Since the days between the years are spent mostly cooped up inside with the occasional shopping excursion, I used one afternoon to go hiking in the Westermark woods near Syke (the same spot where the photos in this, this, this and this post were taken). We didn’t have snow this time around, but it was one of those perpetually foggy days, so the woods had a dreamy, spooky quality, which I tried to capture with my camera.
View along a foggy wood path
Two trees outline stark against the field that lies in the center of the woods for some reason.
A tree, a field and some dead leaves on the edge of the Westermark woods near Syke.
A farmhouse at the edge of the Westermark wood. This is the same farmhouse that adorns the cover of my post-apocalyptic story “The Hybrids”.
Another wood path. Note the branches hanging over the path.
A hunter’s lookout in the middle of Westermark forrest near Syke.
A wood path in Westermark forrest near Syke. This part of the forrest has fir trees in addition to the beech trees that make up most of the forrest.
Close-up of an ant hill. I saw several ant hills, while hiking in the woods.
Yup, it’s another woodpath. The red markings on some of the tree trunks are the lumberjacks, so they know which trees to cut down.
Bare trees and dead leaves in Westermark forrest near Syke. Note the red markings for the lumberjack.
This young tree accidentally got hit by a dose of the red marking paint and now stands bright red.
Close-up of a tree stump with fungi, moss and dead leaves.
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Goodness those are beautiful! And one can see the briefly-evoked background of many fairy tales.
The woods certainly had a fairy tale like quality that day (and as a child, I sometimes pretended to be a knight rescuing a kidnapped princess in that very forrest – the lumberjack markings were clues left behind by the princess herself or the witch who had kidnapped her). And of course, the deep woods featuring prominently in most European fairy tales refer to the fact that much of central Europe was covered by dense woodlands well into the 19th century. This is also a very basic part of what bothers me about many Hollywood fairy tale adaptions, that the woods just look wrong.
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