Clouds

It is damnably cold in here tonight… much more of this and the heating will be going on. For now at least, an extra layer will do. It seems incredible that it is just three weeks since I was sprawled on a rock in the heather. Granted, it wasn’t what you would call sunbathing weather… but then, I don’t exactly sunbathe. Never have really, I’d rather explore…

We had been exploring all morning that Saturday and had finally found our lost stone circle. We had also found beer, ice-cream and a fair few other things we had been looking for. What we didn’t have was a picture of an old-fashioned ice-cream van… or the right type of ice-cream. Yes, it mattered… and if we had to sacrifice ourselves and consume ice-cream from every van we found, we were determined to get the right stuff…  So, knowing the area fairly well, we toddled off towards Hathersage, to see what the ice-cream was like on the moors… Well, that was one reason. But what with the heather being in full bloom and all, we didn’t need much of an excuse, not really… and not with the camera itching to play…

Not just the camera, either. The skies were coming in, the clouds coming down to play after a morning of clear blue and sunshine…and I can’t resist the heather. So we ended up back on the top of Higger Tor, photographing the ice-cream van in the little parking area, hoping it would serve our purposes and inching further and further down the paths… For a ‘quick stop’ we seemed to be taking a while and getting a long way from the car. The smell of  heather and bracken has something about it that simply makes you want to stop and breathe. Like incense, it lifts the heart and mind and erases all care. And with great boulders all around, there was only one thing to do.

Finding a large, flat rock we lay back and watched the clouds roll in, seeing the shifting shapes of ephemeral landscapes in the play of light and shadow… watching dragons curl and smoke and disappear, becoming creatures of dream and myth in imagination and the skies above. Even just looking back at the pictures tonight warms me, from the inside out, and sends me smiling to bed. Perhaps I’ll dream of heather…