ART – Tim O'Hare

Quantock Paintings – Part 1 #art

In recent summers we have take a series of summer holidays walking in the Yorkshire Dales – first in Swaledale (staying at Low Row near Reeth), then in Wharfedale (based in Ilkley) and last year in ‘Bronte Country’ near Haworth. In each case we combined our week in Yorkshire with a day or two staying somewhere en route to and from our home in Plymouth, or in one case a second week away in Norfolk and Suffolk. For a change, this year, we decided that we’d like to spread our holiday time out over the summer months, and so we picked a couple of fairly local destinations for ‘long weekend’ walking holidays and also booked five days over in Suffolk, combining this with a visit to elderly relatives and an old university friend on mine.

The first of our summer 2025 mini-break locations, in June, took us back to the very familiar territory (for me at least) of the Quantock Hills and the Somerset coast. I grew up a short distance from there in Bridgwater, and we would frequently go on family outings to the area. I also spent quite a lot of time at an activity centre in Kilve on short courses of various kinds (mostly musical).

Although I do like discovering new places, I also very much enjoy returning to familiar haunts, especially for a short trip when you want to be able to slot straight into holiday mode without having to spend time orienting yourself and getting the lie of the land. Our Somerset trip – staying in an AirBnB Shepherd’s Hut near the village of Crowcombe, tucked at the bottom of the western side of the Quantock Hills ridge, very much fell into this ‘familiar territory’ category.

While we were away we enjoyed completing a couple of lengthy walks direct from our accommodation (I particular enjoy a stay away that doesn’t involve having to get in the car), and I was able to spend quite a bit of time painting. In this post I’ll feature four of the pictures that I produced during the break, and I’ll pick up the thread with another post soon that will feature a further group of five pictures.

We started our holiday with lunch at a favourite cafe, the Driftwood Cafe at Blue Anchor – the subject of my first picture (shown at the top of this post). It’s not a fancy cafe at all – I’d describe it as a ham, egg and chips or baked potato cafe – it’s just a nice, simple, easy-going place for a quick bite to eat.

Suitably refueled we then drove the short distance to Kilve and did a short walk (~3 miles) along the coast to East Quantoxhead, before turning inland and returning to the car, with a stop at the Chantry Tea Garden at Kilve where we were the only customers and had an interesting conversation with the owner, who used to be a frequent visitor to Plymouth. The two pictures below show a view of a field that we passed on the return leg (I’ve got a thing for trees silhouetted on the horizon) and the view that we had from our table in the cafe garden of The Chantry itself and the white cottage from which the cafe was run.

Finally, for now, here’s a scene I painted of the view looking west in the direction of Exmoor from the base of the Quantock Hills. I’ve tried to capture the way that there are successive ‘layers’ of rolling hills as the eye moves towards the horizon, each becoming progressively just a little higher than the previous one. Although wild landscapes can be exhilarating, I do like a farmed landscape – a patchwork of fields, hedges, copses and the odd farm building.

Somerset Fields Looking West From Near Crowcombe

All of these pictures were really just quick ‘practice’ pieces, but I like them all in different ways – Driftwood Cafe for its small details, the grass-cut field for its slightly abstract form, Chantry Tea Garden for its looseness, and Somerset Fields for the way it captures something of the wide expansiveness of the view.

If you have a favourite of these four pictures write a quick comment to let me know!

Mevagissey #art

I painted this little watercolour picture of Mevagissey harbour back in June. I was looking to paint a picture to use for a birthday card for the son of one of my wife’s best friends, and brother to one of my elder daughter’s closest friends (by which I mean that the son was also the brother!). As it happened, a couple of months previously, his mum had seen some of my pictures when visiting our home, we got talking about art, and along the way she told us how he had surprised her by saying that when he finally got his own place to live (he’s in his mid/late 20s) he wanted to have pictures of two places that were special to him – Pew Tor on Dartmoor, close to their home in Tavistock, and Mevagissey in Cornwall.

