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.