The Purple Season - a photo on Flickriver

The Purple Season

            We do love a bargain, Ali and I.  Only recently, we discovered that certain chain pubs, mostly those strategically positioned next to well known budget hotels on the edges of our towns, offer a weekday afternoon menu at seemingly impossible prices.  Did you know you can get two mains between noon and six at a price you’d normally expect to pay for one meal alone?  We’ve started visiting some of the nearby ones - keep tuning in and we’ll keep you updated on our progress.  This time we were dining at the May Tree on the outskirts of Helston, ten miles south from home at the gateway to the Lizard peninsula and mainland Britain’s most southerly point.  For a penny under twelve quid, we were each treated to a plate of perfectly acceptable fish and chips with mushy peas no less.  Tartare sauce at no extra cost too.  Followed up with a couple of triple chocolate brownies and a scoop of ice cream and we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.

It was tempting to go back to the bar and ask to see the cheese menu next, but we had come this way for a reason.  And in truth I should have been here a week earlier, when the weather had been pretty much perfect for what I had in mind, but I’d been overtaken by an attack of sloth that had confined me to my garden chair for much of the afternoon.  This time it felt like a case of now or next year.  Who knew how much longer the heather would be in bloom?  Now, with burbling stomachs happily silenced, we were heading just a few miles further to one of Cornwall’s lesser known beauty spots - a place that I only discovered three years ago when a sudden itch to photograph a bit of heathland needed scratching.  The one previous visit had been in the middle of September, long after the heather had finished flowering, and I made a mental note to return one summer, a month earlier.  And after a colourful visit to Land’s End the previous week (more of that to come soon), it was clear that this particularly fickle summer had been a good one for the purple season in Cornwall.  

Quite why it had taken three summers to return is a good question, but here I was again at last.  We tottered along the heavily rutted track from the road towards the heath and a space that feels quite apart from much of Cornwall’s celebrated coastal landscape.  It’s as if a section of the New Forest has been stolen while the residents of Hampshire were all asleep one night and transported down to the Lizard on the back of a big lorry.  A central avenue of tall pines, flanked by open spaces studded with smaller firs and spruces on either side.  It’s by no means an expansive location, but one that deserves a tog’s love and attention - a place to be learned and visited throughout the seasons.  In two hours I’d be struggling to find something convincing as we trod silently through this intimate landscape, but if you don’t try, it won’t ever happen.  I had a tree in mind that I’d remembered from last time, but when we arrived at it, a branch was broken and the foreground heather I’d hoped to find was both sparser than expected and in the wrong place.  We carried on exploring.

As the sunset approached and we began to retrace our steps, a small tree in front of a swathe of purple caught my eye.  But with a competing sapling in the background that no amount of airbrushing would convincingly remove, the otherwise perfect composition was doomed to failure.  I carried on, just a few yards to the left behind a thicket and emerged to find the tree again, now free of all distractions, and with an even purpler host of blooming heather to fill the space between us.  Purpler - did you know that was a word?  I didn’t until I typed it and wasn't told off by the spellchecker.  All I had to do was frame the scene and hope the sun was going to reappear from behind that low cloud.  Eventually it did, only very briefly, but with just enough golden light to set the scene ablaze.  And because we’d already eaten, there was no particular rush to get home.  I could dabble with a couple more compositions in the disappearing light.  All thanks to the reasonably priced menus of the great British chain pub.

There’s another food related beano due soon.  Ali’s niece takes a rather different view on the subject of money than we do, and in recognition of our contribution to family childminding services during the school holidays, has bestowed a gift voucher upon us which will lead to somewhere that absolutely definitely isn’t part of a chain.  You know - one of those places with classically Cornish tourist prices screaming from the menu; where the front of house team fawn over you without invitation before adding a twelve and a half percent service charge to your already terrifying bill for the pleasure.  It’s not the first time she’s invited us to a disappointing upmarket gastronomic experience.  She’s would happily shed fifty pounds a head to eat in the right places rather than pay comfortably less than twenty for (count them) two plates of proper grub followed by calorie chomping desserts.  Even with thirty quid in hand before we have to start using our own money, it seems as if we might need to sell a body part or two to settle the rest of the bill.  We do our best to look grateful, and I keep trying to tell her we prefer Smokey Joe’s but she’s just not getting the hint.  Do wish us luck!

Taken in: UK / England / Grade-Ruan (show map)

Taken on: August 20, 2024

Tags:

Goonhilly

Downs

Heather

purple

summer

trees

tree

treescape

heath

August

Kernow

Flowers

wilderness

wild flowers

intimate

pine

England

Great Britain

Greenscene

Britain

Canon

Lizard

Helston

outdoor

landscape

landscape photography « less

Sets appears in: • Trees • Lizard

Groups appears in: • Cornwall • Devon & Cornwall more » • Photography Week • Flickr Social • Trees UK « less

Camera: Canon EOS 80D, f/10.0, 1/100 sec, 25mm, ISO 1000 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 80D
Lens:	18-35mm
Aperture:	f/10.0
Exposure Time:	0.01 sec (1/100)
Focal Length:	25mm
ISO:	1000
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Manual
Exposure Mode:	Manual
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 13.5 (Windows)
Show full info

Stats: 2,623 views / 42 comments

Link to this photo view:
Link to this photo large view: