Snowshill, Gloucestershire

Coloured counties (2)

In view of the colourful cheer my picture of Hailes brought to a number of my readers, I thought I'd do something I do only rarely: reprise a picture from an earlier post. I first posted this picture, which was taken by the Resident Wise Woman, back in 2009 and, looking at it again, it seems to exemplify the happy combination of colour and building that I was celebrating in my post of Hailes. Even more so than that picture, the scene here comes about purely as a result of a working landscape. The barn – stone walled by roofed in corrugated iron – is a basic working building if ever there was one. A knockabout building. And a knocked-about building. But with my admiration for corrugated iron, even with a coat of rust, I like it nonetheless. As for the flowers, they're lavender, a crop grown commercially in these parts that lights up summer hillsides with blue, and sends visitors out with their cameras.

What works, then, can be beautiful or admirable. You know that, probably, if you're a regular reader of my posts. But whether or not you share my liking for the rusty old iron, you can enjoy the drifts of blue that have grown up around it.