The latest Kick-About prompt was Robert Frost’s 1922 poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Night, which returned me at once to the snowy winters in the woods in the village in which I grew up.
I was always struck by the impression of the bases of the trees, very black against the white snow. To me, they looked like the foot of some huge pachyderm or similar, with the thickening around the base of the tree like the moment when the foot of the creature starts taking the full weight of what is being carried above it.
Back in February 2018, the UK was struck by ‘the beast from the east’ – a blast of exceptionally cold weather that brought with it an ice-storm. I went out to the beach to find everything glazed with ice, with even the stones on the beach in that sort of shell of ice you find around individual prawns in the supermarket freezer cabinets.
Whitstable beach is shored up with wooden groynes that extend into the sea to keep the beach from washing away. I was reminded of my childhood in the deep dark woods of the village, less because of the proper cold (which is the way I remember – rightly or wrongly – all the winters of my youth) and more because of the way the exposed wooded groynes against the white of the beach and the frozen slate-coloured mud looked like the skeletons of sea serpents or fallen dragons.
Red's Kingdom 
Black and white photography has an other worldliness about it, always. (K)
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I can tell you, on this day, the freezing temperature was pretty otherworldly too!
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I love these photos. The first one, especially looks exactly like a fallen dragon.
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Thanks Judy – and yes, dragons is what I see too! Maybe they were lured to the town for some fish and chips?
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I could see fallen dragons too !
I also liked the sparse edginess of the photos.
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Hey Teri! Thank you 😀
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