Great to see so many willing to take on the heat of the summer on Sunday at the Uckfield Festival.
My day started with a breakfast interview with Barry Horsham at Uckfield FM, but then it was time for a four hour natural navigation walk in the Barcombe area. Thanks to Bernard Tagliavini for organising it and to everyone who came on the walk, it was a baking day but we tried to find patches of shade to stand in as we studied the trees, the clouds, mosses, lichens and the sun itself. We even found ourselves discussing Pacific sailors as we watched the ripples in a stream. (The ripples were less dependable in the areas where teenagers had been forced into the water by the midday heat for a wild swim.)
Something that I had not noticed before was that there appeared to be a much greater number of lilies on…
I went for a walk in the South Downs yesterday afternoon. The air was cold, there were still chunks of ice lining the north-facing side of chalk ruts in the path. The sun was up for the first part of the walk and made direction-finding easy. When it fell below the hills to my southwest it gave different opportunities. One of my favourite dusk techniques is to use the light reflections of cloud edges to gauge where the sun must be behind higher ground. This photograph from 4.30pm yesterday shows this effect quite clearly. The sun is reaching the far ground, trees and clouds, but it does not light the clouds equally. The bright edges act almost as a parabola, pointing the way back to a now invisible sun.
We had some old friends staying this weekend and decided to laugh in the general direction of the forecasts and go for a walk in the woods. It was dry for half an hour, but then the clouds moving over our heads, and visible in the gaps between the near-bare trees, changed their scudding direction by almost ninety degrees. This was the starting gun for a predicted and yet sudden change in our weather fortunes. We turned at our halfway point, the 18th century 