Winter in Keswick

In February 2010 I booked the train up to Penrith...

only to break the bicycle I'd planned to take on the day before departure....

so changed plans and walked everywhere in the snow around Keswick and Derwent Water, where the boat bus company fought to break the ice...

up over Walla Cragg and Latrigg in the blizzard, and through the fresh snow around the stones at Castlerigg...

and got the double decker bus down to Windermere for the train home...

The squirrel was a lucky catch in the woods below Ashness Bridge.

Boston, six years ago

I was at a conference in Boston, Massachusetts, when the East Coast of the United States flooded in June 2006.

Boston wasn't badly hit with flooding, but it did spend a few days covered in fog and puddles.

I'd only just bought my first SLR a couple of weeks before — the D50 with 18-55 lens — so wandered around town trying it out.

Pointing it at anything and everything, and not usually doing a very good job at all.

There are more pictures in the Boston gallery.

Winter fogs past

I love those freezing winter nights, when everything condenses into one big fog.

And the light blurs...

And the shapes merge...

Location: Castlerigg

In the house where I grew up, on the side of a kitchen cupboard above the kitchen sink is a small wide yellowed print on a bent and battered cobweb covered card, faded with the light of five thousand sunrises and dappled from the condensation of countless boiled kettles.

It's a print of the stone circle at Castlerigg, the Celtic Carles of Keswick, looking north over the shapely Cumbrian fells of Latrigg and Blencathra, known as Saddleback, in the northern lakes.

A neolithic druidical astronomy set, aligned with the autumn equinox and set centre stage on a minor eminence in a cavernous amphitheatre.

An antique shelter for the sheep, trap for the tourist, and prop for the photographer.

Built to catch the light and the lightning, the sun, the snow and the storms.

More photos in the Cumbria gallery...