Finchale in April

[shewhomust]

Today we paid our annual visit to Finchale: it's a ritual. Since we always visit on the same day, and always park on the far side of the river and walk down through Cocken Woods, we always have the same conversations: look, the celandines are out - there are the wood anemones, all the little white stars - the wild garlic won't be long now, I can smell it already - and look how lush the leaves are! But this year there were flower buds ready to burst open on the garlic, and even one or two flowers. And further down the slope, where I'm looking out for the blue of the violets, I almost didn't realise that those particular spikes of blue weren't violets at all, but the first straggly bluebells. Bluebells in April, surely not!

Across the river and into the priory. I wanted to photograph the ruins across the bed of daffodils, but the daffs were all facing the wrong way, their trumpets towards the priory and their backs to me. Also, my pictures are all very slightly misframed. But my new camera does wonders in low light, so here is a picture of the undercroft:

While we were below ground, the sun came out. Two pairs of mallards were dabbling about in the river as we crossed back, one on the limestone pavement, the other in the deeper (but still not deep) water.