12th: King Arthur’s Cave – Herefordshire

You really would have thought I would have leant my lesson by now, but I still arrived at the King Arthurs Cave nature reserve, with a painting already conceived in my mind. It was going to be looking out from inside the cave to the woodland beyond, very much like the sketch below.

However, after walking along the path of this majestic reserve with a fantastically solid rock face to the left of us, with occasional holes and caves in it, plus a wide-open area of the old quarry, my mind opened up to the feeling that the piece of art (if I do one from this reserve) may be better if it depicted the cave within it’s landscape, rather than the landscape viewed from within the cave.

The area had such a fantastic feeling to it, plus such a rich history, it feels right to do it that way.   To go back to the history, it really is just a question of how far back you want to go. A short time back gets you to the couple of the old work buildings, used when it was a quarry. If you really wanted to go all the way back to get to the stone age (well over 10,000 years ago) then the bones, of elephants, lions, hyena, bear and rhinoceros were found in the cave during the last century. Incredible!