New Year’s Eve: Winter Tree

New Year’s Eve: Winter Path

December Walk: Waterlogged Field

December Walk: Reflections in a Large Puddle

Yesterday I went out walking on The Lees, a great open space beside the Tweed, and could hardly stand up.  I didn’t go my usual walk, becaue of the flooded ground, and the danger of walking under trees.  I met a friend at the gate coming into the Lees and said I didn’t think it was the weather to be walking through woods, when there was a great rending sound and a tree came free from its moorings about fifty yards away: point taken.  Today was fine, so I caught the last rays of the sun.  By the time I got home it was not yet four and the sun had completely gone.  Roll on the lighter nights. This puddle was the last thing I looked at.

December Walk: Willows

December Walk: Pretty Debris

Storm and flood debris all along the banks of the Tweed: a deflated rugby ball, some pink gloves, a red bucket, as well as heaps of tree branches, tree stumps, uprooted plants, all daubed with mud – and this pink rag, which looks like the ragged flag of some damaged, uninhabited  little ship come to rest in the shallows.

December Walk: Tree Silhouette

Christmas: Afternoon, Trees, River Tweed, Late Sun

Christmas: Morning, Tweed River

A Murky Little Pool III and IV

There is a walk I take beside the Tweed, then come back through a little wood above the Tweed.  As I turn to climb the path up to the little wood, I look to my left at the standing water that has collected in the hollow, beside the path that leads up to the main road. Few people can ever look at this pool, that is nothing more than collected rainwater that vanishes in the summer; so I decide to look at it myself.

With a camera I like to look at the apparently ordinary.  I have never wanted to paint landscape at all, not at all, I like to paint imaginary figures in a setting. In illustrations I use landscape as part of the story.  But looking at a murky little pool through the lens of a camera is something different. It isn’t me so much as the things themselves.

Now I have a record of a year in the Scottish Borders, and I will make use parts of the photographs as background for a story. But my pleasure in looking at a murky little pool is something else altogether.