The Start of Winter

Mottisfont House and Gardens, and 4 varieties of frost so far

11th December 2012

So with Cal at Allan Dunn's sugar art class, and Mark having met with the Diesel Car Company to try and resolve our ongoing car problems, the dilemma for Mark was what to do with about 2-3 hours of the afternoon between the car meeting and picking up Cal.

With nothing planned, other than the camera on the back seat and a resolve to only shoot photos with aperture priority (gotta get back to camera basics at some stage) Mark happened across Mottisfont House and Gardens (built on the old Mottisfont Abbey). OK, so, I did think about going to Romsey to buy a four bird roast (Turkey, goose, chicken and duck) and then remembered that Mottisfont was nearby . . . the birds will have to wait.

When pulling into the carpark I saw there were puddles covered in ice, so (being the boy at heart) I had to drive over the largest one to crack the ice and splash water around. As I drove over it there was no cracking sound, and no discernable drop in the right side front wheel. After parking, the reason became apparent. The ice went all the way through the puddle - no "layer" of ice to crack . . . time check . . . 12:30 in the afternoon, and still very very cold :-).

The following photos are Autumn meets Winter:

 

 Then there were some pics around the grounds:

I won't bore you with the details - the house wasn't open, but there was a display of star sculptures called "stargazing" . . . Art meets astronomy - there were some (a few) art forms that were good - the rest were simplistic or downright crap - but art is in the eye of the beholder, and my eye is probably very different to others !!! One of the sculptures was called "winter stars" and was very pretty hanging off the tree.

The one sculpture that caught my fancy was simply called "star" and embodies the concept of mass and gravitational distortion - I like that one, even though it's made of simple wood.

I thought the constellation of aquarius displayed over the abbey stream was pretty cool too.

Last, but not least was the Christmas display in the cafe - taken for Cal who has a soft spot for meerkats (at least I think that's what they are). The Chestnut and Pumpkin soup was pretty good too :-).

So, what about the four varieties of frost. I guess this stems from the frost this morning, which was downright beautiful. Last night we had a thick fog, which, during the course of the night negative temperatures, resulted in a beautiful layer of white - not just on top of everything, but all around it. It seemed that every branch and finest of twigs was covered in a thin layer of white dusting. Unfortunately there are no photos as I'm not allowed to take my camera to work, and the photos would have been taken on the drive to work.

Medium Frost - no big deal

So, we have (1) the freezing fog that turns into a light frost that permeates everything (and lasted through to midday). Then there's (2) the light frost that is really easy to scape off the windscreen, (3) the normal frost that is a pain to get off the windscreen, and is heavy all over the ground, and (4) the down right hard and nasty icy frost which comes after rain the previous night - the "frost" is actually a thick layer of ice that is a pain in the neck to scrape off the windscreen. We wonder how many others we'll have before the end of winter :-).