Kingley Vale

Took a trip to Kingley Vale National Nature Reserve this past weekend. It's noted for having Europe's oldest and largest stand of yew trees. Usually confined to churchyards, here the yews individually sprawl over wide patches of ground, and collectively have spread over the hillsides of the vale. They're pretty impressive, though a bit stumpy and rather reminiscent of Treebeard from Middle-earth with their gnarly features. Needless to say, lots of tree photographs resulted.


We also made use of the GPS again. Firstly to log our path ...


But also to track the hike's (steep-in-places) terrain ...


And plot up the locations of the resulting "Kodak moments" ...


I also took the time to try out some panorama-making software that I'd acquired from APM. After a number of attempts, which involved fruitless hand-edits and removing seemingly irrelevant frames, I finally got this to create a quasi-sensible result ...


Anyway, the full set of pictures is available over at Flickr.