Here are a few more photographs from my excavations into the dusty backfiles, looking for overlooked "landscape" treasure. The first two may look almost sequential – same place, approaching storm, clearing storm – but in fact the one above was taken at 11:49 on 25th November 2015, and the one below at 16:14 on 26th April 2016. They may also look rather like a drone was involved, but in fact there is a car park on the top of the cliffs at Clifton Down, where in summer an ice-cream van is parked, and from which a zillion snaps of this view must have been taken. I suppose the only claim to distinction for my efforts is a willingness to endure hailstones and driving rain to get a more unusual shot.
If you take a short walk further along the clifftop and look back the other way, you get a view down the Avon to the port at Avonmouth, with the Bristol Channel beyond, and the hills of Wales looming on the horizon, north-west of Newport. And there on the right is the fence around that car park, so conveniently placed for a view of the Suspension Bridge. Despite the magic of compression performed by a long focal length lens, those nearest blue hills are something like 20 miles away, with the Brecon Beacons a further 20, as the crow flies.
Talking of crows, being high, windy, and frequented by humans who are inexplicably prone to scattering tasty grub all over the place, it's a popular spot with scavenging birds. Which in turn makes it a handy spot for birds that find other birds rather more tasty than picnic scraps: peregrine falcons nest on the cliffs, and most days with a bit of luck you can catch sight of them flying rapidly overhead, or (with the aid of binoculars) sitting on their favoured perches in Leigh Woods on the far side of the Gorge, wondering whether it's time for lunch yet. Pigeons, though, not crows, are the peregrine's snack of choice, and it's impressive to watch the way pigeons dash across the vast vacancy of the Gorge at top speed, jinking like hares to throw off any unseen predator's dive. I'm surprised they haven't evolved the equivalent of the "chaff" thrown out by military aircraft to divert heat-seeking missiles. Or maybe that is precisely why pigeon-droppings are so ubiquitous...
2 comments:
Cool photos. Spent that past 10 minutes flying up the river, and lost it around Badminton, where you can step across it in a single stride. All courtesy of Google Earth. What's unusual looking about the river in your photos, is how scoured clean the riverbed appears. It looks like everything gets carried straight out to sea. Nothing gets tangled up, at least in that lower section.
Kent,
Yes, I've been flying around on Google Maps today, too. The thing about the Avon is that it's tidal, and that the tidal "reach" of the Bristol Channel is one of the biggest in the world: the river reduces to a trickle running through vast grey mudbanks when the tide goes out, and then becomes brimful when it's in, especially when there's a "spring tide".
Mike
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