As the date of the birthday approached I started to think of painting one of my ‘special place’ pictures for his card. The trouble was, I was faced with a choice, and anyone who knows me well will know that one thing I am not good at dealing with is choice. It’s tempting to think that choice is a good thing, and I am sure that I would say that I’d prefer to always have a choice than not, but in many ways I’d find life a lot easier if there was a little creature sitting on my shoulder, or tucked into my sleeve, whispering to tell me what to do all of the time.

Should I paint Pew Tor or should I paint Mevagissey?

I’d painted a larger picture of Pew Tor back in early March and knew that I could produce something smaller but similar that would work as a birthday card. I’d also painted various places in Cornwall as part of my Cornwall Landmarks Miniature Watercolours Series. But I’d never tackled Mevagissey… So, one morning I took a small piece of watercolour paper, performed a quick Google search for a suitable photograph, and set to work.

I like the results of my effort – the painting that introduces this post. The picture I chose was a fairly busy scene, with the quayside at Mevagissey backed by all kinds of interestingly shaped and coloured buildings, a host of colourful boats moored at the water’s edge, a pair of rather striking light-blue benches towards the right of the scene, and the bright yellow fishing boat pulling out confidently towards open waters. It was a picture that provided lots of splashes of colour that give the painting a nice sense of aliveness I think.

But, in the end, it was Pew Tor that won the mental tug-of-war that was taking place inside my head. I put my little Mevagissey picture, really just a test piece, to one side, and opted instead for the Dartmoor ‘special place’ rather than the Cornish one. If you are reading this soon after it was originally posted (on 9th September 2025) and want to see the Pew Tor picture that I ended up using, then you’ll just have to visit this site again in a few days time… because if all goes to plan I will post it here soon. For now, you’ll just have to enjoy a quick trip to Mevagissey – a perfect example of the many picturesque little harbour towns that line the southern Cornish coastline.

Tim O’Hare Art is open for business! #art

Over the last couple of months I have been gradually gearing up to start trying to sell some of my artwork. Obviously, I am not thinking that there will be crowds flocking to part with their hard-earned money to the extent that I might become rich through my artist endeavours. Rather, people who see my pictures often pass comment that they think I could sell them, and the inquisitive part of me thinks that it will be interesting to find out whether that is true, and if it is, which pieces of my output people like enough to pay for. [Okay, okay – I admit it – I’d also love to have the implicit praise and external validation that would come my way if my artwork attracted interest in this way… but I know that it’s far better for me not to get hung up on this aspect of things and, instead, to focus on simply enjoying the process of creating art and then allowing it to leak out into the world.]

So far, my art selling has only gone as far as listing prints of my Dartmoor Stone Circle painting on eBay (two copies sold, albeit to the same buyer, in almost four months…) and, more recently, to set up an online shop on Etsy. In this shop I have listed my Dartmoor Stone Circle print (one copy sold) and lots of different Greetings Cards based on some of my miniature watercolour series: Dartmoor Scenes, House Plants, Capital City Landmarks, Cornwall Landmarks and Exmoor Views (of which I have sold the grand total of two: one of ‘The Forbidden City, Beijing’ from my Capital City Landmarks series and one of ‘The Roundhouse Gallery, Sennen Cove’ from my Cornwall Landmarks series). Clearly, it is slow going, partly because I need to master the art of marketing and try to drive some traffic to the shop, but also, because I doubt that there are many people shopping online for greetings cards of random places or plants! Nevertheless, it was a bit of a thrill when my phone pinged to tell me that these sales had been made..

