Will you still need me…when I’m sixty four?
(Click the small image to enlarge it)
A picture of one of many much loved beach huts in West Wittering, near where our family recently spent a long weekend with friends on the Selsey peninsula near Chichester.
Selsey is one of many coastal towns that is beginning to renegotiate its relationship with the sea, in the light of future sea level rises.
Here’s what the area will look like when the sea level rises by just 5 metres. Have a play with the amazing interactive map that was constructed by Alex Tingle of flood.firetree.net
In the not too distant future, no-one will be able to find, nor indeed love, the beach hut. Or the beach, come to that.
(Click the image to make it suddenly enormous)
On the way home from Selsey, we took to the hills, and took a long walk in the Kingley Vale National Nature Reserve, just to the North West of Chichester. It features groves of 2 - 3000 year old yew trees and there is a group of 3,000 year old barrows on the top of a hill which are definitely out of reach of any rising waters.
You can clearly see these circular mounds in this Flash Earth image.
The yews in the forest below cast a heavy shadow that give the woods a lugubrious, almost sinister mood. My advice is to use a tripod if you’re taking pictures.
Some of the trees have fantastically gnarly bark.
I was delighted to find a magnificent example of The Chicken-of-the-woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) bracket fungus growing on one of the yews. It’s about the only bracket fungus that’s fit to eat. In the gloom under the heavy canopy, the fungus glowed with an amazingly strong brightness and colour.
The most delightful sight was the hundreds of little Common Spotted-orchids growing in the long grass of the chalky hillside. I stretched the macro feature of my camera to the max. The lens was about 2 centimetres from the flower in this shot.
Dactylorhiza fuchsii The Common Spotted Orchid.
(Click this small image to enlarge it)
I will surely keep loving the sight of this beautiful flower long after I’m sixty four.
Beach Huts on Flickr
Yew Trees on Flickr
Bracket Fungi on Flickr
3 Comments
West Wittering - one of those lovely English place names that sounds like verb. Like Hastings, Dorking (which sounds like something you wouldn’t want tell your mother about) and Kettering (did Ian Dury never rhyme this with catering?). This one sounds like it shoudl be twinned wiuth Westminster.
I’ll have fun (or nightmares) playing with the map in the Dutch context.
@The Textual Healer: Douglas Adams and John Lloyd co-wrote a book in the 80’s called The Meaning of Liff that attempted to attach otherwise useless names of villages to new phenomena that were crying out for a name. The Wikipedia entry will lead you to the complete list of place names - good fun.
Thanks for that. I particularly liked some of the Welsh place names:
ABERYSTWYTH (n.) - A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for.
DOLEGELLAU (n.) -The clump, or cluster, of bored, quietly enraged, mildly embarrassed men waiting for their wives to come out of a changing room in a dress shop.
MAENTWROG (n. Welsh) - Celtic word for a computer spelling mistake.