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This atmospheric optical phenomena was unusual because it occurred with surface air temperatures near 40F. Ice crystals are usually required with upper level (cloud base) temperatures colder than -20F.
The 1st still shows the mock sun (with pillar). The actual sun rose ~10 minutes later. The 2nd still shows the fading pillar.
Mock advertisement with an image of myself as Tatiana Veranova, a 1960s Ukrainian ballerina, cellist, and KGB spy from my "Absolutely Smashing" franchise.
The two wonderfully ornate timber-framed buildings in the middle of this Chester street scene are Victorian Tudor revivals from the 1890s. Both buildings are jettied in the late-medieval medieval style in which the upper floors extend out over lower stories. As an artifact of the perspective distortion correction I did, these two buildings almost seem to lurch upwards, especially the taller of the two.
One thing I couldn't edit out was the fellow dead in the middle of the shot giving me the stink-eye for taking his picture. Perhaps I could have waited a moment for him to pass out of the frame.
A visit to the National Trust property that is Penrhyn Castle
Penrhyn Castle is a country house in Llandygai, Bangor, Gwynedd, North Wales, in the form of a Norman castle. It was originally a medieval fortified manor house, founded by Ednyfed Fychan. In 1438, Ioan ap Gruffudd was granted a licence to crenellate and he founded the stone castle and added a tower house. Samuel Wyatt reconstructed the property in the 1780s.
The present building was created between about 1822 and 1837 to designs by Thomas Hopper, who expanded and transformed the building beyond recognition. However a spiral staircase from the original property can still be seen, and a vaulted basement and other masonry were incorporated into the new structure. Hopper's client was George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, who had inherited the Penrhyn estate on the death of his second cousin, Richard Pennant, who had made his fortune from slavery in Jamaica and local slate quarries. The eldest of George's two daughters, Juliana, married Grenadier Guard, Edward Gordon Douglas, who, on inheriting the estate on George's death in 1845, adopted the hyphenated surname of Douglas-Pennant. The cost of the construction of this vast 'castle' is disputed, and very difficult to work out accurately, as much of the timber came from the family's own forestry, and much of the labour was acquired from within their own workforce at the slate quarry. It cost the Pennant family an estimated £150,000. This is the current equivalent to about £49,500,000.
Penrhyn is one of the most admired of the numerous mock castles built in the United Kingdom in the 19th century; Christopher Hussey called it, "the outstanding instance of Norman revival." The castle is a picturesque composition that stretches over 600 feet from a tall donjon containing family rooms, through the main block built around the earlier house, to the service wing and the stables.
It is built in a sombre style which allows it to possess something of the medieval fortress air despite the ground-level drawing room windows. Hopper designed all the principal interiors in a rich but restrained Norman style, with much fine plasterwork and wood and stone carving. The castle also has some specially designed Norman-style furniture, including a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria when she visited in 1859.
Hugh Napier Douglas-Pennant, 4th Lord Penrhyn, died in 1949, and the castle and estate passed to his niece, Lady Janet Pelham, who, on inheritance, adopted the surname of Douglas-Pennant. In 1951, the castle and 40,000 acres (160 km²) of land were accepted by the treasury in lieu of death duties from Lady Janet. It now belongs to the National Trust and is open to the public. The site received 109,395 visitors in 2017.
Grade I Listed Building
History
The present house, built in the form of a vast Norman castle, was constructed to the design of Thomas Hopper for George Hay Dawkins-Pennant between 1820 and 1837. It has been very little altered since.
The original house on the site was a medieval manor house of C14 origin, for which a licence to crenellate was given at an unknown date between 1410 and 1431. This house survived until c1782 when it was remodelled in castellated Gothick style, replete with yellow mathematical tiles, by Samuel Wyatt for Richard Pennant. This house, the great hall of which is incorporated in the present drawing room, was remodelled in c1800, but the vast profits from the Penrhyn slate quarries enabled all the rest to be completely swept away by Hopper's vast neo-Norman fantasy, sited and built so that it could be seen not only from the quarries, but most parts of the surrounding estate, thereby emphasizing the local dominance of the Dawkins-Pennant family. The total cost is unknown but it cannot have been less than the £123,000 claimed by Catherine Sinclair in 1839.
