Wide in Wales

Our Easter procession continues: we left Wales at the weekend, and are now in Bristol. The weather in mid-Wales was typical for the time of year; that is, we had heavy rain, light rain, fog, hot sunshine, and one day of snow. How the poor bloody sheep with their new lambs cope I don't know; no wonder they look so grumpy. Sadly for us, this was our last stay in our cottage of choice since 2011 – an excellent, eco-conscious barn conversion perched on the shoulder of a hill overlooking a picturesque valley – as the owner's son will be moving in with his two sets of twins. I'm not sure it's somewhere I'd want to bring up four children, but I wish them luck...

It's nice to have Wi-Fi and a solid phone signal again, but I'm relying on my laptop here which is not equipped with my full set of photo-processing software, so this little gallery of wide views is a sort of rough preliminary draft of what I will be doing when we get back to Southampton next week.

Obscured by clouds...

Obscured by smoke...

The next five photos are all from one lovely walk we usually make at Easter that leads up to what the Ordnance Survey map marks as a "recumbent stone", a large boulder on top of a hill with commanding views of the landscape in every direction. Whether this is some ancient ritual marker or just a glacial "erratic" (a boulder that a glacier eroded in one place, carried in its icy pockets along with tons of other rocky trash, and dumped in another place, usually hundreds of miles away) is debatable – it may well be both, of course – but it certainly feels like a place of significance: there are stone circles in the valley below and an alignment of four upright stones next to a man-made mound further along the hill.

Technical point: Actually, one thing I'm noticing using this laptop to edit these photographs is that my customary downsizing settings – 22cm long dimension @ 96 dpi for "normal" images, or 30cm long @ 96 dpi for "wide" images – result in rather smaller pictures on this higher resolution screen than what I see on my usual desktop display at home, which is quite old now. Basically, the one on this laptop is 2256 x 1504, whereas the one at home is 1600 x 900... So I really do need to reconsider these settings when I get back to Southampton. Apologies to those of you who have been struggling with postage-stamp size images on this blog forever (Hi, Kent...).