The river Swere passes north of Barford St. Michael. It's been partially diverted for a mill so you actually cross it twice as you leave the village behind.

Ah, freedom! With another great adventure before me, I take a deep breath and smile.

If you know the area around Barford St. Michael, you will realise that I was lost at this point. I was halfway to Bloxham here and way off the footpath. I can't say that I minded a whole lot. It was a beautiful, warm day and the scenery was just as excellent here as on the way I meant to take.

I also spotted this wagon loaded with bales of straw. There's something about a fully loaded wagon of straw in an empty stubble field that says job satisfaction to the genes of my agrarian ancestors.

Bales are on the way out, rolls are the new bales. When I first started photographing landscapes, I was obsessed with the sky. In many of my early photos the sky takes up more than 2/3 of the picture. I loved the feeling of space, the feeling of having room to breathe that the large sky gave me in those times.

But in a picture like this, the sky isn't just there to give a sense of spaciousness, it is a feature in itself. There's the lone roll of straw and above it the forces of nature come rolling in. Do you want to cast the roll of straw in the role of damsel in distress? In the role of the lone ranger who is holding the fort against the advancing rows of Indians with the clouds as the cavalry that comes to the rescue in the nick of time? Or is it perhaps the outline of two lovers clinging to each other while marching out into the waves of straw one final time while the tumultuous clouds vainly try to intervene?

The rolls aren't nearly as tidy as they appear at first. This is the side of one. You can see how the straw has been compressed unevenly.

The farmer was actually working in the field, creating these rolls while I was taking these pictures. What he thought I was up to is anybody's guess.

I can tell you what he did, though. He had a medium-sized contraption hitched to the tractor. With that he would follow one of the rows of straw. After maybe 20 meters or so, he would stop. The contraption would make a noise like a very big cat with a hair ball. Then a door at the rear would open and deposit the roll of straw on the ground. And then the tractor would continue along the ribbon of straw.

Here is a view of some of the straw strings that the straw roll maker hadn't processed yet. It looks rather a lot like waves, doesn't it?

This is more or less the same view but I'm standing higher up and I'm using the zoom. I think the village in the distance is South Newington but don't quote me on that.

More evenly spaced straw rolls. Having watched the farmer laboriously create them, I had a whole new appreciation for them.

The river Swere again. This is by the ford across it just outside South Newington.

In South Newington I found these little gems outside a cottage. Little cyclamens are definitely worth crawling on the ground for.

A single, pink cyclamen has immense grace. The grass behind shows just how small these little treasures are.

Apples. Fabled fruit of folklore and legend. Not only will one of these each day keep you healthy, a really shiny one will also guarantee good grades if given to your teacher. And if you cut one horizontally across, the seed chambers form a five-pointed star, a pentagram. All this and apple crumble with custard too!

On my way from South Newington I caught sight of the spire of Bloxham again. It's really tall and can be seen from many places.

I got really caught up in photographing the cloudscapes.

This house on the hill is Rignell Hall. You can make out the ghostly shapes of a silver pear in the field on the left.

The sky is really on fire now. In contrast the house seems very solid.

I was trying to capture how the setting sun colours the clouds in the most fantastic colours.

Even stronger here. You can see this kind of light in paintings from the Romantic period. But it's very hard to get right and can easily become a cliché.