One of the things that I wanted to make sure of before I launched my online shop was that I had all of my art-related points of contact joined up nicely. To that end, I managed to get hold of an email address and accounts on all of the major social media sites (Instagram, X, Bluesky, Facebook, Meta) that matched the name of my etsy shop (@timohareart). To help with future networking and promotion activities, I designed some business cards to convey all of this information to anyone interested. For these, I decided that I would paint a picture of Plymouth’s most iconic landmark, Smeaton’s Tower, with Plymouth Sound and Cornwall in the background to use on the front of the card. It took me several attempts to set up the picture so that I could add the name of my art ‘business’ without the text crossing the darker parts of the picture and that could be cropped nicely into a circle for use on the back of the card and on my social media accounts. The picture at the top of this post is final version.

The final form of the business card is shown below (front and back)…

… and just in case you’re reading this and are tempted to explore a little more, here are some direct links:

shop: timohareart.etsy.com
web: timohare.blog/art
instagram: @timohareart

(Instagram is probably the best social media site to see all of my artwork as I produce it, but you can find my art via the same social media handle on the other sites, although these are not all updated to the same extent.)

What’s In The Box – A Wedding Anniversary Gift #art

Back in early June it was the first anniversary of the wedding of my elder daughter (K) and wanting to find a unique and personal gift to mark this occasion I set about thinking of some kind of art-related present for the pair of them. I thought about painting a scene from one of their wedding photographs, but my attempts at including recognizable people in my pictures so far have not proved to be very successful, and so I quickly ruled that possibility out. I thought about painting a ‘standard’ picture of some kind, but it wasn’t that obvious how to select a scene that carried some relevant meaning – a view of the Park Bar on the Reading University campus (where they first met) didn’t really appeal and, in any case, that would have taken me back into ‘people problem’ territory again.

Instead, I decided to try out an idea I had a few months ago when I came across some small wooden boxes for sale at bargain price in the shop The Works. These little square boxes, about 6cm across, were almost exactly the same size as the miniature watercolour pictures that I often paint, and it had occurred to me that it would be neat to pop two such pictures into a box so that when it is opened the two pictures are revealed. Putting this idea together with the upcoming wedding anniversary it seemed like a natural fit – to celebrate the matrimonial joining together of two young people with a little box bringing together two pictures – one related to each person.

After a little more deliberatrion, I decided that the two pictures would show the places of origin of the two halves of the happy couple. In my daughter’s case this was the city of Plymouth, a familiar theme for my paintings, and for her now husband (H) I chose a view of Horsley Towers, a rather grand, gothic building that is the dominant landmark in the village of East Horsley in Surrey where he grew up.

Having painted the two miniature pictures and fixed them carefully to the base and lid inside the box, all that remained was to personalize the front of the box with their initials, package it up and drop it in the post to them.

I’m glad to report that they loved their little box of pictures. It’s obviously nothing grand or expensive, but I think the best gifts are those that have a personal touch and are the product of some dedicated labour.

Walkham Woods (charcoal/watercolour) #art

Since I started drawing and painting back in April 2024 I have primarily worked with ink and watercolour paints, with my ‘go-to’ format being small, usually ~5cm square, pictures on some particular theme that I have chosen to explore for a few days. Producing pictures of that type has become my staple art activity, to the extent that I describe this as my ‘art practice’. However, I am constantly thinking about how I would like to explore different formats and work with different media. This especially happens when I visit an art exhibition, see works by other artists,and wonder what I could produce if I branched out a bit. The funny thing is that prior to my big shift into art in April 2024 I had actually begun to dabble with creating pictures with pastels (e.g. see my post Rediscovering The Artist Within) but I have not returned to pastels once since then.

Sometime back in May I must have been somewhere that brought me into contact with some charcoal drawings. I had a set of charcoal pencils sitting unopened in my art supplies box, and so I thought I would branch out a little and see what happened when I completed the drawing phase of a picture with charcoal, rather than adopting my usual approach of starting off with some faint pencil lines and then going all in with my black ink pen. I think I hoped that the different drawing texture might lead to me producing a more abstract picture. Then, after scribbling away with the charcoal pencil for a bit, I returned to the familiar territory of my watercolour paints to give my drawing some colour.

