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Showing posts from November, 2015

Golden bands

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Golden browns in the Villuercas Mountains (Martin Kelsey) Standing at 1600 metres above sea-level on an early November  day...it was calm, the sun was shining....shirt-sleeves weather. Indeed, only the bronzed bands of autumnal colours betrayed the season, and as we had ascended to this peak, so we had travelled, as it were, through weeks of flux, the slow shut-down of the fall. That morning we had stood beside the ruin of an old mill, listening to the gurgle of water hidden from view behind a tangle of bramble. The poplars and alders beside the stream stood tall and clothed in leaves that barely were tinged yellow, whilst the rounded guarled fig tree beside the building was still heavily clad with lime-green foliage. A party of wintering Siskins emerged from their dangling foraging, stretching to reach the small, corrugated alder cones, whilst a Firecrest restlessly shifted through the nearby evergreen holm oak, Old Mill near Guadalupe (Martin Kelsey) We then took the track