Swan Lake

According to some theories the world was supposed to end on Friday, following some form of water horror. Well it obviously hasn’t ended for I’m still here, but as for the water, there is lots of that.

Its been raining here for what seems like days, in fact the outstanding memory of this year has been rain and lots of it! But that’s another story. Until today it seems to have been raining almost consistently since Wednesday. The ground that was already totally saturated, has now begun sprouting new springs, appearing along the hillside in places where they haven’t been before. Most of these springs are not seeps, but are pouring like springs with business elsewhere. We even gained our own water feature, with a raging torrent pouring down the track outside the house, to add its contents to the duck pond opposite.

Duck pond is probably now the wrong term to describe our temporary water body. In fact its as large as I have ever seen it and is now looking more like having the proportions of a lake rather than a pond, as it stretches for at least a hundred metres in length. As for the ducks, seen those on it in the past, I’ve also seen children on it when its frozen, but today is the first time I’ve seen it with a pair of swans on it. They were obviously quite happy there, for when I returned some time later they were happily dozing.

Swan Lake – 23 December 2012 (Copyright Carol Jones)

Heading north along the valley, the fields along the bottom have also flooded, something which occurs most winters but not as much as this. Usually the water forms just a series of temporary small water bodies down the valley, that rise and fall rapidly as the surroundings drain. Following our most recent rain event, they have coalesced into two large lakes, one of which was deep enough to cover the fence that separates two of the fields, while the other is only a few inches from the top of a wall. Both of these were fed by raging torrents that had given up with the field drains and were pouring down the surrounding hillsides, flooding across the lane and into the bottom fields.

Lakes – 22 December 2012 (Copyright Carol Jones)

In the Sky with Diamonds

What a wonderful cold clear night, the skies are clear and the stars twinkle like jewels in the darkness. Temperatures have been below freezing for most of the day and everything is crisp and frozen, crunching gently under foot as you walk by.

The coldness of the day has allowed frost to coat every blade of grass with tiny ice crystals. They almost form symmetrically neat lines, down the edges of the individual blades and along the veins, but every so often one or two will be out of place to destroy this pattern. Even so they enlarge and magnify the blades, making each blade easily identifiable, amongst what had become a wet and compressed mass of grass over the course of a very wet summer.

Diamonds in the Grass – 11 December 2012 (Copyright Ross Lockley)

Amongst this mass of tiny crystals there seems to be an occasional jewel. Every so often as the torch light passes across the ground, one will catch the light and shine like a diamond in the darkness. Its almost as though some one had put their hand in a bag and thrown jewels round the garden, scattering them across both grass and hedge alike. Millions of tiny treasures waiting just to be taken, but also as ephemeral as a sparkle in the eye. Gone as soon as the light moved on.

The Eye in the Snow

First sprinkling of snow for this winter (though in fact we have yet to reach winter and are still in autumn) occurred on Friday night, maybe an appropriate way to welcome December in. To be honest, it wasn’t what I would necessarily call real snow. More like a layer of tiny ice crystals that gave a thin white crystalline coating to the already frozen ground. Each ice crystal was still quite visible, looking as though there had been a leak in a bag of rice, as each crystal was about the size of a grain of rice and each was individually identifiable.

Ice Eye in the Green of Winter – 01 December 2012 (Copyright Carol Jones)

The cold though, has made the temporary duck pond into a shining frozen eye, and with the sun low in the sky the whole affair shines and twinkles like a watery eye. This eye is then ringed by the hazy bright white band of ice crystals, made even brighter by being in a field of green, where the rest of the snow has been melted by the days bright sunshine. This eye sat there almost unblinking in the bright light, but not quite, for the warmth of even the weak winter sun, makes the ice expand and contract. This expansion and contraction produces a wonderful pinging sound, almost like the stretching of an elastic band to its final limits. The expansion was so great that the elastic pinged, and broke, as it breaks the note produced almost reaches the high notes of heaven.