It has been two of the dreariest days with dense cloud and completely flat light. Yesterday I didn't take s hot and today I went to Fountains Abbey, and old favourite, and only took three frames.

This, despite appearances, is not a representation of medieval dog-walking but a carving of a chained dragon. It symbolises conquered sin (dragon=serpent=sin).

Interestingly, I found I had to flip it left-right to make a stronger image. This made me wonder why the original artist had the dragon looking left and I realised the answer is probably to do with the ubiquity of signs and notices: we read a picture left to right because we read a page left to right, but also because we are so surrounded by words and texts that we read everything as if it was linguistic. While medieval writing went the same way as ours, the written word did not permeate the visual environment, so even the literate minority probably did not read an image quite the way we do.