Helen Stephenson's Plaxtol/Shipbourne/Ightham Mote Pictures

It is usual to save the best until last, but the best on this walk came about early on when I was lucky enough to capture a near silhouette of trees framing a gate with light streaming through and just the occasional leaf showing in an otherwise black picture. This has to be the blackest picture I have ever taken, but it is set to become one of my favourites.

After passing the gate, the footpath continued in the shade of trees for a while, before cutting through an apple orchard. There was a crab apple planted every so often to aid in the pollenation, but although I attempted to photograph several of them, I found that my regular apple photographs were better!

The footpath eventually led to the village of Plaxtol, where it emerged in the churchyard. I made an attempt at photographing an ivy covered gravestone; and I pointed a camera at the ceiling of the church when we went inside. The local ladies were busy sweeping up inside the church: really they should have been 15 minutes later, because although we all wiped our boots, some mud was bound to have been tracked inside over their nice clean floor.

We had lunch in a pub in Plaxtol. (And a very nice lunch it was, too, accompanied by a half pint of well-deserved cider in the case of Stephen and myself!) After lunch, we took to the footpaths through the fields again. This stand of trees caught my eye and I photographed it both in black & white and in colour and decided to include my best of each here.

This somewhat grubby horse was very friendly and a number of us captured it on film.

The farmyard should have been more photogenic than I managed to achieve originally. A few hours slaving over PhotoShop during the winter improved it somewhat. Another member spent a long time photographing the weather vane, but my attempt at it wasn't worth including here. I hope she had better luck!

The next village we came to was Shipbourne, where we stopped for an afternoon drink. The village church is next to the pub, and after refreshing ourselves at that hostelry, we visited the church.

After more walking on footpaths across fields, we arrived back where we started at Ightham Mote.

Ightham Mote is a moated manor house which is currently undergoing restoration. The plastic over a section of the roof is rendered much more sypathetically in black & white than in colour!