Okay, so I haven’t chipped in with a decent bird post for a while now, and this – I’m afraid – isn’t going to make up for that, but everyone I know (both of them) have emailed me recently asking for more pics from Great Chalfield, our very own (when I say ‘own’, we rent but we never want to leave so we’ve staked a very minor claim of sorts) Wiltshire paradise.
Last night I went to bed and it was cold but clear – no sign at all that it would cloud over and dump a couple of inches of snow all over the garden and the Manor next door. While we’ve not had the monster falls that Scotland and the east of England have had, it’s been just about enough to make the place look magically beautiful. And the best thing of all is that if you get up early (well, by about nine in the morning anyway) hardly anyone else will have been around and all that snow is just lying there waiting to be crunched underfoot….
So, the first ‘white-out’ shots below were taken when I first went outside, then the sun appeared from behind the clouds and a little blue sky emerged, and finally I was just standing outside the house when a couple of the teens from the neighbouring farm came racing by on their quad bike towing their brother on a plastic sled with the bottom ripped out of it: oh, to be fifteen again, impervious to the cold, and not bothered by a bit of road burn as my arse bumps over the ice and snow at thirty miles an hour…
All photographs copyright Charlie Moores
