This is the first view you encounter inside the museum grounds after you pay your entry fee. Amazing to think the medieval hall house is from Cray in the London Borough of Bexley. It dates to the 1400s.
The Titchfield Market Hall has recently been restored. It’s looking very good indeed now. These halls were once more common in English market towns, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen one in situ. How times change.
The House from Walderton punctuates a quintessential Weald and Downland Museum scene.
These charming railway cottages are a game of two halves. In one part (here on the right) you can see the internal structure of the building. On the left hand side you can see a furnished representation of the cottage.
I’ve been visiting the museum since 2018 but only managed to see the cart and vehicle section for the first time during this visit. Some of the wheels on show were huge. It would have been amazing to see these carts wending their way around Sussex once upon a time.
Not that kind of battle, but instead to the village in East Sussex. Battle the village is the site of one of the major battles of the Norman Conquest of England of 1066, when the Normans invaded Britain and defeated the Anglo-Saxons.
It’s a period in history that absolutely fascinates me. The land ownership brought about by the Normans has shaped much of the rural landscape today, bar the impact of the enclosures in the 18th-19th centuries.
I was passing through from Rye in February 2025 and wanted to experience Battle (the village), so we stopped off for some food and a walk around. The main photographic interest was in the timber-framed buildings. It’s always worth checking out old Sussex villages because they are so rich in history and much of it is well preserved.
The timber-framers are concentrated along the rather loud high street, noisy because it’s the main road and has a fair amount of agricultural traffic.
Now squeezed in by the George Hotel, it’s home to a charity shop raising money to support homeless people.
I know it says 1500, but it goes deeper than that.
I enjoyed this little alley view, but I’m not sure if it’s too wide to be a twitten.
If you came here looking for food, tough luck – the kitchen was demolished in 1685. I’m confused by the date as the Historic England listing only dates it to 1688. What happened to the kitchen!?
This is the imaginatively named 59 & 60 High Street. It’s been restored but dated to the 1400s. Just goes to show how old Battle High Street is.
Before turning off the main road onto Mount Street, I enjoyed the ‘clap-boarding’ on this little shop. This is a technique used to protect the front of a house from rain and wind, hence its other name of ‘weather-boarding’.
This is a decorative hanging-tile style that you often see in Kent and Sussex. The tiles are ‘hung’ on two pegs from holes in the top corners of the tile and laid one by one over each other. It was introduced to protect timbers from rot and weathering, I think. This one doesn’t have a listing but is probably 1700s.
Now we’re talking. This large house, Lewins Croft, is the wonkiest of the wonkies.
It’s a joy, but a shame it’s so close to the road.
It’s also very old, dating to the 1500s.
Here’s another nice clap-boarded cottage along Mount Street, off the main road.
I’ve been making an effort to go for a walk in my local slice of the Sussex Weald before work in recent weeks. The impact it has on my brain, body and soul is profound, having lost my connection with woodland somewhat recently.
Early spring is a special time in woodland, watching the the leaves appear, the first spring birds, and the woodland flowers. It is so much better than those hot, shady and sterile days of summer, in my view.
The chiffchaffs have been arriving, but the song thrush rules this chunk of the Weald. Its repeated phrases echo through the still leafless branches.
Wild branches against ranks of pine and birch.
Those birches, growing on old heathland, waiting for the onset of new leaves.
A birch tree harassed by honeysuckle, catching the morning light.
A green beech tree with lots of moss and algae.
The ride, with pines reaching across on either side.
Silver birches among bluebell leaves.
An old beech tree.
Bluebell leaves appearing below a mess of beech twigs and old leaves.
The grassy banks of the woodland ride. I often hear firecrest singing along these edges where the ivy climbs and a few evergreen trees like the cypresses grow.
One of the nice things about not living in a city is that you get to see hoar frost. I know this because I’ve spent most of my life in cities where the ‘heat island effect’ usually won’t allow for hoar frost to really develop during daylight hours.
Bramble leaves make it through the winter, providing a good platform for these frost spikes.
This thick frost covers the trees and hedges, everything vegetative really, in a thin veil of icing. The puddles become milky ice clouds.
After a very dark, grey and damp December, these blue skies and frosty landscapes have been welcome relief.
Not a great time to sit on a bench though.
This is a reed with a coating of frost.
Remarkably this oak tree still holds its leaves, which is unusual outside of cities in January. I have known deciduous oaks to hold leaves into January in London.
I always seek them out in this weather, especially with a little bit of backlighting. This is quite a heavy crop so the sharpness is lessened a bit. You probably don’t care.
That distant landscape is actually an equestrian estate. It is chewed to within an inch of its life, hence the black sticks of trees, compared to the rough grassland where I stood to take the photo.
