Exmoor

[puddleshark]

Picture taken from one of the roads that runs across the high ground of Exmoor, where there are sheep and Exmoor ponies and red Devon cattle roaming freely, and sometimes wandering along and across the road.

I was quite startled by Exmoor - by how high and how bleak the hills were. I suppose I was expecting something like the New Forest, or the Dorset heaths, with wide expanses of purple heather.

Comments

[greenwoodside]

When I lived in Mid South Wales, I used to look out across the Estuary and mentally wave at Exmoor on clear days. (Many days it was just a shadow, if that).

It always seemed to loom lofty and remote, in comparison to fertile, Norman-baron-attracting Glamorgan -- not like a continuation of an interrupted landscape.

[puddleshark]

...not like a continuation of an interrupted landscape...

No. Not like when I'm down by the Dorset coast, waving at the Isle of Wight.

Exmoor has a very different feel.

[watervole]

Where I grew up, you could always see the Pennines in the distance.

It was a couple of decades before I stopped missing them in Dorset.

[puddleshark]

Whereas I grew up in Dorset, thinking that the Purbeck Hills are high, so I tend to be really surprised when I see what hills look like in other places. 😊

[greenwoodside]

I was brought up with a view of the Clwyds in the distance. After much travelling here, there and everywhere, I'm attempting to buy a house just on their edge.

Mountains are dangerous things. (Hills too, pace the Clwyds).

But one late summer’s eve, she refused to remain a mountain. Ablaze, she bared her true colours, and broke out all over in cairns of purple and green virtues; masses of blue and pink powers; mounds of black and red forces.

And seeing her that way I could but stand and stare, so vast were the wonders I saw in the fire.

There are wonders in life …

Euros Bowen