Mapping
To me this is perfectly normal, I’m not sure that my wife or her parents agreed:
When I look at a line of hills, I want to know what it’s is I’m looking at. It worked quite well for Snowdonia:
but I’ve had distinctly less success so far with the Brecon Beacons.
Anyway, as the product of the altogether flatter south-east of England, I really like living in a place where there are always some hills looming over you.
Waves
I learned in a recent language class that the Welsh word Ton means wave, but by analogy it can also refer to a line of hills. There are plenty of places near us named in this way – Ton Pentre, Tonypandy, Tongwynlais, Tonyrefail. The view from the top of our field is less dramatic than that of either of our neighbours, but it has a line of escarpments that has always struck me as being like a series of waves, one giving way to another. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that doesn’t photograph well, like a full moon, because it turns out to be a much smaller proportion of the field of vision than you realise.
Repetition
I attended a conference once in Estonia, that was held in a museum of sorts in a village on the edge of the Baltic Sea. The proprietor there, as I came to understand it, painted the same view from the edge of the sea again and again under different conditions – there were a host of paintings on the walls, all the same view and yet all different.
Driving home from some errand the other day, I stopped to take a quick look from a vantage point on the crest of a hill that overlooks our house and that of our neighbours. Unbidden, I found myself thinking how great it would be able to say ‘we farm this land’, and then a moment later I realised it was quite literally, true – not much of it, not necessarily well, and only recently, but definitely we farm part of this barren, unprepossessing land. We’ve managed to get hold of some rams finally – they’re going to be put to the ewes at the start of December.
A Story from Twitter
Fireflies 