Tredaniel plan d'eau, morning

The strong welling of water around the sluice is unusual.  Then the coypu surfaces, and seeing me, floats for a time in the guise of a log, before diving again.

Quessoy arboretum, afternoon

Bright bronze alder catkins follow on top of last year's blackened cones.

The tip of an overhanging twig divides the fast running water of the stream into a fluid V.

Old railtrack, Gare de Moncontour

Mol sloshes through the puddles, we hop over and round them, talking happily about The King's Speech, which we have just seen.  Mol was patient and waited in the car.

Up the road, afternoon.

A bright open sky, anvil-clouded, to our right, makes the cloudbank on our left dark.  The soft pale serrations of distant poplars glow against the winter wooded hills behind them

Up the road, afternoon

A few daffodils at Brochains', always quite early, and the viburnum in flower, yellow crocus, purple primulas, many catkins and glowing leaf buds of the honeysuckle vines in the hedges.

Hill above Henon, afternoon.

In the fallow field, among the shoots of phacelia and leftover rapeseed plants, are large numbers of tiny cream-coloured pansy-like flowers, heartsease, I suppose, and the name itself seems cheering.

Quessoy arboretum, afternoon.

A rugosa rose bush, with acid green shooting leaves and spidery withered hips invites photography, until three rumbustious dogs come pelting around the corner, driving us back to the car.

Up the road, afternoon.

Just lately I am intensely enjoying the gorse flowers.  I know they are there more or less all the time, but their yellow now seems especially full of promising sunshine.

Up the road, afternoon.

We walk to the  end of the la Tantouille lane, and contemplate completing the triangle, but the haul up to Plemy, then still being far from home, turns us back.

Up the road, afternoon

The firs are dark against the cloud-opalescing sun, not quite blue, nor grey, nor green.  One gull whirls on a wingtip, counterchanging, between sky and trees, now dark, now light.

Up the road, afternoon.

Three partridges scuttle away across the bare stalks of the maize field.

The mirabelle hedge has been pruned, the logs with their rose-gold cross sections piled neatly between the trunks.

Hill above Henon, afternoon

Looking out  towards the sea, the upright white marks of water towers suddenly remind me of the old stone cisterns of the villages on the Mani peninsular on the Peloponnese.

Tredaniel plan d'eau, morning.

Some of the short, fat, grey hazel catkins, biding their time since before Christmas, have, with warmer weather, fluffed out into soft yellow dangles, like expanding foam from a can.

Up the road, afternoon

It's one of those January days with an almost unbelievable ghost of a  promise of spring, where the green on the slopes is gold, in credit at last with light.

Down the road, early evening

The unrelenting grey opens momentarily, showing a delicate blue and rose band of light to the north.

A kestrel perches upright in the air, then settles in the chestnut tree.