#52Ancestors, Favourite Photo

When this topic has come up in the past I have chosen a family group photo to discuss.  

This time though I have chosen a landscape - actually three. 

I have hundreds, thousands of photos; landscapes, sunsets, flowers, trees, people, buildings, holiday memories, instagram gold.

I love these though because they are timeless. 

It is the view I savoured (and photographed) just six years ago. It is exactly the same view that my great great grandparents and their children saw, and will have remembered, every day in the years leading up to their departure from England for their fresh start in New Zealand. Although there were probably more apple trees planted in the orchard in the foreground then.

It is the same view that the original inhabitants of the house and farm would have seen hundreds of years before them.

And this, from the gate at the top of Churchill looking down to St Michael's Raddington. 

Unchanged. 

The Manor House, Kingston, at the foot of the hill where my great great grandfather lived with his elder brother, their mother, stepfather and half siblings. Where their father and grandfather had likely lived before them. St Michael's where his grandfather's brother had been the minister until 1783 and his grandmother's great grandfather or his brother was church warden in 1675.

It is where I feel at home, although I never lived there. Being there feels grounding, walking in the footprints of my ancestors. It’s in my DNA.