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Realms of Gold

@petergknight.bsky.social
477 followers 291 following 1.3K posts

I started calling myself a Geographer about 1972. I suppose I still am one. I was a university lecturer for years. I wrote some books about glaciers. Perhaps I'm a writer. I also paint a bit, and take photos. Two cats & a collie. Books. 53°N, 2°40'W.

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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Yes, I used to teach hydrology through the medium of dance.
A photo I took looking past my lecturer bench out into the class as they considered "exercise 1"
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Continuing what will probably be a lifelong task of organising thousands and thousands of old photos, it was perhaps appropriate to stumble upon two "scraps" from my old and much derided "novel" "Scraps of Fabric".
a page of text... a page of text...
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
A change from sunsets and countryside. A trip into Whitchurch to get the car’s tyres sorted.
A pile of discarded tyres and an outbuilding at the garage.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Good morning from Marbury. In my early-morning #sky today: the #moon
The moon, photographed from my back garden this morning.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Good morning from Marbury. For a change today we have a photo of the setting moon rather than the rising sun.
The setting full moon just before dawn reflected in the water of the Llangollen Canal, near to the Cheshire Shropshire border.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Good evening, for a change, from Marbury, with a nice sunset.
Big sunset sky.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This morning’s sky could almost have been courtesy of Mark Rothko.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Good morning (somewhat belatedly in case anyone is paying attention) from Marbury. My early-morning #sky today.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Ha ha here's an example of why I don't trust the tech to do automatic updates on my behalf!
A ludicrous "suggested update" to an online listing of one of my publications, where the updated version is a completely different paper, by somebody else!
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The “art and wellbeing” session in the village hall today included learning to do cartoony illustrations of dogs. Debbie did a brilliant cat but didn’t get a photo of it so here are some of my dogs!
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
40 years ago. Summer 1986. Ecuador.
me posing at the camp fireme changing a wheel on the truckme posing in some of my tourist souvenir clothes!Chimborazo volcano. The top of this mountain is the farthest point from the centre of the Earth
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Good morning from… well, it’s actually not Marbury. A rare excursion off patch and over the border into Wales.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Just now? Me? Making an apple crumble, as a kind neighbour gave us (lots of) apples. #foodsky #cooking
An apple crumble waiting to go into the oven… and a couple of apples just to look pretty. #foodsky #cooking
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Life today. Good morning from Marbury. And good luck.
A blurry view across a foggy rural landscape consisting of a huge ploughed field with a distant copse of trees and a foreground strip of green. If it wasn’t for the trees and if I’d held the camera straight I could have said it looked like a dull Rothko. But it doesn’t. It looks like the washing machine when you forget to take the cream eclaires snd trifle out of your pockets before you wash your trousers.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Cooper the cat having a thoughtful little moment. He looks as though he’s remembering something. #catsky #cats We named him after Gary Cooper. The actor.
Black and white cat sitting in the middle of the room, thinking about something.
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Reposted by Realms of Gold
@GeoBlogs @geoblogs.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Eliot poetry? Check…. Mervyn Peake? Check…. Teach yourself language book? Czech….
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
A Monday afternoon #shelfie. These are some of the books on the shelves closest to where I usually sit when I’m “doing nothing”. I think it’s important to spend enough time doing nothing.
Two rows of books.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
A Sunday afternoon #shelfie from one of my living room book cases. #books #library #booksky
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Me? Right now? I’m mowing the Great West Lawn.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
40 years ago today I was setting up camp in Greenland for what turned out to be a very challenging expedition: lost luggage, stolen equipment, early bad weather... diary makes grim reading but it turned out OK. I don't think this photo is that day, but I think it's that trip, based on borrowed hat!
Me sitting on a box, next to a theodolite on a tripod, writing in a notebook. I'm sitting next to a river in front of a glacier. I'm wearing a borrowed hat as a lot of my own kit was lost en route to the site. I was lucky that I was in the habit of wearing (or keeping as hand luggage) the most essential kit eg boots and big coat! It's a Kern DKM-1 theodolite... I used that model a lot in Greenland and in Iceland.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Yesterday afternoon I took a moment to watch the clouds.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I couldn’t decide between two of today’s sunrise pictures, so I’m posting them both! Personally I prefer the lighter sunrise skies with more grey and blue… the big orange skies are a bit showy for me! Good morning from Marbury, anyway. Choose the morning you prefer!
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Another session of the Art & Wellbeing group at Marbury Village Hall this afternoon… Today’s theme was colour, and here’s the picture I made. #art
A scruffy picture of, er… perhaps a wet beach with a line of buildings on a distant horizon under a moody sky?
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Morning sunlight falls Across honey-dappled toast. September breakfast. #dailyhaikuprompt #dappled #haiku #breakfast
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Good morning from Marbury. Now I’m walking across a ploughed field towards the dazzling sunrise.
Dazzling sunrise at the end of a trodden path across a ploughed field
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
