A Cold Morning - PhotoBlog
Glasgow’s Linn Park
The weather report read minus ten degrees Celsius. Not, strictly speaking, the most inviting of environments. A lack of wind and cloud and the sun low in the sky did up my shoelaces for me. The park was still in the shade – the sun yet to clear the treetops – and the paths were mercifully crunchy with frost before the morning sun made every slope a slippery one.
The few people that I saw out on the paths walked with a slow pace, heads turned up – eyes taking in the wintry surrounds under bauble hats. The surface of the river had frozen solid and the slow creep of the ice had taken over most of the waterfall. Ice discs swirled in the last unfrozen enclave, eventually latching onto the advancing ice shelf before turning to swallow their contemporaries into the sheet.
Sitting by the water’s edge, now the edge of ice, I could hear the slow flow and far away gurgle of the river somewhere beneath. Thrushes harried robins and magpies chased thrushes – frost shaken loose from the branches like fell like snow. An aerial perspective of the river proved magnificent and more than repaid the time to gain it. Top-down shots of the ice discs and the river’s last stand at the frozen waterfall. And then a flash of blue as a kingfisher arrows down the river.
I settled down some 200m upstream of the waterfall, where the advance of the ice failed, and the river was steaming in the sunshine. Fifteen metres off-path and in a private world I watched as the kingfisher landed 20 feet away. Cold hands made heavy work of composition as I watched its magnificent colours and a keen eye through the lens. Having decided against the plunge, the kingfisher darted downriver in instalments – stopping every 100 metres or so on a favoured perch.
The sun had left me in the shade of the canopy as a dipper fluttered through the water. It kept to the ice in shade between forays into the river. Squirrels scuttled along the high branches and more frost fell. Twenty minutes passed and the subtle beauty of the emergence receded into the harshness of the settled sun. It remained fiercely cold in my private world. Disappearing into my winterwear no longer guarded against the chill, by now in my bones, and I pack up and head home.
