October In Pictures

Taken on a morning walk along the banks of the Thames at Henley, not a great angle, but my lens was playing up so it's the only one without a black circle around it.  Shame about the plastic bottle...

I think this is a post with weeds growing on it, an intriguing shape.

The  mansion below is said to be built from the proceeds of slavery.  You can just see a jogger and a rower enjoying the exceptional weather.

                                    Ephemeral Virginia Creeper vines with shadows.

The view below from my bedroom, by the time I had grabbed my camera the glowing autumnal sunrise was fast disappearing, you can just see it disappearing into the cloud above the church.

Just so that you know my life is not all quiet walks and views, my son and his band performing at a gig.

Back to the views...  I have just returned from a trip to visit Haworth.  My daughter and I explored the Bronte countryside and the area around the parsonage that gave a home to the Bronte sisters.  The museum was excellent, it really gave you a feel of their daily life, but amongst the rooms was an exhibit which seemed a little distracting to me, a first time visitor.  Dog head photographs exhibits were in every room, in abundance.  A stuffed giraffe next to the first floor window overlooking the graveyard?

 If I had to describe it in one word, that word would be disconcerting. 

My daughter walking through the Bronte Meadow at the back of the parsonage.  It was a windy and quiet day, not Wuthering Heights weather at all.  More Jane Eyre on a brisk stroll to the church.

I went with moody monochrome for the graveyard and parsonage shots.  There was quite a gruesome fact about the graveyard.  The Rector Patrick Bronte (father) campaigned for more land for his graveyard and for improvement for the village water supply.   The two causes were linked.  Due to the fashion for covering the graves with large stones, no plants grew on the graves, and thus oxygen was prevented from getting into the burial hole.  This slowed down body decomposition considerably.  Then a noxious oily liquid started to appear in the village water supply...  Once the public health inspector Charles Babbage got involved, the newer graves were not covered with a stone but marked with an upright stone or carving instead.

The trees that came along later add an air of menace;  giving a perch for the murder of crows (the collective noun, not my fevered imaginings) and causing havoc with the large horizontal grave markers. Spooky.

All of the Bronte family, with the exception of Anne are buried under the church (it was later rebuilt).  I can see why thousands of people make the pilgrimage every year, the Parsonage is a very special place.  The horsehair sofa on which Charlotte died was appropriately in the front room where the Bronte siblings wrote their stories together.   They would pace round the table in that small but cosy room, reading the stories out loud to each other during the long dark evenings. It made me think, if their mother had lived, if their father had been less strange, if they'd had a telly....  We would not have great novels filled with wild, unforgiving moorland, strong, colourful characters, love and loss.