My photos here show how beautiful is our world. I hope to encourage viewers to help save it from our carelessness. This one depicts a panorama of part of the glorious Yorkshire Dales under a summer sky. This part of the country, most of it a National Park and therefore protected from adverse development, has been farmed for millennia. Following the last Ice Age, the ice sheet began to shrink about 27,000 years ago and had completely gone by 11,300 years ago. Very quickly, the land was populated by trees until the entire area was a forest. Humans had lived in the land before the ice age, and Neanderthals were probably living there during the Ice Age. In fact, people lived around the edges of the Ice Sheet for thousands of years. But it wasn’t until the Neolithic age, about 6,000 years ago, that people began to farm the land, which meant clearing much of the forest. Mediaeval monks were responsible for ‘taming’ a lot of the land while making money for their church. And lead mining made some serious marks in the landscape. Dry stone walls have been used as boundaries since around 1300 CE, when they were erected largely to keep wolves away from sheep. Some of the existing dry stone walls originate from that time. The Dales is considered some of the best walking country in Europe.

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Comment, like, and share the post to help spread the joy of natural beauty to as many people as we can. That will help fight the rapidly approaching climate emergency and species extinctions.
I post every Saturday here, but also post one at the end of each day, with the hashtag #ourworldiswonderful, on FaceBook and Twitter. Join me there and comment, share and like if you wish.

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More of my pictures appear in the Gallery.
If you’re looking for pictures for almost any purpose, you’ll find 2,500 large HD images on Picfair, which can be purchased for a small sum as digital files, or as art quality prints on paper or canvas. The small fee helps me maintain the gear and software quality digital photography demands.