A frosty December dawn over Oxenhope and Leeming

I’d originally planned to photograph the sunrise in Haworth but having had a wander round in the dark there, I had a feeling I needed to be somewhere with a better view of the sky, so I headed over to one of my favourite spots on the dam of Leeming Reservoir near Oxenhope.

What I particularly like about this spot is that there are a number of beautiful, varied compositions within 20 yards of each other, as you will see.

The temperature was -4C when I arrived at about 07:00 and it was still dark. There was a hard hoar frost overnight and we’d had a dusting of snow a few days before, which had stuck around, even in some places where the sun had tried to clear it.

Sunrise was due at just before 08:00 and the temperature dropped noticeably to about -6C as the sun came up but in the preceding 20 minutes or so, I was treated to a beautiful salmon and lavender sky which, fleetingly, wrapped the whole scene in a cloak of pink light.

I did wonder if Top Withens might have been a better bet up to that point but, looking in that direction, there seemed to be a fairly substantial mist on the high ground beyond Harbour Hill.

In the words of local lass, Charlotte Brontë, in her novel Jane Eyre, “I like the sternness and stillness of the world under this frost”.