Day 189 - Late afternoon walk

Purely to get outdoors for a bit today before there was no light left, I went out for a quick - and muddy - walk from the house at about 3:30pm. It was already pretty dull by then, the sun very low and behind cloud. It was a short walk, approximately 45 minutes, across the meadow, around the edge of the woods and back across the cow (and grasshopper) fields. Under an overcast sky the landscape was looking very drab and colourless, and then the light soon took on that bluish hue as the sun sank further and disappeared behind a hill.

Today's route was actually a walk I did monthly in 2013

If you recognise the tree above, that's because it was one of my 2013 'tree project' trees (I did three!) and I took a photo of it once a month (which all featured on my main blog) and then made a collage at the end of the year.

I was surprised to see that all the hazel trees had catkins. That's the sort of thing I normally see in February. But then again, with all the mild weather and after hearing so many other reports of nature being confused and all out of sync, it's not really that surprising is it?!

I was out, at sunset on a December afternoon, wearing only a light old jacket  (no hat/scarf/gloves) and wasn't cold at all. I kept thinking how warm it was, and that in 'proper weather' I'd have been properly wrapped up and still would have wanted hot chocolate by the fire when I got home after my 45 minutes!


Here's that tree, in the 2013 collage...