The result of my efforts is shown in the picture above – a charcoal -cribbles-with-watercolour painting of a row of what I refer to a ‘wall trees’, somewhere in the valley of the River Walkham, from a photo that I had taken on a walk there.

I’m not sure exactly what I think of this picture. It seems quite basic and simple – the trees sitting very much on top of the leafy backdrop and lacking much detail in their trunks and branches – and that simplicity pushes me towards thinking that the picture doesn’t quite work. But I also quite like the more impressionistic look – the rough lines suggesting the texture and structure of the stone wall, and the bright greens and particularly the yellows of the leaf canopy shouting out for attention. The picture has a naivety which I think gives it a certain charm. As I look at the picture, my eyes seem to be drawn in to explore what little detail there is, perhaps more so than happens when viewing one of my more detailed ink and watercolour pictures. Overall, I think that perhaps the switch in drawing medium was successful in helping me to present the view in a more abstract, suggestive manner than my normal ink-and-watercolour approach.

I’ve not had another go with charcoal pencils since I created this picture just over two months ago, but revisiting it now and writing this post has fired me up to spend some more time over the coming period to play around with different approaches and media a bit more. I wonder what will emerge!

Cornwall Landmarks #art

I like to try to spend a little time painting on as many days as I can, and for obvious reasons, the key to this is to keep my pictures small. One of my favourite formats seems to be 5cm square pictures painted in a fairly loose style, with not too much detail and a fairly limited colour palette. Each picture starts with a few pencil marks that serve as guide lines for the pen work, mostly outlining key features and providing various forms of shading. Once the ink has dried, which only takes a few seconds, I start to apply the watercolour paint, usually colouring the sky and any large blocks of vegetation first, before moving on to fill in any details. The whole process generally takes less than 30 minutes and my preference is to spend time of this as pretty much the first thing I do in the morning. When I completed my first small picture, I didn’t have any particular plans for further pictures on the same theme, but one picture led to another, and it seems that I end up producing these miniature watercolours as part of a series, first Dartmoor Scenes and then House Plants, Capital City Landmarks, and a series of slightly larger Mysterious Britain pictures. Most recently, returning closer to home, I completed this set of pictures showing various landmarks in our neighbouring county, Cornwall.

The pictures weren’t painted in this order, but the subjects of my Cornwall Landmarks series are (from top-left working across the rows and down the columns in the composite picture above) The Roundhouse Gallery, Sennen Cove, The Eden Project near St Austell, Bedruthan Steps, Men-An-Tol stone ring, St Michael’s Mount near Penzance, a classic coastal tin mine pumping station, the Minac Theatre, Tintagel Castle and Restormel Castle near Lostwithiel. If I had to choose favourites then I think I would go for the pictures of The Roundhouse Gallery, Bedruthan Steps and Restormel Castle, although I might well make different selections the next time I look at them!

As with each of my other miniature watercolour series, I plan to get some copies of the 3 x 3 composite picture printed as greetings cards to sell at some point, and I will probably try out some of them as individual framed versions too.

I guess the obvious question for me now is where I will go next with this kind of miniature watercolour picture. This morning I painted a view from a photograph I took last week while staying in Exmoor, and so I guess that it is likely that I will end up doing some more from that beautiful part of the world. But whether I will end up with enough for a full series, so that I can make another 3 x 3 composite, only time will tell!

Dartmoor Panoramas #art

The proximity of Dartmoor to our home in Plymouth generally means that it is our go-to place for weekend walks, so it is hardly surprising that my phone is full of photographs of Dartmoor landscapes. I’m a particular sucker for ‘big views’, but my attempts to capture these in photographs are always something of a let down. Looking with the naked eye, big views fill my visual space with rich detail, but on camera everything seems to shrink, recede and flatten, resulting in a rather distant picture that is dominated by sky, and especially foreground, that the brain somehow filters out of the live view. I expect that this phenomenon is well understood by photographers, and it probably even has a special name, but to me it is just known as ‘disappointment’. This is compounded by the difficulty that I face when I subsequently try to capture this same kind of open, expansive view in one of my paintings. The part of a photograph that I want to paint seems to be only a small component of the whole, and no amount of zooming in seems to really help.