I had some hours to take one Friday afternoon in August and so headed to my local heathy woodland to seek out some summer fungi.
I found zero mushrooms, but did learn that summer wasn’t quite over.
In a clearing created a few years ago by the removal of non-native conifers, a heathland has flourished. Sussex, like other southern counties, once had far more heathland before it was either built on or converted to coniferous forestry (like this particular site).
This little patch of restored heathland was zinging with insect life, not least on a fallen birch tree.
Enter: the magic birch tree. Or at least sunbathe on it.
I revered it in such a way because it was providing roosting space for one of my favourite subjects – robberflies!
I managed to get my best ever photos of robberflies here, thanks to the capabilities of my camera, and a little bit of that famous fencepost knowledge.
Robberflies are predators of other flies, but also wasps. The photo above was taken using an in-built function of the camera to stack about 15 photos together to create a seamlessly in-focus image. It worked to great effect here.
Less dramatic was this flesh-fly, one that is actually quite smart in their black and white get-up with red compound eyes.
On the toe of my shoe a hoverfly that looked like a scuba diver was resting.
There was plenty of evidence of burrowing insects in the form of these pilot holes.
I didn’t get to see who lived here. Probably solitary wasps or bees.
What this blog can never express is the sheer number of grasshoppers. Every footsteps sent insects like the one above flying for the safety of a grassy tussock.
The birches were showing signs of autumn and its inexorable approach.
In August I was camping in West Sussex. On the final morning I opened the tent door and nearly stepped on a dragonfly that was resting in the grass outside.
It had been a cloudy night and the ground was very dry compared with the previously dew-laden start.
The dragonfly is probably a migrant hawker (Aeshna mixta) and is known to breed in SE England. As its name suggests it can also migrate to England from southern Europe.
It’s a dream to find a dragonfly in such a restful state, although the insect is vulnerable. It was in the right place however, especially if it wanted its portrait done.
It was an excellent opportunity to look at the wings of the dragonfly close up. They are renowned for their beauty and likeness to stained glass.
By looking at the wings I noticed that a planthopper bug had leapt aboard the dragonfly.
Here’s a closer view. I’m not sure of the species but it’s one I don’t remember seeing before.
A day earlier we had walked along the River Adur, famous for its connection at Knepp Wildland. It was good to see some more wasps around, with so few of them being reported this year.
The wasp is scrapping a layer of wood from a handrail or fence post to be used in the construction of a nest. You can see the ball below its mandibles above.
What a lot of hard work, worthy of my respect that’s for sure.
For my mum’s birthday in early August, we visited Sheffield Park in East Sussex, just over the border from West Sussex. It’s a National Trust estate so membership is needed to avoid the £17 entrance fee.
I didn’t have a camera with me other than my phone, but the Pixel 7a has an amazing camera, so I managed some nice pics of a few damselflies.
Obviously these are people not dragonflies, but the area was absolutely zinging with Odonata (the scientific name for dragons and damsels). This is looking back towards where the estate house is, though it’s not somewhere you can enter. People live there like in olden times.
Perched on the edge of the giant rhubarb (Gunnera – a super invasive wetland plant installed in places like Sheffield Park long ago for their showy foliage) was a small red-eyed damselfly.
What a beauty. Damselflies generally rest with closed wings, while dragonflies have them open. That notion was quickly dispelled by my next sighting. Usually dragons are much bigger anyway, by the way.
I was chatting to my sister when I noticed a damsel had taken a very pleasing perch in a shrub. A damselfly holding its wings out!
Now this is a willow emerald damsel, a species which ten years ago people were losing their minds over. It was a new arrival in the UK, and likely indicative of a warming climate. Now they are everywhere in southern England, and we’re experiencing temperature breakthroughs year on year.
I was just pleased to share a nice day in Sussex with my nearest and dearest. You can’t ask for much more than that, except for maybe some beautiful damselflies.
Nymans is a National Trust garden in the western edge of the High Weald. There are great views across Mid Sussex towards the South Downs. This visit was just for a general walk, but it quickly dawned on me that it could be a chance for some macro.
I had my Olympus 12-45mm lens with me which can work really well as a macro lens. Bingo!
Nymans has a lovely array of rock gardens and extravagant flowering borders.
The common spotted orchids were peaking, as you can see, the flowers turning to seed.
I realised this visit could be interesting for macro when we spotted this caterpillar munching on a knapweed leaf. It’s the larva of a sawfly, rather than a moth or butterfly.
Elsewhere on the knapweed was this small robberfly. I love seeing this striking group of flies, they make great subjects. They also strike, in the predatory sense.
