Showing posts with label lichens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lichens. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 17

"Visiting Humphrey" I.

We had a neighbour way back when ...
...and mum was really, very friendly with her.
Her important "other" was called Humphrey.
Why does that still make me want to smile?
No offence meant for those who may read this and either know a Humphrey or be a Humphrey...
...but the name makes me think of some children's story where the animal say's, "I'm just a big old Humphrey"!
 Do you remember Sir Humphrey Appleby in "Yes Prime Minister"?
Or that the cat in No.10 Downing Street was named Humphrey after him?
Oh yes a very smile-inducing name indeed.

Well...there's a lump of glacial rock sticking out of the Bay on the northern shore...
...and what joy to find out that it is...
"Humphrey Head".
You know that I have to go there and be at that place!

So I pack picnic and off we go.
What a treasure.
I'll show the pics...because they speak louder than a book of words!

My adventure starts with this Willy Wagtail bobbing around at the car park end.
That's where the sands are silver and they butt up against the rock.


And this is the rock itself where the Peregrine Falcons fly and nest and are watched over with beady eyes !


The face of Humphrey is sheer and clad with spring green shrubs at the moment.


...and the rocks are coloured and ...I don't know what they are made of but... they are certainly beautiful!


They say that the glaciated mountains of the English Lake District are so old that they have been weathered more than the Alps or the Himalayas.
I heard this from my lovely friend....Anne Hodgkiss...illustrator supreme...sharer of knowledge.
(I love a person who shares information without making you feel stupid...yes?)



Just look at those pinks and blues!


A piece of abstract art I think.






...and some naturalist will hopefully inform me of just how pure the air is and how long these lichens have been here to manage that amount on the rock....

Enough for now ...
...except to show you this sad little inscription...
...with a bit of humour none-the-less...



"Beware how you these rocks ascend,
Here William Pedder met his end"!

Friday, March 2

Wall Flowers.




Coast Magazine has an article about the artists John Fox and Sue Gill who live in the most unusual house on the edge of the Bay...
...you know when I write ..bay..
...I always mean, Morecambe Bay!

We discovered their home once, on a prowl along the Bay's edge by Ulverston,  a few years ago.
It was then a mere tangle of bits of wood and a scrub land stretching from the wooden shack down to the water's edge.
We noticed at the foot of the ridge on which it's built...
...a thorn tree bedecked with scraps of beach combings and plastic washed up on the shoreline...
..it loked like one of those prayer trees where you put a memory of someone that you were thinking of.
So I put my bit of plastic flotsam up for a friend.
It was not much more than a shack then. Now it seems an idyll of a home looking out on what John calls, "The ballroom in the sky"

Our home by the Bay is merely an old guesthouse built to give the mill workers of the Lancashire factories an annual weeks holiday by the sea. 

So anyway...this is a post dedicated to the green clad walls of the Bay...
(Whether Morecambe, Kent's Bank, Silverdale or Ulverston.) 
...with the growth of the mosses, ferns and lichens thriving on the sweet air coming down from the  mountains of the Lakes...