Lancashire Autumn
October and November in Lancashire were mild.
Hawthorne berries in a clear crisp sky.
Ploughed fields and berries bright.
Leaves are turning.
Hounds are yearning to go for walks while they can.
The low sun makes beautiful effects.
I watched these ducks one afternoon marvelling in their colours
against the reflections from the canal barges.
The patterns in the water held me spellbound.
Beautiful, playful ducks.
It will be these youngsters’ first Winter.
The Garlic Woods has a carpet of leaves. That is Bungle moving at speed on the left. He is having acupuncture at the moment for a bad back. Fluff is in the centre of the photo.
Carruthers and Son play a good game where Son swings across the stream and the water loathing Carruthers runs around to the other back via the bridge. He is very quick!
Something has been having a nibble.
One of my fav sights of Autumn- a fresh conker. I would love furniture or floors in this shade of brown.
A road across the Moss was flooded so we found a new way across. I think I’ve found where the v squadrons of pink footed geese go to at dawn when they fly over the house. They are gleaning the wheat field.
This duck caught my eye.
I think he is part Mallard and part Black East Indian -probably an escapee from a garden pond who bred with a wild mallard.
Beautiful pink-reds.
Sheep were grazing in the cabbages.
I’ve come to appreciate the brighter days now the light hours are so short.
And to find humour in the odd sights the season has brought.
Berries
Barges
And the last of the Summer flowers.
Keats sums up Autumn better than me:
John Keats (1795-1821)
TO AUTUMN.
1.
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
2.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
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