On one recent trip to Dartmoor I was pondering this issue when it occurred to me that what I was seeing with my eyes was a little like the view I got when I used my thumbs and index fingers to create a rectangular, letterbox-like, frame and then looked through that frame as if looking through a window. Despite there being so much more that could be seen, my brain seemed simply to ignore that part of the view that would have outside this frame, whereas my phone camera played no such trick. I began to wonder whether the key to painting this kind of view was to change the size and shape of the picture, adopting a similar letterbox, or panoramic, format. So, for a few days I played with this approach. The results are a series of four small painting that I refer to as my Dartmoor Panorama series.

I’m pleased with these pictures, at least to the extent that they better capture something approximating to the kinds of spacious views that I like best. Using a panoramic format does seem to work. In the third picture I was brave enough to include some people standing on one of the tors and gazing out at the view> I think this little piece of detail adds a lot to the picture, including a splash of contrasting colour. I was even more brave in the fourth picture, including a group of Dartmoor ponies. I tend to think that I’m not able to paint animals, but perhaps I am improving, because at least some of the ponies in this picture seem to have come out pretty well. I am particularly pleased with the grey pony in the foreground and the somewhat lively pony furthest to the right.

I feel sure that I will use this approach to painting expansive views again, and I suspect that at some point my curiosity will lead me to explore some photography guides to see whether I can find a proper explanation of my observation. It might have something to do with ‘foreshortening’ and/or ‘depth-of-field’ (words that I am vaguely familiar with that at least sound like they could be contributing factors). Who knows, perhaps someone reading this post will be able to point me in the right direction!

Plymouth Postcards #art

Smeaton’s Tower Lighthouse, Plymouth Hoe

Back in April, after completing four series on miniature watercolour pictures (Dartmoor Scenes, House Plants, Capital City Landmarks and Mysterious Britain), I decided that I would give myself a new challenge by scaling up my paintings a bit and keep my subject matter close to home with a set of pictures that I described with the working title ‘Plymouth Postcards’. I wanted to try to keep the same kind of fairly loose style but I thought it would be good to be able to capture a bit more detail of each scene. My miniature watercolours had been just 5cm square (or 5cm x 7cm in the case of the Mysterious Britain series) but this new series was, naturally, postcard sized (roughly 10cm x 15cm). That’s an increase in area of up to six times, and so it gave me quite lot more sketching, drawing and painting to complete!

My first picture (above) focused on what is probably the most iconic view associated with Plymouth, the red-and-white striped form of Smeaton’s Tower – one-time lighthouse on the Eddystone Rock which was moved to Plymouth Hoe when it was replaced in the 1880s.

Next up, I remained close to the waterfront with a view across the inner basin of Sutton Harbour towards the old customs house and the Three Crowns pub. I am not sure that the colour of the water there is ever quite as blue as my picture suggests, but I like the bright and cheery feel of this painting…

Third came a view of one of Plymouth’s most distinctive new buildings, the Roland Levinsky Building, home of the Arts Faculty at my workplace, the University of Plymouth. Again, the sky is perhaps a little too bright, but I like the three-way competition between the blue sky, the green of the grassy area in the foreground, and the coppery-orange cladding of the building itself…

The Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth

After painting a fairly new building, it was time to visit a much older one with a ffront-on view of one of the main buildings at the Royal William Yard, formerly the victualling yard for the Royal Navy but now a home for swanky apartments, restaurants, various studios and art spaces, and a cinema. I think this is one of my favourites from the series…

Then, it was back to the city centre for a picture showing the Charles Church, bombed in the Second World War and left in its broken state as a memorial to lives lost. Behind it, the angular exterior of the eastern end of the Drake Circus Shopping Centre forms an interesting backdrop which was surprisingly challenging to paint…