My 7am mission this morning was to go and collect a blonde wig from a barbed wire fence in a remote field. Let no one say I have a normal life.
Blonde wig hanging on a fence with a field in the background.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I've been spending some time with this poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by W.B.Yeats. It was one of my sister's favourites, and my nephew has suggested we use the opening line on her headstone. I think it's a good choice.
Full text of the poem, from: 
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
We often have a week’s holiday in the Isles of Scilly at this time of year. This year we didn’t make it, but here’s a picture I painted years ago of where we stay. #Scilly #landscape #painting #art
Painting of the view across Porthcressa, Scilly, UK, by Peter Knight.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
When I was young there was a lighthouse at the end of our garden. Its impossibility never occurred to me.
When I was young there was a lighthouse at the end of our garden. 
I lived in the city, a hundred miles from the sea, but there she was: perched on jagged rocks just offshore from the cliff, pounded by the foaming sea and circled by crying gulls between our house and the neighbours who backed onto us from Woodvale Road. Its impossibility never occurred to me. I was nine or ten years old before I realised that nobody else saw the lighthouse. Its piercing beam did not penetrate anyone else’s skin to illuminate their bones like a cartoon electrocution. The crying gulls, day and night, did not feed the chaos in other people’s heads as they did in mine.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Somebody ploughed up my footpath. Raindrops are falling on my head. And I forgot to wear my waterproofs and wellies. Good morning from Marbury.
The ploughed field.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
There was an “Art and Wellbeing” Workshop in the Village Hall. I drew a thing. #art
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
My wife is making me a cake.
The cake mix in its tray ready to go in the oven.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Today’s lunch was best before 2021, but that should be fine, yes?
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Good morning from Marbury. There’s a flower for every season. Orange Balsam growing alongside the canal.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
In my inbox this morning: "...we need not keep breaking our own hearts on expectation’s cold hard edge of not-enough." Maria Popova www.themarginalian.org/2024/12/14/w...
themarginalian.org
How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a sh…
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Good morning from Marbury. My early-morning sky today. #sunrise #rainbow
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
It’s “Greek Night” in the Village Hall tonight. Some of my favourite lines of poetry come from The Axion Esti… I wonder if they’d like me to start the evening with a short reading. Probably not.
My name and date in my copy, which I have evidently had for 40 years.From the textFrom the textThe front cover of my copy.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
41 years ago: 1985, 21st August - 2nd October I was in the field in Greenland, at Ilulissat and Kangerlussuaq. Some of the time I was with Dave Sugden, Roland Souchez and Reggie Lorain, but I spent a few weeks camping alone working on my PhD project. Here's me with Sugden & Souchez and our ride!
David Sugden (left), me, and Roland Souchez (right) on the tarmac at Kangerlussuaq airport with the helicopter that was about to take us to our field site. September 1985.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Another fresh start. Another new leaf. But harder this time.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Across the border Into Wales, where dragons are, We travel in pairs.
Two pairs of trees huddled together alongside a track, near Holt, Wales.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
My skies this evening. I live in big sky country. From the hill behind my house I can see all the way to Wales in one direction and to the Derbyshire Peak District in the other.
A big sky of mixed clouds and blue patches over a low horizon A big sky of mixed clouds and blue patches over a low horizon
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I'm #writing little #poems all the time. ...not necessarily any good, but I have many hundreds of mostly-unfinished poems in files & notebooks and am always working on something in my head. But my wife has asked me to write one about Ravens for her, and now I'm completely stuck and totally blank!
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
A drawing of the composer Gustav Mahler that I made when I was a student. #art #portrait #drawing #Mahler
Drawing of Gustav Mahler by Peter G Knight, 1982. With reflections on the glass covering the drawing in its clip frame!
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
A few days ago we went up onto the hill at the back of the village to look at the solar eclipse.
Debbie and Bits sitting in a dry field watching the sun.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Good morning from Marbury. My 6am sunrise sky today.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
The UK switched to decimal for a lot of things while I was growing up, so I’m bilingual in Imperial/Metric. For temperature I always think in F for hot days anything above about 70, but in C for anything cooler than that. 90 is officially super hot for me. My hottest ever was 104F in Bismarck ND.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
The heels of my shoes have started to self-armour by embedding stones from the road into the inner framework exposed by the erosion of the soles. My walking sound is now stones against road rather than rubber against road. And no, I don’t like to throw things out too soon!
Photo of the heel end of the soles of my shoes. The surface covering is worn away in places to reveal an inner framework into which stones have become embedded.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Looking east, into the sun, along a canal in the countryside at sunrise. The sky is reflected in the water.
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
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Realms of Gold @petergknight.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
The season is certainly moving on. It’s only a few weeks ago that the sun was rising behind the tree on the left, but now it has started its swing back to the south. Good morning from Marbury.
The sun rising behind a group of trees.
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