I’ve seen loads of alder leaf beetles since moving to Sussex but I usually see them in towns. It’s always nice to see one in a meadow.
There were a number of small bees around. I think this is one of the bronze furrow bees.
In the head of a meadow cranesbill was this rather dozy little solitary bee. I pulled the petal to the side, as you can see here, to see if it had been caught by a spider. It hadn’t, it was just still.
Nymans has rose gardens, where I found this solitary bee trying to make sense of the maze of petals. Life, eh?
I started drafting this blog while unknowingly coming down with COVID, and now can’t remember what I wanted to say…
Nevertheless, the photos here are a few phone pics from a wonderful churchyard in Haywards Heath in West Sussex.
The churchyard has views of the South Downs, in this case towards Wolstonbury Hill. I was actually going to be walking there for the coming weekend but the virus has robbed me of that dream. I must spend less time hugging 5G phone masts.
Again, I am so impressed by the detail that the newer phone cameras can achieve. This is probably a furrow bee (I think sometimes referred to as sweat bees?) in a common knapweed flower head. Did you know that daisies are some of the most evolutionarily-recent flowers and they make use of multiple florets, as seen here. Bees are impressed.
Hawksbeard or hawkbits (too ill to check) abound in these Sussex Weald grasslands. This is an Oedemera beetle, so a relative of the iconic swollen-thighed beetle. You may have seen him pumping iron in your local gym.
The nicest find was among the ragwort, a plant that inspires those on the margins of society, and upsets those who worry about their livestock being poisoned by it.
This is a cinnabar moth caterpillar, like the socks of some experimental Netherlands football kit. Their homestrip warns of their toxicity, so I had a sandwich for lunch on this occasion, just to be safe. Not that it made any difference! #Sick
I recently upgraded my phone from a Fairphone 3+ to a G**gle Pixel 7a. The Fairphone dream is dead for me. I bought the Fairphone 3+ looking for a sustainable option that would last a long time and be invested in. Instead two new models were soon released and the 3+ was effectively archived.
The Fairphone 4 and 5 are just too big and expensive, but the company have pushed sustainability and human rights up the agenda. Surely people shouldn’t be getting a new phone every year. I would argue it’s irresponsible due to the sensitive materials required and the shady employment practices across the production line.
I don’t think I would be interested in smartphones if they didn’t have cameras. Phones are thought to have killed off much of the entry-level camera market, especially when they are so good now and storage and sharing has become digital.
Back in 2002 I took Media Studies A-Level and we were taught about ‘convergence’, the coming together of all manner of tech into single devices. Photography has been a key part of that process. Radios, TVs, typewriters, even people’s jobs have disappeared into phones. This has been predicted for a long time.
So can anyone who considers themselves a photographer (always sounds very serious and self-important, doesn’t it) ignore phone photography? I don’t think so. Especially because Instagram has become the prime mechanism for professional photographers to promote their work.
Also, I’m writing this blog post on my phone!
Anyway, here are some of the first images I captured on the evil Pixel 7a. The camera is exceptional.
One thing that recent camera phones are doing so well is controlling glare. The sky here would be ‘blown out’ or over-exposed in normal images taken on a camera. AI is working here, I expect, to effectively take two images – one exposing for the foreground, a second for the sky. It can look quite over-edited, but for random snaps it’s really helpful.
Another interesting change with newer phone cameras is the inclusion of a wide angle lens. This lens type is probably one of the most controversial in the world of photography, because they’re rarely needed, heavy, expensive and often have extreme barrel distortion on either side of the image. Ever been at the far end of a photo taken with a wide angle lens? You probably looked quite warped!
One thing that impresses with the Pixel 7a is the autofocus. These blackthorn flowers were blowing in the wind and yet the detail is so good.
Lichens are a great thing to photograph because they stand still and can be very attractive subjects. I was considering stretching my budget for a Pixel 8 Pro because it had a macro function. Reviews of the 7a said that it can focus closely, and that is true, to a degree. Also it sounded like the AI in that phone maybe does too much.
One potential block on macro potential is that the phone seems to do auto noise reduction. That can make these weirdly impressionist details were the AI is trying to hide graininess from a high ISO. I’ve noticed it a couple of times and it’s not ideal. The detail and focus is otherwise really good. This is not what the tech people call ‘flagship’ or top of the range.
All in all, I am amazed by what this camera can do. It is so much better than the Fairphone 3+, which shows how quickly cameras are developing in phones.
Would this phone make me sell my standalone camera? No way. Lenses and sensors of mirrorless, standalone cameras can’t be matched by phones currently. It just provides a great option for capturing nice images on the go. It’s going to be especially good for fungi.
Unlocking Landscapes 