Light and Dark

This is the last photo from my walk that I'll be publishing for now. I thought the contrast between the darkness of the foreground and the sunlit scene of the reservoir beyond was striking. It can obviously be taken as a metaphorical image of someone looking out from a world of darkness, depression or imprisonment to an unattainable world of enlightenment, happiness or freedom beyond. Not that that's my frame of mind I should add!

I've been reading the book The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes about science at the end of the 18th century when Joseph Banks, William Herschel and Humphrey Davy were active, and also The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow, about the group that included Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, James Watt and others. Both reproduce paintings by Joseph Wright. I saw these, by chance, when I was in Derby a year or so ago and happened to pass time by visiting the City Museum, which has a whole room devoted to his paintings. Holmes writes that "Wright became a dramatic painter of experimental and laboratory scenes ... The calm, glowing light of reason is surrounded by the intense, psychological chiaroscuro associated with Georges de la Tour." I'm not sure that I entirely go along with this interpretation, but Wright's treatment of light is certainly striking.

A Tangled Bank

This is another of the photos I took on my walk through Ecclesbourne Glen last month. It makes me think of the famous final passage in Origin of Species in which Charles Darwin writes "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us." And he goes on to expound in brief the thesis of evolution by natural selection.

There have been some beautiful sky scapes visible on the sea front over the last few days, particularly on Friday mid-day where there were extensive cumulus clouds out over the sea, silvered with sunlight and in numerous shades of grey, and this afternoon when, looking towards Beachy Head the sun's rays were shining down through the clouds. Until I first saw this effect some years ago I had assumed that artists paintings of sunlight as rays pushing through the clouds were just a matter of artistic convention; but they really were trying to capture the reality. Alas on both occasions I went out without my camera. I must try to carry it more regularly.

Ecclesbourne Glen

This photo is the one I took before the shadow photo. It is a view looking down into Ecclesbourne Glen. I walked down the hillside to enter the Glen via a gate at the bottom left. There are steps leading down that meet another set of steps going up the hill on the other side. At the bottom there is a narrow path leading down towards the sea. Whether it gives access to the beach there I don't know.