Since 1951 the house has belonged to the National Trust, together with over 40,000 acres of the family estates around Ysbyty Ifan and the Ogwen valley.
Exterior
Country house built in the style of a vast Norman castle with other later medieval influences, so huge (its 70 roofs cover an area of over an acre (0.4ha)) that it almost defies meaningful description. The main components of the house, which is built on a north-south axis with the main elevations to east and west, are the 124ft (37.8m) high keep, based on Castle Hedingham (Essex) containing the family quarters on the south, the central range, protected by a 'barbican' terrace on the east, housing the state apartments, and the rectangular-shaped staff/service buildings and stables to the north. The whole is constructed of local rubblestone with internal brick lining, but all elevations are faced in tooled Anglesey limestone ashlar of the finest quality jointing; flat lead roofs concealed by castellated parapets. Close to, the extreme length of the building (it is about 200 yards (182.88m) long) and the fact that the ground slopes away on all sides mean that almost no complete elevation can be seen. That the most frequent views of the exterior are oblique also offered Hopper the opportunity to deploy his towers for picturesque effect, the relationship between the keep and the other towers and turrets frequently obscuring the distances between them. Another significant external feature of the castle is that it actually looks defensible making it secure at least from Pugin's famous slur of 1841 on contemporary "castles" - "Who would hammer against nailed portals, when he could kick his way through the greenhouse?" Certainly, this could never be achieved at Penrhyn and it looks every inch the impregnable fortress both architect and patron intended it to be.
East elevation: to the left is the loosely attached 4-storey keep on battered plinth with 4 tiers of deeply splayed Norman windows, 2 to each face, with chevron decoration and nook-shafts, topped by 4 square corner turrets. The dining room (distinguished by the intersecting tracery above the windows) and breakfast room to the right of the entrance gallery are protected by the long sweep of the machicolated 'barbican' terrace (carriage forecourt), curved in front of the 2 rooms and then running northwards before returning at right-angles to the west to include the gatehouse, which formed the original main entrance to the castle, and ending in a tall rectangular tower with machicolated parapet. To the right of the gatehouse are the recessed buildings of the kitchen court and to the right again the long, largely unbroken outer wall of the stable court, terminated by the square footmen's tower to the left and the rather more exuberant projecting circular dung tower with its spectacularly cantilevered bartizan on the right. From here the wall runs at right-angles to the west incorporating the impressive gatehouse to the stable court.
West elevation: beginning at the left is the hexagonal smithy tower, followed by the long run of the stable court, well provided with windows on this side as the stables lie directly behind. At the end of this the wall turns at right-angles to the west, incorporating the narrow circular-turreted gatehouse to the outer court and terminating in the machicolated circular ice tower. From here the wall runs again at a lower height enclosing the remainder of the outer court. It is, of course, the state apartments which make up the chief architectural display on the central part of this elevation, beginning with a strongly articulated but essentially rectangular tower to the left, while both the drawing room and the library have Norman windows leading directly onto the lawns, the latter terminating in a slender machicolated circular corner tower. To the right is the keep, considerably set back on this side.
Interior
Only those parts of the castle generally accessible to visitors are recorded in this description. Although not described here much of the furniture and many of the paintings (including family portraits) are also original to the house. Similarly, it should be noted that in the interests of brevity and clarity, not all significant architectural features are itemised in the following description.
