Avenues of trees are a perennial favourite for people. The leading lines of wonderful trees, the road / path / track leading to somewhere. possibly the history that way back someone had the foresight to plant them.
Perfect beech avenue, immaculately maintained.
Some avenues are globally famous such as that one in Ireland made famous by Game of Thrones. Others more UK famous such as the long beech lined road near Shaftesbury in Dorset. I have tried to photograph this, but the problem is traffic; lots of cars to run you over. And consequently white lines to dominate the foreground of images.
I therefore took to google earth one afternoon, virtually scouring the locality for avenues of likely contenders. I found a few in Wiltshire, west of Salisbury and went off to explore them. A couple were promising, others not so, mainly because of messy ground levels. I found one of largely hornbeam on a farm-track that was also a right of way - perfect for not being run over. I found another that was on a quiet road and in fact turns out to be fairly famous. It was a perfect avenue of beech, maintained to improbably high standards.
Summer hornbeam,
The fact that I found several just from looking in one part of one county makes one think there must be a lot of these avenues all around the country. Anyway, having found them, one trip was obviously never going to be enough so I revisited them with Autumn colour (part of a pretty busy Autumn shooting this year). The hornbeam turned first and I caught it in full golden glory.
The beech is a much later tree to turn and I have visited it twice in October, with the second trip offering a lovely warm rendition but with an interesting mix of Autumn hues and lingering greens.
I now have to decide which images will win the place on one of my greetings cards. Or maybe I could allow two…