Sometimes you only see the landscape for the first time, the landscape that you thought you knew so well through the eyes of a visitor.

I have spent hours and hours wandering around the lanes and the public footpaths of Green Fairfield, a little bit of bird watching perhaps, trying to identify wild flowers, or just musing on the strange world that we live in.

The above photographs were taken at the request of a friend of mine who thought the landscape was beautiful. She had forgotten her camera, hence the request.

The landscape is of course man made.  The parish of Green Fairfield is home to some thirty people, along with cattle, sheep and the occasional visitors. It is an ancient landscape. Man has lived, hunted, farmed here for five thousand years and longer.

Most of it is farmed, but where the nearby quarry begins to intrude in the landscape, so the farming and a few houses have been abandoned, and nature, with its billions of years of experience begins to take the land back.

These little pockets of rewinding are vital to the wildlife that tries to cling on in the face of competition  from farming, and from man’s arrogant attitude, that nature must be tamed, and controlled.

But on a warm summers day, its a good place to be.