Entrance gallery: one of the last parts of the castle to be built, this narrow cloister-like passage was added to the main block to heighten the sensation of entering the vast Grand Hall, which is made only partly visible by the deliberate offsetting of the intervening doorways; bronze lamp standards with wolf-heads on stone bases. Grand Hall: entering the columned aisle of this huge space, the visitor stands at a cross-roads between the 3 principal areas of the castle's plan; to the left the passage leads up to the family's private apartments on the 4 floors of the keep, to the right the door at the end leads to the extensive service quarters while ahead lies the sequence of state rooms used for entertaining guests and displayed to the public ever since the castle was built. The hall itself resembles in form, style and scale the transept of a great Norman cathedral, the great clustered columns extending upwards to a "triforium" formed on 2 sides of extraordinary compound arches; stained glass with signs of the zodiac and months of the year as in a book of hours by Thomas Willement (completed 1835). Library: has very much the atmosphere of a gentlemen’s London club with walls, columned arches and ceilings covered in the most lavish ornamentation; superb architectural bookcases and panelled walls are of oak but the arches are plaster grained to match; ornamental bosses and other devices to the rich plaster ceiling refer to the ancestry of the Dawkins and Pennant families, as do the stained glass lunettes above the windows, possibly by David Evans of Shrewsbury; 4 chimneypieces of polished Anglesey "marble", one with a frieze of fantastical carved mummers in the capitals. Drawing room (great hall of the late C18 house and its medieval predecessor): again in a neo-Norman style but the decoration is lighter and the columns more slender, the spirit of the room reflected in the 2000 delicate Maltese gilt crosses to the vaulted ceiling. Ebony room: so called on account of its furniture and "ebonised" chimneypiece and plasterwork, has at its entrance a spiral staircase from the medieval house. Grand Staircase hall: in many ways the greatest architectural achievement at Penrhyn, taking 10 years to complete, the carving in 2 contrasting stones of the highest quality; repeating abstract decorative motifs contrast with the infinitely inventive figurative carving in the newels and capitals; to the top the intricate plaster panels of the domed lantern are formed in exceptionally high relief and display both Norse and Celtic influences. Next to the grand stair is the secondary stair, itself a magnificent structure in grey sandstone with lantern, built immediately next to the grand stair so that family or guests should not meet staff on the same staircase. Reached from the columned aisle of the grand hall are the 2 remaining principal ground-floor rooms, the dining room and the breakfast room, among the last parts of the castle to be completed and clearly intended to be picture galleries as much as dining areas, the stencilled treatment of the walls in the dining room allowing both the provision of an appropriately elaborate "Norman" scheme and a large flat surface for the hanging of paintings; black marble fireplace carved by Richard Westmacott and extremely ornate ceiling with leaf bosses encircled by bands of figurative mouldings derived from the Romanesque church of Kilpeck, Herefordshire. Breakfast room has cambered beam ceiling with oak-grained finish.
Grand hall gallery: at the top of the grand staircase is vaulted and continues around the grand hall below to link with the passage to the keep, which at this level (as on the other floors) contains a suite of rooms comprising a sitting room, dressing room, bedroom and small ante-chamber, the room containing the famous slate bed also with a red Mona marble chimneypiece, one of the most spectacular in the castle. Returning to the grand hall gallery and continuing straight on rather than returning to the grand staircase the Lower India room is reached to the right: this contains an Anglesey limestone chimneypiece painted to match the ground colour of the room's Chinese wallpaper. Coming out of this room, the chapel corridor leads to the chapel gallery (used by the family) and the chapel proper below (used by staff), the latter with encaustic tiles probably reused from the old medieval chapel; stained and painted glass by David Evans (c1833).
The domestic quarters of the castle are reached along the passage from the breakfast room, which turns at right-angles to the right at the foot of the secondary staircase, the most important areas being the butler's pantry, steward's office, servants' hall, housekeeper's room, still room, housekeeper's store and housemaids' tower, while the kitchen (with its cast-iron range flanked by large and hygienic vertical slabs of Penrhyn slate) is housed on the lower ground floor. From this kitchen court, which also includes a coal store, oil vaults, brushing room, lamp room, pastry room, larder, scullery and laundry are reached the outer court with its soup kitchen, brewhouse and 2-storey ice tower and the much larger stables court which, along with the stables themselves containing their extensive slate-partitioned stalls and loose boxes, incorporates the coach house, covered ride, smithy tower, dung tower with gardeners' messroom above and footmen's tower.
