Clay Park
The following images are from Clay Park, looking towards The Flats, with Wortley Hall behind the trees on the right. The atmospherics weren't great for photography that day, but I was quite pleased with the results, considering. The oilseed rape (canola) did nothing positive for my hay fever, as pretty as the view might be.
A remarkable feature of the English countryside, as I witnessed on a recent rail journey north, is the dominance of rapeseed (canola) cultivation in UK agriculture. A vast acreage is put to growing this crop and field after rolling field is cloaked in its bright yellow flowers during the late spring. It's a crop that was not much seen before the 1970s, thereafter being ubiquitous. It's a cheering sight, right enough, but it does make one think about diversity (or its possible lack). Different practices used on land owned and maintained by charities like the National Trust have demonstrated that less intensive methods, variety and the adoption of fallow periods have increased wild species numbers and diversity: something I think our forebears had a better handle on than we do. But the rapeseed flower is an impressive and cheerful sight, none-the-less.
A vista from Wortley Hall across Clay Park:
Below my window ... the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... Last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people—bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it. —Dennis Potter |
Part of Roaming South Yorkshire.