Where are the impressionists?

Today I walked up onto Pla de Martis, and experienced the big, open beautifully sunlit spread of sky and the prairie like expanses of the fields.

Since I have not had to take Adam to hitch a lift to his school (They have a sort of flexi time until the exams finish in mid June, or so he has convinced me) I have not been in Martis since before the clocks went forward. The bare furrows have turned into waving fields of corn, the hedges are plump and bosomy and the verges are full of wildflowers. I enjoyed following winding tractor trails between farms whose only visible boundary is a half concealed stone, delimiting field ends. The whole area is reminiscent of my childhood home in rural Lincolnshire with the same sense of uninterrupted space with the backdrop of the mountains to the north.

Actually there is another sort of division between fields and lands, that of different crops. The oats are rapidly ripening whilst the barley and wheat are still green so you get a stripe of contrast as one field edge meets another, and then the poppies which are starting to fade with that sense of sadness that we have been conditioned to expect from poppies.

So North was the direction of my shot this morning, over the village of Maia de Montcal in the middle of the frame towards the rise of the Col de Bassagorda and the high meadows in the far distance. Warm air, hot sun, bees and butterflies and that heavy smell of a Spanish summer morning, days don't come much more pleasant than these.