Reasons for Listing
Included at Grade I as one of the most important large country houses in Wales; a superb example of the relatively short-lived Norman Revival of the early C19 and generally regarded as the masterpiece of its architect, Thomas Hopper.
First views of the castle.
Towards the Railway Museum
Here is the completed MOCked and Loaded trophy in the Battle theme at BrickCon 2015, for the build that best epitomized the overall convention theme of MOCking History. The trophy features a spaceman who is loaded (both because he's quite inebriated and because he's carrying futuristic weaponry) being mocked by a couple of colonials dressed as native Americans during the Tea Party at Boston Harbor.
These two Maasai Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis tippelskirchii) engaged in a mock battle as they swung their heads to and fro while trying to strike their opponent with their horns.
At first sight I though that this was a stone chat but Trevor, who has an eye for detail, disagreed and of course he was right!
It also has a very un-pronounceable Latin name!
I also noticed the lizard on the roof when I finally got around to processing the image.
Blyde River Canyon
Mpumalanga
South Africa
www,photoafrica.net
In the backyard today I heard quite a conversation going on between my Quaker Parakeet and this Mockingbird. I doubted that he'd still be there by the time I ran in and got the camera. He surprised me by allowing me to get quite close and never flew away. He was copying the sounds my bird makes and vice versa - so cute!
DSC_7870: Hood ornament as seen yesterday downtown in Moncton at the Atlantic Grand Nationals car show on Main St during lunch hour.
Part of my series of "interesting car part" assigned to me by Sue.
This area of Taitung, by Jinlong Lake, seems to be a great place to find mock vipers (Psammodynastes pulverulentus). The last three times I've been there, I've found four sleeping at night and then one crossing the road in the morning. Although I couldn't get my long lens to focus correctly (I later realised it was fogged up with condensation after spending the night in my car), the snake seemed to think it could fob me off by pretending to be a twig and slowly crawled up into a bush, allowing me to change to my favourite short lens and get some close-up shots.
We took the girls out for a walk this evening (I just happened to have my camera with me!); we stopped to chat with a neighbour when my jaw dropped at the sight of the falling sunlight filtering through this mock orange. I had to ask her to allow me to spend a few minutes alone with it :)
6D with EF 70-200 f/4L and a Tiffen CPL: f/4.0; FL: 100 mm; SS: 1/250; ISO: 200; shot in RAW and PP in Lightroom; slight crop and a touch of unsharp in Gimp.
This little bird is hysterical. my first encounter was a ferocious screech when I let Sprocket the cat out. It turns out this is a Mockingbird and the sound it is mocking is the local bald eagles that live around the St. Johns River. I'm not sure that the cat believes its an eagle but i'm also sure the Mockingbird doesn't believe that it's not an eagle. The interactions between the two are frequent and extremely entertaining.
The kitchen was quite warm, so I did dishes in my slip. I like how the kitchen gloves match my earrings. Christine took this picture.
Hand-created rought mock-up of printed vector sketching in a vintage-style. The actual base will have smaller spaced honeycomb, and a larger area of it shaped in a classic basket shape. Size of mock-up is 5"x5", with 5" depth 360 degree front/back base.
The Mock-Up Reactor (MUR) was a 100-kilowatt reactor installed in the reactor building to test experiments at low power before inserting them into the more powerful sixty-megawatt reactor. This allowed operators to determine the best location for the experiments and it also helped them understand the effects each loading scheme had on the neutron flux. Though much smaller and less powerful than the main Plum Brook reactor, the MUR required its own annual AEC/NRC license, and today has its own separate decommissioning plan.
Credit: NASA
Image Number: C-2001-1204
Date: May 30, 2001