Just an ordinary day

It never ceases to amaze me how many beautiful things one can see during the course of an ordinary day!   

Today we went to the 3 Harbours Festival (http://www.3harbours.co.uk)  which takes place throughout the three coastal communities of Port Seton, Prestonpans and Cockenzie.  It is worth looking at the website because it can give you a much better idea of all the exhibitions and events taking place over the period of a week than I can describe here.  

On our way over to the festival we passed a newly cut field of hay.  It was the palest of greens and the lines of fallen grass lay in beautiful swathes.  They looked like breaking waves.

It was glorious just to stand in the middle of the field, sun on my back and hear the twittering sky lark way up high.  I don't know if the RSPB's recent survey of British birds has established any new information about the abundance of sky larks but recently they seem to be in evidence everywhere I go.  Walking on the beach earlier this week I was accompanied by an amazing symphony of sound, sky larks over the dunes combined with the swoosh of the surf, and lark song prevailed!  Fantastic little bird. No wonder Vaughan Williams wrote that blissful piece of music describing the lark climbing higher and higher into the blue.  It's one of my Desert Island Discs.

Moving on to Cockenzie, we found a number of exhibitions and lovely things to see both in the way of artwork on display but also in and around the communities putting on the show.  

In East Lothian the soil is red and so are some of the walls.  The sandstone is soft and old walls are worn and weathered, stones become rounded off giving an interesting mixture of shapes and textures. 

The garden of Cockenzie House had clumps of crumpled red poppies, so vivid in colour that they almost hurt the eyes!  

 There was a huge clump of hostas next to the pond in the garden 

and tadpoles in it!

Across the road from Cockenzie House in a shed just above the rocky coastline there was an amazing collection of model boats.  They depicted real boats from the history of fishing along the coastline of Port Seton, Cockenzie and Prestonpans.  

The walls were covered in photographs of the local fishing boats and vessels dating back to the early days of photography.  There were also lots of photos of the locals.  One of the exhibition sitters pointed out his mother (in the photos below) and others showing his father, grandfather and great grandfather who were all part of the fishing community.  The women did hard physical work in those days too.  However the photos show lots of smiling faces and here they are wearing their fishwife aprons which were navy with a thin white stripe.

I drove past this glorious pink door and then reversed back up the street to photograph it.  I took other photos of it which I am going to use in a future post, but my recollections of today would be incomplete without this lovely door!