This morning I headed to Averbury, I set my alarm for 4:30, I clearly remember waking at 4:30 and turning off the alarm. Then the next thing I knew, it was 5:30…
So, I rushed around, the dogs were excited to see I was getting ready to go out, little did they know that they wouldn’t be coming on this fun little journey… I ran out to the car, threw my gear in the back, I could already see the glow on the horizon and knew I wouldn’t make it to Avebury before the sun came up, but decided to still head there anyway.
Sunrise was on a pretty blank canvas, not a cloud in the sky, but with all the additional dust in the atmosphere from the Icelandic volcano dusting across europe, the sunrise was a really hazy one, as I was driving along the M4 I was passing through lots of fog banks, if only I could have found somewhere cool to stop, but decided not to be distracted on the journey. I’ve done that too many times before and wasted time and light…
Anyway, I arrived in Avebury, the temperature was around 0c, a bit frosty, by this time the sun was two fingers above the horizon and the haze was beautiful and gave everything a soft golden glow. I wandered around the town in the surrounding fields, it was fantastic. A couple of people were already out and about with their dogs, there was a brief greeting and then I continued on my walk.
I took some shots of the standing stones and was quite pleased with them, but really wished I’d made it there before sunrise, I think that the shots would have been much more remarkable with that perfect blue of the golden hour before sunrise… I’ll definitely be taking a trip again before sunrise to see if I can improve on what I shot there this morning.
As you head around the outer ditch, you come to a clump of beech trees on the other side to the town and the root system of them is simply amazing, completely proud of the ground, a fantastic grouping of trunks and veins for the lifeblood of these trees…
I decided to head to Devizes to see what is going on and stopped off at the locks, but I was feeling a little tired at that point and decided to come back another day… I think I definitely need more sleep at the moment before I start doing more early morning japes… 🙂