LIGHT! WHAT LIGHT? (16/12/11)

I know I will have to reshoot today. I was going to pay………….don’t all faint…….and enter Chatsworth House. Sanity prevailed but mainly because the place was heaving with folk, mostly, looking at the coaches, those of a certain age. My age and older. They can be entertaining………….if one finds remarks like….”I wouldn’t give that house room”. “What we doin ere?”. Entertainment.

I’ve had the devils own job with the light. It keeps snowing but it isn’t settling. I walked up through Stand Wood behind the house to look at the Stand or the Hunting Tower. It’s a real bugger to snap as it’s in a wood.              It stands does the Stand on the escarpment four hundred feet above the main house. It was built in 1582 by Robert Smythson.

Forty odd years ago I used to come courting here. The lass used to straddle the canon. No wonder that romance didn’t last, she, in retrospect, suffered from penis envy.

             I can’t understand why…………I don’t recognise the slightest similarity to mine or have any affinity with them. Happen she joined the circus and became a human canon ball.

   

          There are three of them, emplacements for five, a bit odd. All have different numbers cast into them and the government arrow. I suspect it started as a guide for the gun aimers or appeasement to the archers they displaced.

These came from a ship that fought at the battle of Trafalgar. It may be true or it may not……………I believed everything I was told when I was a teenager. I still want to be gullible but find romanticism so much harder these days.

I took the steps up the four hundred feet…………….I’m no spring chicken and felt the pain. Had to stop for a rest and a cigarette. Shattering it was.  So I decided to use the road for our descent. On the way down we passed this.

      This broken aqueduct was commissioned by the sixth Duke of Devonshire. Yes I said Devonshire……not Derbyshire…….confusing our little country can be. It is a follie, inspired by the Germans and built by Joseph Paxton in 1839 in the Roman style of aqueducts. It’s what they did with spare cash…….much like us and garden centres. I love this and what the current duke is doing. Got the place and given it a real seeing to.

    A look down it.

A look up it.

All images today have had a real seeing to.

The lady is still indisposed, she is insisting it’s man flu. She will pose before Christmas.

Have a grand weekend.