All the photographs in this gallery were taken in a wonderful ancient beech avenue in Cornwall. The beech avenue is land-locked on private property and its existence is known to very few. It extends for about 350 feet along the bottom of a wooded valley and is bounded by a stream on one side, and an old dry-stone granite hedge on the other. The avenue begins unexpectedly in the middle of the woods and mysteriously leads nowhere! It’s an enchanting and magical place, where woodland flowers flourish, buzzards nest, and foxes and badgers roam undisturbed.

I saw my first skypath as I walked through the woods with my camera one crisp January morning in 1999. I paused in the avenue for a moment to let my eyes climb the massive limbs of the beech trees and gaze at the complex tracery of bare branches silhouetted against the sky…and there it was! A ribbon of clear blue sky meandering between the capillary-like extremities of the tree-tops…a skypath! I took a photo and moved along and looked up again…another skypath, a larger one that branched off in several directions. I chose a path at random, fixed my gaze skyward, and followed it as far as I could from tree to tree until it vanished into the mass of blue.

The beeches that form the avenue are planted close together, and the rubbing of branches between adjacent trees during the winter appears to inhibit growth at the branch-tips…resulting in a void that is filled by foliage in spring and summer. When fall comes the sky appears once more as narrow pathways between the tree-tops.

The last few images in this gallery are of the beech avenue. Your comments are very welcome and votes are much appreciated.