Through The Wardrobe

Last week saw the temperatures in the south of England plummet, nights of -15 and days when the mercury didn’t ever get above freezing. I’m from up north where the winters are generally more savage, but even I was surprised by the intense cold – and the beauty it created.

Freezing fog decked the trees and hedgerows with glittering garlands of frost, and in the usually mild and kindly Hampshire landscape that I escaped to this weekend, I felt as if I had stumbled through the wardrobe and into Narnia.

The fields near R’s family home, pocketed in the land’s gentle swell were silent monochrome, their familiar far ridge obliterated by icy fog.

I had found nests of peacock caterpillars and watched drowsy flies dance on the Hogweed flowers in this lane last summer. Now the undergrowth had been frost bitten back to nothing. All except for the umbels of dead Hogweed which had been candied with a thick rime of frost.

It was so cold that I had to keep my camera in my jeans pocket, only removing it quickly to snatch a hasty photo. This picture of ice crystals on a bramble is the most in-focus closeup image I managed in two days.

The hedgerow trees stood ghostly in a sugared landscape, petrified and birdless.

In this gentle southern county of England conditions of such magnificent hostility may only come once in a lifetime, and despite a heavy cold I spent as much time out in it as was polite to my hosts. Walking at night was magical – the flanks of the hills glittering under a full moon when the fog shifted enough to reveal them. I have a single night walk photo that worked and a whole other set from a day walk to share over the next couple of days, these are just a taster. Come visit again!

Related posts: