Tree painting #10 Queenswood, Herefordshire again

Today's trees are some more from Queenswood, the area of woodland that tops Dinmore Hill, between Hereford and Leominster.

I never much liked driving up Dinmore Hill! It's quite steep and goes round a long three-laned curve, where my little Peugeot, Guinevere, could never make her mind up which lane to be in. She's far too impatient to hang around behind the lorries in the inside 'crawler' lane and yet doesn't quite have the 'oomph' to keep up with the larger, more powerful cars in the outside lane.

But once arrived at the entrance to the country park at the top, it was always worth a few hairy moments on the way up - especially in the Autumn!

Tree paintings #6 Goytre Wharf, nr Abergavenny

 

One of my favourite places to take visitors is the Brecon and Monmouth Canal at Goytre Wharf, just outside Abergavenny. 

There's a restaurant, a little museum and gift shop and sometimes there are special events for children laid on, with such treats as pond-dipping! But I just love to walk along the towpath where the boats are moored up and I've done several soft pastel paintings of the canal and the boats.

I was there with a friend one very hot August afternoon and it was wonderfully cool on the towpath but there's also a small area of woodland (above) between the main road and the canal, also very pleasantly shady on a swelteringly hot day!

I don't normally much like using a lot of green in my paintings so I don't know what happened in the painting of the towpath below but it's actually one of my favourites. It obviously also appealed to a man who worked for the Waterways and he bought the original at my first exhibition, in spite of the high price I put on it, and later ordered a print of it for a colleague's leaving present.

Brecon & Monmouth Canal Print/Poster. by helikettle

Tree paintings #5 Black Mountains Forest, nr Abergavenny

 

This is one of my few rather dark and gloomy tree paintings. It's part of the same forest that covers the steep-sided valley that I described yesterday and on the map it's called the Mynydd Du Forest - the Black Mountain Forest and it certainly does look pitch black as you enter it.

But we always refer to it as the 'Where's my Teddy Woods' ever since my toddler grandson kept looking up at the trees and repeating 'Where's my Teddy?' We eventually twigged that one of his favourite bedtime stories was called 'Where's my Teddy?' and that there is a somewhat similar wood somehow involved in the story! Such is the impact of the illustrations in children's picture books!

More recently my son and I went for a 'walk' up through the forest but it's very steep and slippery underfoot so when we came to a proper track that circled the mountain horizontally, I was much relieved and there were some stunning views where the trees cleared.

However, after a while we realised that the path was not leading us back down in a circle to my car, which was parked down by the river but in the opposite direction. I would have happily gone back by the way we came but that was too boring for my son and he set off straight down the mountainside with me following as best I could.

I was not dressed for this sort of adventure as we were planning to have lunch at the Skirrid Inn after our walk; it was very wet and slippery so I was also a bit worried about spraining an ankle and as my son isn't insured to drive my car and of course there is no mobile signal out there, that could have been tricky! But I survived, apart from travelling down some of the distance on my backside and having to make sure I kept my back to the wall at the inn because my best trousers were so muddy from the slide!

I've heard that the SAS train in that area but I've never spotted them. Perhaps they were hiding behind the trees. It's not hard to imagine!