Tag: #landscape

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!

A Walk Around Peek Hill #other

We are blessed by the fact that although we live towards the centre of a fairly large and busy city (Plymouth), we are just 10-15 miles drive from the open moorland and wonderful walking landscapes of Dartmoor National Park. I know that some people love the really bleak, wilderness sections of Dartmoor, but my own preference is for what I think of as the ‘edgelands’, where the rougher terrain gives way to wooded valleys and the surrounding farmland. I have always liked landscapes that mix wildness with areas where humans have worked with the land over a long period of time in a relatively unchanging manner. The edgelands of Dartmoor certainly fit this description.

A couple of months ago we drove up towards Princetown and parked a little way from the rocky mass of Sharpitor (above and immediately below). It was a fine day, but one with plenty of interesting cloud formations that arguably made our view of the sky as interesting as the views of the hills and valleys around us…

Our walk took us just north of Sharpitor, from where we were welcomed with expansive views to the northeast of classic Dartmoor moorland:

After rounding Sharpitor, the prominent, rather pointed, conical peak of Leather Tor came into view…

… and we were greeted by a typical group of Dartmoor’s sheep, grazing on the rough hillside…

Having passed midway between Sharpitor and Leather Tor, we turned southwest towards Peek Hill, and from here the view opened out to reveal the waters of Burrator Reservoir, with Plymouth visible towards the horizon…

Our route took took us northwest, down the slope from Peek Hill towards the Plymouth-to-Princetown road, and along the way we passed one of my favourite sights, a lone tree of a type that I like to refer to as a symmetree…

Then, just across the road stood this wonderful row of Beech(?) trees, planted into the old stone wall, their dark, essentially leafless, forms making beautiful patterns when viewed against the bright colours of the fields, sky and clouds beyond…

This row of trees – in fact any row of trees like these – are really one of my favourite sights of all, and although there was still a little more walking to do, down towards an ancient stone row that we then followed back towards the car, I think that they are a fitting place for me to end this little photo-tour of our April walk around Peek Hill. I often think that I ought to have a go at painting this row of trees one day… but there are so many branches, so many, many branches… I am not sure that I have the patience for that!