"Look at it this way"

From the classic 'Crossing Open Ground' “I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within.  The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology… If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of the sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out, and in that tangible evidence you will sense the history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush… the smell of the creosote bush….all elements of the land, and what I mean by “the landscape.” The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named a...

Those teaching in or near to Somerset  gained another possible option for field visits following the 2023 announcement that Mendip became a National Nature Reserve. Mendip in #Somerset is our newest ‘super’ #NationalNatureReserve 🎉 Home to a vibrant landscape and nationally endangered species such as horseshoe #bats , this 1,400 hectare #NNR will boost #NatureRecovery whilst connecting people to nature. Read more: https://t.co/Au8d4RFbgC pic.twitter.com/4dSgNu5eSi — Natural England (@NaturalEngland) October 19, 2023  Mendip is a place that I have visited a few times over the years.

This nice interactive infographic visualises the ice loss from Switzerland's glaciers. It is one of several from the VisQuill site , developed by Dr. Benjamin Niedermann.

A cross-posting from my GCSE Natural History blog A really useful podcast recorded and shared by Ellie, the Curious Geographer. Stones might seem lifeless — but what if they’re not? All around us, from monuments to buildings, stones are quietly alive, inhabited and transformed by lichens. As these organisms grow, they merge with the stone itself, blurring the line between what is living (biotic) and what is not (abiotic).  In this episode, I’m joined by Dr Nicholas Carter, biogeomorphologist and Lecturer & Subject Lead in Geography at Christ Church College, University of Oxford, to explore what lichens are, how they interact with stone and challenge the way we understand the world around us.  This interview is ideal for A Level and GCSE Geography students, especially those studying Ecosystems and Geomorphology (including coasts) — and for anyone fascinated by the hidden connections between organisms, place, and environment.

Came across a cracking little guide to the pebbles on the beaches of Scotland (in particular) by the Scottish Geology Trust. It's a free PDF download from this link. Scottish Geology Trust ©2021 This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. 

A few years ago, I spent a lot of time producing an entry for a writing competition, which required a piece of descriptive writing linked the Fens and travelling, and encounters with nature and wildlife. I can't remember the exact rubric, but it was about travelling. I decided to write about a journey that I have made over 2000 times .... from home to work and back again. It took me weeks to write on and off, and at the end I didn't think it was quite good enough to enter, so never used it - imposter syndrome again perhaps. It's sat on my hard drive for a couple of years and perhaps now is time to just put it out there... I'm quite pleased with some elements of it. B1145-A1065-A47-A1122-A10 by Alan Parkinson This piece also acts as an example of quotidian geography . This is something that is the daily experience for many, although a growing number have never had a job, or are currently out of work. Some travel to work or school the same way each day - some by tr...