A foxglove in sunlight

 

Pre-Covid, our office used to be on the opposite side of the Nene from our current location.  I occasionally used to take the opportunity of a lunchtime walk along the riverbank and even more occasionally, if I had a longer break, I'd walk as far as the Boardwalks, the Local Nature Reserve.

Every now and again, I walked along the opposite side of the river, where there's a small railway museum (Railworld) next to the Nene Valley Railway. The sound and smell of the NVR's steam engines were just so evocative! When the 'Santa Specials' were running, we'd here the engines' whistles as a backdrop to our working day.  Railworld has a small nature reserve attached, and I just happened to be there one gloriously sunny day.  I couldn't resist trying to capture a view of this foxglove from a different angle.

#100Photos #6

Edible geology from Herts (12)

Hertfordshire Puddingstone - pebbles of flint in a fine matrix.

When I was knee-high to a tabby cat, my parents had the most wonderful atlas.  It was huge!  It was a good 50 cm high by 30 cm or more across and quite thick. That's not just me looking back at it through the eyes of a child, although I  remember having looked at it when I was about 7 or 8 years old.  I'd never seen anything like it!  I know it was that size because we lugged it around various RAF stations until (a) it was falling to bits and (b) it was given to me when I left home.  I eventually binned it when it had totally disintegrated. 

I really do wish that I'd kept some of the pages but the actual atlas was fairly much obsolete by then, and that was before - for example - the break up of the USSR!  That's another thing - when we were growing up, countries felt eternal and absolute.  Who knew just how ephemeral they are and how quickly local and world events can split them apart?

After the atlas proper, though, there were other equally interesting pages.   I remember a page about precious stones, with (of course!) pictures of a diamond, a ruby, an emerald and a sapphire and another page about semi-precious stones.  I also remember seeing another page with a sentence or two about Hertfordshire puddingstone and a good photo to illustrate it (If you are interested, by the way, the 'plums' in the pudding are flint and the 'pudding' they are in is a finer matrix of sand and silica cement).  

To me it's also a trip down memory lane.  I don't know why, but the name is one of those things that stuck with me from my childhood.  Perhaps it just sounded incongruous?  Anyway, it would make a great crossword clue.

#100 photos #5

The snakeskin wall

 "Why did you choose geology?" asked the tutor of each of us in turn. "Well, I suppose it was 'Once a rock chick, always a rock chick" I replied.  I actually had that as my tagline in my course's message board signature at the time, and one of the other students commented that she had seen me and the said tagline on there.

It was true for more than one given value of the word 'rock'. I had listened to a fair bit of it during my teens and early twenties; Deep Purple's 'Black Night' still puts a smile on my face (Incidentally, I know that it's a rather heretic view, but I actually prefer Steve Morse to Richie Blackmore).  I can take or leave quite a lot of rock nowadays – but I get really excited by a good orchestra(!)

I had become fascinated by geology and palaeontology in the very early parts of my degree (and I still am). I'd planned to study biology and ecology, but my foundation course was multi-disciplinary and I contracted a severe case of adult-onset geology. I love what every bit of an outcrop, feature, rock or even slab of polished stone can tell us about its history and I marvel at the sheer variety of geology. Don't even start me on the beauty of thin sections!  You can see why I loved this serpentinite.

Like all polished stone surfaces, this was a so-and-so to photograph, and I was ridiculously pleased with this photo when I looked at it on a large monitor when I got home. Serpentinite gets its name from the fact that it looks like snakeskin. You can see why! The slab in this photo is cladding a wall in Nottingham city centre. When you look at the surface of a well-polished serpentinite it can give the illusion that you're looking into a 3D structure and you can almost lose yourself in it.  That was especially true in this case - just look at the top-right quadrant of this photo.

A blog isn't the place to go into the petrology of serpentinites but, in a nutshell, they are formed by hydrous alteration of rock rich in iron and magnesium - this can happen at, for instance, mid-ocean ridges or some parts of subduction zones. And just look at how minerals have infilled where the water penetrated!  