Charles Church and Drake Circus Shopping Centre, Plymouth

For my sixth Plymouth Postcard, I took a trip down to the Barbican area of the city for a view of the Plymouth Gin Distillery on Southside Street. It was difficult to get the perspective of the curved road right but I think I have just about managed it…

Plymouth Gin Distillery, Southside Street

It was time to get a bit ‘arty’, so my next picture was of the interestingly illuminated Theatre Royal, with the imposing form of the statue ‘Messenger’ in front of it. I think that I did pretty well with the theatre itself, and the shape of the statue isn’t too bad, but my initial attempts to shade its dark form resulted in it looking like a hairy gorilla, and so I coloured it black with a permanent marker to try to salvage the picture. Unfortunately, this was only partially successful and I think I would have to describe this one as something of a ‘fail’…

Painting number eight took me back to Sutton Harbour, this time looking across the swing bridge towards the Fish Market on the far left and the National Marine Aquarium, with its wavy roof in the centre. I’m please with the way I captured the blue colour of the windows and the advertising poster on the left of the building, and I like the foreground detail of the boat and bridge. Sadly, my attempt at a Union Jack flag was not quite so successful and the flag of the USA seems to have lost its stars…

My ninth picture took me to very familiar territory, with a view of the old turnstiles at Home Park, home of Plymouth Argyle Football Club…

Home Park, Plymouth Argyle Football Club

… and then it was back to the waterfront with a view of the art deco Tinside Lido with part of Plymouth Hoe, Smeaton’s Tower and the war memorial in the background…

I finished my series with two pictures of contrasting buildings. First up was the Devonport Town Hall and Column, with the oddly coloured and spectacularly fronted (and named) Odd Fellows Hall on the right. Finally, my subject was the sharply-topped, and so highly appropriately named, Beckley Point (a Hall of Residence for students in the city). This is, apparently, the tallest building in the southwest of England (although I don’t know what is being counted as the southwest in this case)…

Devonport Town Hall and Column and the Odd Fellows Hall

Beckley Point Hall of Residence, Plymouth

This was a fun series to do, taking 17 days to complete, and overall I was pleased with the results of my efforts. It was interesting to try to capture some of the more striking buildings and views that Plymouth has to offer, particularly as it is generally regarded as an architecturally bland and unexciting place (largely as a result of the fact that much of the city centre was flattened by bombing raids in the Second World War).

I am sure that I will do plenty more paintings of Plymouth views in the future, but I think this set forms a good initial collection, showcasing some of the different areas and places of interest in the city nicely.

Alvor – oh no it’s not – oh yes it is #art

I have probably mentioned in a previous post that over the last year it has become fairly standard practice that each time we are approaching the birthday of a friend or family member I rustle up a painting showing a scene or location that has a special association for the recipient. I paint these pictures on a piece of very rough-edged, handmade paper that I have a stack of, and then fix the painting onto a 5 x 7 inch recycled card blank. The result is a specially created, uniquely-designed, hand-made card*. These are always well received, and it is funny how often the recipient doesn’t twig that I did the painting, despite me usually putting my initials in the bottom-right corner. I guess I have only been painting for 14 months and so a lot of people aren’t even aware that the picture on their card is a piece of my handiwork.

Back in April, I set out to create one such card, this time for Ann, the wife of my wife’s father. For some years, Ann and Keith greatly enjoyed holidays at the resort of Alvor on the Algarve coast of Portugal, but health issues and reduced mobility have meant that these trips have not been possible for quite a while now. Consequently, we decided that it would be fitting for me to paint a scene of Alvor to use for Ann’s card. I took a look online, googling images of Alvor, but couldn’t find anything that grabbed me until I came across what I thought was a suitable picture on a tourist site that was promoting the merits of Alvor. It showed an attractive open square, with people going about their business, a few trees and plants, and some interesting patterns in the paving, surrounded by some fairly grand, old buildings, including one that was a striking bright green – perfect to add an interesting splash of colour to the scene. I duly set to work and perhaps 45-60 minutes later, and as I usually do, I posted the finished picture to my social media accounts on Bluesky and Instagram.

