record in the Thacka Beck Nature Reserve, and this year has been no exception:

These are organically reared longhorn cattle that are brought in to graze the central marshy area during the summer months.

I don’t often walk past the location of the next image, but I swear that I’d never seen this statue of a bear before this year:

The odd thing is that it appears to have been carved from a tree trunk that is still rooted in the ground!

I rarely get a chance to photograph sunsets, but I took this photo on my way home from the pub one Sunday afternoon:

It would probably have made for a better photo 15–20 minutes earlier.

Finally, I include a couple of autumnal photos. I’m usually back in Hong Kong by the time leaves start to drop off the trees in earnest:

The first photo is a view of the avenue of trees in Castle Park leading down to the main entrance, which is also Penrith’s memorial to the two world wars of the twentieth century (the memorial to the Boer War is located behind the camera). The second photo is a view of Penrith’s Methodist church from the grounds of Christ Church.

manchester miscellany

Although I’ve already posted five collections of graffiti that I photographed back in June in Manchester, these were all in locations where large numbers of graffiti had been painted in a relatively small area, and there were other places where perhaps there was only a single graffito. Some of these were well worth recording too, especially the first image:

I can’t help but see this as a row of semi-reclining creatures, possibly human, although that probably wasn’t the artist’s intention. The figure third from the left reminds me of an amorphous snowman wearing a bobble hat, despite the colour. Unfortunately, this was another graffito that I couldn’t fit into a single shot.

I spotted the next work on its own a short distance before I reached the hoarding that I described in The Writing on the Fence. There is nothing exceptional about the writing style, although I do wonder why the black outlining on the letters adjoining the mask is broken. Malign influence? Although I can actually read what’s written, it’s meaningless to me.

I came across an undeveloped area west of Oxford Street that was surrounded by walls and fences bearing graffiti, but I didn’t consider most of these worth recording. However, the next three artworks were a resounding exception. The first appears to be completely abstract, but the more I look at it, I wonder if I’m seeing, or imagining, concrete images.

The object obscuring part of the image in the bottom left of the picture is a lightweight tent. I saw several in similar locations around the city, and I did wonder whether the occupant was a homeless Mancunian, or merely a backpacker looking for a cheap option.

Around the corner to the right from the previous image, there are two more artworks side by side:

It’s worth looking closely at each work in more detail. Both are mostly abstract, but there are faces that were obviously intentional. Of course, once you see faces in paintings like these, you see them where they weren’t intended. And both feature the glinting light motif, which I’ve commented on before:

The red face in the next image doesn’t appear to have been painted by the artist who is responsible for the blue faces that I’ve commented on previously, although they are similar. The central graffito is what I now describe as ‘routine’, but the right-hand tag is much more nuanced—and colourful!

Finally, I’ve included this image precisely because all the lines are crude. Yet despite this apparent limitation, the lettering stands out extremely well:

This is my sixth and final report on graffiti in Manchester. I didn’t go looking for any of it, but in simply wandering around the city, this is what I saw.

more graffiti from manchester
The Writing on the Fence
Lost Horizon
Some Consolation: Part 1
Some Consolation: Part 2
A Graffiti Mystery