A windy walk to the woods

I walked up the hill before lunch. It was overcast but fairly bright, and very windy. I hoped to use slow shutter speeds to capture the movement of the branches against the relative solidity of the larger tree trunks for today's Mono Monday challenge, but it didn't work: the sky was too bright for me to achieve slow enough speeds, even with the lowest ISO and tiniest apertures. Instead, I went a little way into the wood and resorted to ICM to try to convey something of the sense of movement in the trees, which were creaking and groaning as branches and trunks shifted with each gust. I also went into the hilltop field where I have started to document the details of some of the very old trees. I marvelled at the fuzzy, enveloping encrustation of lichen on of the largest, and at the twisted sinews of its trunk. I'll need more time to process these, and have been wondering where I might share the best of them as the project develops. It was a happy half hour in an otherwise humdrum day.