Belton boat house

click photo to enlarge
I've long felt that the UK's country houses are largely stuffed with expensive tat, objects that serve no purpose other than to provide something on which the wealthy owners can spend their excess of money. Truly, shopping as a leisure activity didn't begin in in the malls of the second half of the twentieth century, but much earlier, on the Grand Tour and in the workshops of painters, wallpaper manufacturers, and craftsmen who decided that there was a living to be made parting the wealthy from their cash by selling them elaborate and ornate versions  of everyday articles, or specially created objects whose sole purpose was to be collected.

The last of the photographs I am showing from our visit to Belton House near Grantham, Lincolnshire, is a view of the boat house. This small building sits at the edge of a man-made lake that is surrounded by trees. Like much else at Belton it is more than it needs to be. However, it makes a nice eyecatcher in its location and doesn't quite scream "money" in the same way that the house does, even though it was designed by the notable architect, Anthony Salvin, in 1838-9 and is in the style of a Swiss chalet with fish-scale tiled roof and walls of basket-weave pargetting.

photo and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 42mm (84mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A lake or a pond?

click photo to enlarge

There seems to be no universally accepted definitions that allow us to categorically state whether a small body of still, enclosed, inland water should be called a lake or a pond. It is widely held that a lake is larger than a pond. However, exceptions to this rule are not uncommon. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says that "properly" a lake is "sufficiently large to form a geographical feature". However, it then adds, "but in recent use often applied to an ornamental water in a park etc": in other words small stretches of water that do not form geographical features. Biologists have looked at the problem in a different way and proposed that an area of water should be defined as a pond if sufficient light reaches the bottom to allow rooted plants to grow, otherwise it is a lake. Others say that if the effects of wave action can be seen on the shore it is a lake, but if not then it's a pond. No wonder we are so confused on this relatively insignificant matter.

In the UK the small, man-made stretches of water that are created for fresh-water fishing are often called "fishing lakes". Whether this is simply for marketing reasons I don't know, but many of them are what I would call ponds. Of course, the UK also suffers from a plethora of other terms, many of great antiquity, that are used to describe what otherwise might be termed ponds or lakes: loch, Llyn, mere, tarn, pool, water, flash, broad, pit, are a few such words that add a layer of complication to the issue. When I saw the man-made pond in today's photograph I thought that it might be a fishing lake, but I could see no perimeter jetties or other locations where a fisherman might sit. It is also on a farm where the owner has made a conscious effort to maintain areas attractive to wildlife, so perhaps it was designed for the benefit of the moorhens, greylag geese, mallards etc, that scurried for cover or took flight at our approach.

I've noted elsewhere in this blog, that a sunset over water multiplies the effect of the dwindling light in a magical way, so I wasted no time and took a group of shots across the water as the sun sank out of sight. These are the best two photographs.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 75mm
 F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/400 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On