Tag: landscape

A Murder Mystery. In Pictures.

You are invited to Heaton Hall, the country seat of Lord Ballingdon, for a weekend of good old fashioned fun.

The house is imposing and painted cheerful yellow.

After dinner, the host informs his guests he prepared a fun murder mystery game. It kicks off the next morning.

And so the next morning, after breakfast–rich, delicious full English–Lord Ballingdon gives his instructions.

You are to find the dead body.

It is no easy task. The grounds are vast and the body could be anywhere.

But that doesn’t discourage you. Let’s start!

Careful it gets steep!

You think the body might have rolled down this hill. But there’s nothing at the bottom.

Ooh look, a bench! Not very comfortable sitting on that stone. You reckon the victim must have sat here at some point, before they were killed.

Careful now!

Were they pushed off the ha-ha? If so, the murderer must have moved the body because it is not here.

You check under the ferns for clues. Nothing here.

Aaah, look, a folly. You bet that’s where the body was hidden.

The folly is locked. You peer through the windows, but the only thing you see is a broken electric heater.

It occurs to you that the body might actually be inside the house. Your host never said it was on the grounds.

Hmmm, your host… This is the first time you’ve been invited to Lord Ballingdon’s party. You’ve heard of him a lot, of course, everyone gushes how entertaining he is, people leave his gatherings with smiles on their faces. And he’s so charming! “He’s the biggest prankster I’ve ever met,” says your cousin, and coming from him, it means something. Your cousin has been playing pranks on people since he was eight.

Prankster. Of course!

You got it. Murder? Here’s the murder:

Lord Ballingdon bursts into booming laughter. You win the game.

Pictures are from Heaton Park in Manchester. The house is indeed called Heaton Hall, but it is not a seat of any lord, as it belongs to the city council. Lord Ballingdon is a fictional character. No murder mystery games take place at Heaton Park, however the place does share initials with the great Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, so make of it what you will.

Crosby Beach

I thought it was about time I went to the seaside again.

Crosby is a town in Merseyside, near Liverpool, on the same coast as Southport and Formby, both of which have featured here before. (In fact, it was to Southport I went, and from there I took a train to Crosby.)

This beach also has statues!

It is a work by Antony Gormley called Another Place. The statues are spread out along the beach, as you can see some of them quite far out into the sea.

It would be interesting to watch them get submerged in the water as the tide comes.

Sand dunes.

Seagulls.

Ship!

And sky, of course.

March Landscape

It was early spring—probably the ugliest time of the year.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams

This quote is wrong. Here’s why:

Wild grasses.

From the same book: No sign of life was visible, save a big black crow winging his solitary way across a leaden field.

The crow wasn’t exactly co-operating with me when I took this.

Remnant from days of autumn.

A lone daffodil.

It’s not often that I argue with LM Montgomery–not on descriptions at least (there’s plenty in her books that I have problems with, mostly concerning abusive and narcissistic caregivers but that’s a topic for another day). But, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

World in January

In recent years, I learnt to handle the first month of the year quite well, as it’s something I struggled with in the past. January doesn’t depress me any more and I’ve actually come to like the quiet winter days.

I went for a walk with my camera to the wooded place in my neighbourhood, photos of which I’ve already posted here many times. Here I give you the pics:

Roman Lakes, Marple

The problem with taking so many pictures when going on a trip is that it’s so hard to decide which ones to post on the blog.

me

When I went to Marple, I didn’t have any particular plan. I asked the guy behind the information counter at the station what there was to see and he said there was a river on one side (Goyt), canal on the other and that there was a place called Roman Lakes.

I went down to the village and walked a bit, when I spotted a trail and I thought, okay, since I had such a good experience with it last time in Hebden Bridge, I would try it again. A good decision! Not only did I get a healthy hike and some great shots out of it, I eventually reached the lakes place the information guy told me about–from the other side.

I can see why it is popular.

My old friends ducks and geese hang out here a lot.

That’s where I sat when eating my bacon sandwich. Yes, they do serve food and drink here and there is also a toilet–see the building on the left on the top photo.

I should add, the lakes have nothing to do with Romans, they’re just named that way. I haven’t managed to find out why, so I’m going with Bill of Kill Bill‘s saying “They thought it sounded cool”.

Arnside, Cumbria

The following photographs have already appeared on this blog, as part of the dead and buried WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge. The reason why I’m reposting them is the same as with the Albert Dock of Liverpool pictures. Arnside deserves its own post.

Arnside is a village in Cumbria, North West England, on the river Kent estuary in Morecambe Bay. It’s belongs to the Arnside and Silverdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty–you can see why.

I have added the following two pics for this post:

From my trip in September 2016.

Walk to Heptonstall

Here’s what happened when I took an unplanned walk to the village of Heptonstall from Hebden Bridge.

It started with this.

I thought, just because you can doesn’t mean you should–but I did it anyway. I saw how steep it was–but I did it anyway. I reckoned, if it gets too bad I’ll just turn back–but in the end I made it all the way to Heptonstall!

People I met on my way up did follow the instruction on the sign–honestly everyone was so dead nice!

I’ve not spent much time in the actual village, just enough to take some shots. My loss, probably, as there is a museum and also the poet Sylvia Plath is buried in the graveyard extension of the St Thomas the Apostle Church (but that I found out later by Googling, at home). I needed to preserve energy for the walk back!

It’s a very picturesque village as you can see.

Chicken at the Methodist church graveyard.

So that was trip to Hebden Bridge. A lot of it quite unexpected.

Yorkshire Moors

Out on the wiley, windy moors…

So here they are, as promised in my previous post.

These pastures are right beyond the Haworth Parsonage and the church–there are several little paths that lead out on the moors.

I believe Top Withens, carved on the above sign, was Emily Brontë’s original inspiration for the setting of Wuthering Heights.

I wish I could have seen more of the moors, but I had to rush back to town to catch the bus. Yeah, literally I ran on the moors, though for much more practical and much less romantic reason than that I wish I were a girl, half savage and hardy and free. (Well, I am ever an indoors person.)

“Heeeeathcliiiiiiiiiiiiiifffff!!!”


Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

I’ve always had hard time with Wuthering Heights. It was a struggle for me to read it in English (when Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall weren’t) and I don’t like the narrative style, though I can get past that. What really was the problem, as it is probably for many people, was that the book was promoted to me as romance–when it isn’t. It’s a story about revenge and cycles of abuse, as brilliantly explained in this Tumblr post. Once I understood that, I got it. And what I always liked, even before I knew all of this, was the ending and how Catherine the younger and Hareton get together. I have no doubt the first Catherine and Heathcliff loved each other, but they were both awful and hurt everyone around them. Whereas Catherine Jr and Hareton chose kindness in the end and they lived happily ever after. (And let’s not forget, in the 1998 adaptation Hareton is played by Matthew Macfadyen, who went on to play Mr Darcy in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice!)

After seeing the moors with my own eyes, I no longer wonder why Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. How could she not?

My own video, made by smartphone.

You may have recongised the first line of this post, out on the wiley, windy moors, as the line not from the book, but from the 1978 song by the magnificent Kate Bush. I wonder, could this song be considered a musical version of fanfiction?

Fun fact: Kate Bush and Emily Brontë share the same birthday, 30th July.

And thus concludes my Haworth trilogy.