Foggy, foggy day

The snow had now gone, the ground was wet but solid and the red deer were now away foraging, leaving the fallow deer to occupy the patch of silage left the previous week for the red deer. For once they imitated the red deer and stayed put, not seeking the shelter of the nearby wood, so we were able to get quite close.
It is a fascinating place. Not only for the deer and the wildlife, which on such a foggy day, had not been keen to be in sight. We were walking, once again, in parkland which was being restored to its 18th century magnificence. This project will take time and the wild deer, aided by the domesticated red deer, were part of that process.

Eighteenth century plantations, removed by twentieth century open cast mining, have been replaced. Overgrown woodland, invading for the past century or two and which had blocked the views created three hundred years ago, have been cleared. These views beheld structures set up by the owners of the house in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

These were Thomas Wentworth and his son William. Their story is fascinating and is set against a rapid change in the monarchy involving invasion and a change of dynasty, political and religious divide and fear in the country, the creation of union with Scotland, played out over a European war and the creation of Great Britain as a leading European power.

Heady stuff, and all new to me. My school history education had a huge gap between the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the American War of Independence in the later 18th century. The stuff of here, in the late 17th and early 18th century, is, for me, quite new and extremely fascinating. And the fact it involves this family of Wentworth at the highest political and state level, makes the parkland I patrol the richer for it.
But any views, no matter how many trees have beeen removed, were impossible today. The patrol was quiet, with the fog deadening sound and diffusing its direction. If last week was to me the dead end of the year, then today was not showing anything to change that.