After I had finished making the card itself, and it was safely on its way in the post, a work colleague commented on my instagram post along the lines that ‘there is a green-painted building exactly like the one in my picture just a little way along the coast from Alvor in Lagos‘. The first time I read the comment I simply thought ‘well that’s a coincidence‘… but then it dawned on me that they were perhaps just being polite, or maybe subtle, with their wording. Some more image searching soon revealed that no, the square I had painted was not actually in Alvor, and yes, the square I had painted was actually in Lagos… In fact, as I searched further I found that practically every picture I found online of Lagos seemed to feature that same square with its beautiful, old, bright green building. Doh… I had been duped – the website I had originally found the picture on had obviously (how shall I put this?) been developed by a ‘Creative Geographer’.

Ann’s birthday came and went. I had already confessed to my error, and the card was much appreciated nevertheless, but, quite obviously, I was left feeling that I had not quite struck the target. So, a few weeks later, when some spare minutes arrived, I did a new, and more careful, search for pictures of Alvor, plumped for a nice beach/waterfront scene, and set to work again. The result of my efforts is shown below.

I learned (or was reminded of) a good lesson here, namely that you cannot believe everything (much?) that you read on the internet, and Ann was thrilled to receive two birthday cards including the second bonus birthday card with a picture that really did bring back happy memories. So, in the end, we both came out as winners!

* If there is a special place that you would like me to paint, for a birthday card or otherwise, feel free to get in touch. I’m on the point of opening my art activity for business and would be happy to take commissions. I think it would be fun, and interesting, to paint some new and different special places.

Mysterious Britain #art

Hot on the heels of my other miniature watercolour series (see: Dartmoor Scenes, House Plants, Capital City Landmarks), the next group of pictures that I painted were slightly larger, rectangular, and given the working title of Mysterious Britain. My idea was to select various ancient landmarks from around the United Kingdom that have some aura of mystery, largely a result of their age.

I started off with a fairly obvious subject for the first picture, the prehistoric megalithic structure known as Stonehenge in Wiltshire, much feared by those who travel along the A303 knowing that there is a very high chance that they will be held up by traffic in its vicinity. I remained in the southwest of England for the next two pictures, to Somerset for a mist-shrouded Glastonbury Tor at sunset (with its much debated history and reputed links to the legend of King Arthur) and St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall (for which there is evidence of population between 4000 and 2500 BCE). But perhaps I should write not describe the latter site as being in England at all and refer to its location as Kernow…

Next, I popped up to northwest Wales (Cymru) for a picture of the prehistoric burial chamber Bryn Celli Ddu (‘the mound in the dark grove’) in Ynys Mon (Anglesey), before returning to the southwest for the later Neolithic or early Bronze Age group of standing stones known as Men-an-Tol (‘stone with a hole’).

Finally, my painting activity for this series took me to the far north, almost as far as it is possible to get in the United Kingdom, to The Ring of Brodgar, a neolithic henge and stone circle on Mainland, the largest island in Orkney.

I enjoyed painting this series and was pleased that for the most part I managed to keep the pictures simple, not putting in too much detail and using a fairly limited colour palette. I’ve tried to pick a favourite, but there are aspects of almost all of the pictures that I particularly like so I’ve not been successful – the simplicity of Stonehenge, the mystery of Glastonbury Tor, the causeway stones of St Michael’s Mount and the little white house behind Bryn Celli Ddu. But like a lot of things, I like the way that these pictures work as a set – taking the viewer on a whistle-stop tour of just a few of the many wonderful locations of Mysterious Britain.

Do you have a favourite? Add a comment to let me know if you do!