One thing that intrigues me about a blog is that you can see which country your readers come from. As a result I can say safely that most of you have never been here, and if you have then it was most likely a package tour which paused at the monuments while doing a day trip to Windsor. I thought today I would share with you a little of the magic of the mead.
This photograph is a week or two old now. It was taken from the hill that you've seen in the background of some other pictures here, looking towards the Runnymede Hotel. The dark band along the top of the picture is the hedge alongside the road to Windsor.
I've included a couple of details a bit larger as it is a complex picture - at full screen its epic but I can't see how to do that in Blogger. As far as I could make out, the chap on the left was taking his dog for a wade (where he is is usually a path across a field) when he saw ducks and tried to take pictures of them. He's plainly more hardcore than me as I've been avoiding the water, and he's plainly dafter too as you don't take a dog when you're trying to photograph birds!
The other detail has been chosen because it shows the characteristic colours of the area - the grass, the grey, purple and brown undergrowth, the grey brown of probably an oak (I wasn't close enough to check) and the spectacular, ever-changing orange/ochre/sienna of the willows. These are usually a lot brighter, but it was a washed out kind of day.
The reason I think this picture is a good summary is that it shows the richness, the bleakness and the epic scale of the mead. The man is dwarfed by trees, water and field alike in the wide view and yet we're only looking at a small fraction of the place. For all its sunny richness in high summer, I almost prefer it at this time of year. This view will just be a shapeless mass of leaves soon, but for now if you can put up with the biting, biting wind the trees are still showing their structure and their true, mysterious colours.
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