100 photos #4

A solitude of sand

Holkham beach - wide, clean sands and and blue sky

I've only been to Holkham a few times, but it's one of my favourite National Nature Reserves and a place that speaks to my soul in a way I can't express in words. There are huge, wide, open beaches, pine woods, dune systems, agriculture and grazing marshes. I saw my first ever marsh harrier from a hide at Holkham, and to my everlasting delight I saw my first ever spoonbills there as well. I'd read about spoonbills but I had never expected to see any in the UK!

I remember playing frisbee on Holkham beach and I remember an amazing meal in a pub just across the coast road. I remember going bird watching there with friends at 6:00 o'clock one morning (a truly bizarre time to be out and about if you don't have to, if you ask me). I remember being dropped off at Wells-next-the-Sea one morning and spending the whole day walking around the reserve without seeing a single other person until I walked into the pub at the end of the day. I remember getting sunburned on the beach on one occasion, while we could see some awful thunderstorms just inland - we drove home through the most torrential rain. I remember the hot, Mediterranean, scent of the fir trees behind the dunes that same day.

Norfolk is my favourite English county, and Holkham is definitely my favourite beach anywhere. Even on a hot day with lots of visitors there, I took this photo and there's not a living soul in it. It just so brings back memories of special times at a wonderful place.  It's been my wallpaper for ages and I've no intention of changing it just yet.

#100Photos #3

Rock-hard toffee (or vice-versa)

Portoro marble - looking more like a dessert than a rock

The day I took this photo was a feast for the eyes and the soul; whilst a rehearsal for the following week's Trooping of the Colour was underway nearby, my Other Half and I were visiting the [then] Queen's Gallery  at Buckingham Palace, London. It was the first time we saw any of the Royal Collection. We saw a Fabergé egg for the first time, and it was as beautiful and as finely wrought as we had imagined it would be.  We saw the golden Exeter Salt, we saw sculptures carved from the finest marble, we saw paintings by Old Masters and we saw, for the very first time for either of us, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci with notes in his mirror writing!

One thing I also drank in, though, was this polished slice of Portoro marble. Stonemasons often refer to any stone that will take a polish as a marble, but Portoro is a true marble, i.e. a limestone that has been altered (metamorphosed) by heat and pressure; it comes from La Spezia in Italy, and this slice adorns the top of a very ornate (actually overly ornate to my Philistine eyes) table.  The structure of the rock shows the effects of the heat and pressure that altered it from the limestone it once was; the black in it comes from organic marine material, and the gold and fawn colours come from oxidation of that same organic matter. As it was reformed, it was pulled like toffee - but it's probably best not to try to eat it. The heat, the pressure, the stretching, doing this to solid rock!  To my eyes, though, it looks like a dessert you could get a spoon into.

#100Photos #2

A shutterbug refreshed

Welcome!

Some time ago, I blogged here.  Always about photographs, principally about geology but sometimes about other things as well.  My premise was that a picture is worth a thousand words but you sometimes need words to tell the story behind the picture. Now, in true Hollywood fashion, I'm rebooting the blog; this time around, I'm going to tell the stories behind 100 of my photos.  I'm no great photographer, but I hope that the photos and their stories will be interesting.

This one, though is just pretty rather than enigmatic or worthy of a long story.  I was out for a walk a couple of months ago, and this was the canopy above me  - copper beech leaves contrasting with the pale greens of other Spring-clad species in rural Cambridgeshire, England.  It was one of those days that make you glad to be alive, and the contrast in colours and the delicacy of the tracery entranced* me.  It just seems apt to post a photo that captures this to open a newly-reemerged blog.

--------------------

*By the way, have you ever noticed that when a noun and a verb are spelled the same way, the noun places the emphasis on the first syllable, and the verb on the second?  Think in terms of 'a protest' and 'to protest' or' an entrance' and 'to entrance'...  You've got to love language. 

#100Photos  #1