In the rural West, fences are ubiquitous.
Love them or hate them, they’re everywhere, marking property boundaries, keeping livestock in or out (or not).
Some fences are all wood planks or posts, others wood or metal posts with barbed wire. Wooden gates are quickly being replaced with metal tube gates (and fencing) which aren’t nearly as aesthetically pleasing.
My eye is attracted to the geometry they impose on the landscape.
When my dogs and walk along roads in our valley, I often focus on the interesting lines and scenes made by fences, gates, and cattle chutes. Mother nature adds accents: fog, frost, sunlight, wildflowers. I take photos.
Which is what I did this afternoon while walking with the boys along a country lane. While I took photos, the boys ran along the ditches and dug through the snow for voles. In other words, a good time was had by all.
I have oh-so-many more photos like these taken over the years, enough to create a series of posts about rural fences through the seasons.
You’re been warned.
With those gorgeous backdrops? You can post as many fence pics as you want…
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Careful! Although, I don’t think my fence photos will come close to competing in beauty with the rock photos from your autumn vacation.
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I don’t know…. yours are pretty dramatic.
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Absolutely gorgeous!
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Thank you!
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Personally, I think fences are pretty ugly and disrupt an otherwise nice scene (much like telephone poles and wires) . I think I wish for a time before modern humans when the world was unblemished by us trying to gain control over nature.
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I think it’s more about attempting to control property to protect it and our neighbor’s property. 🙂
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Barbed-wire fencing changed the West forever: https://historydaily.org/how-barbed-wire-changed-the-american-west . I agree, though; most fencing is ugly – especially that found in cities and suburban areas – and is necessitated by the property-owning concepts Europeans brought here with them. But, fencing does keep my dogs safely close to my home, keeps the cattle of neighboring ranchers off my property (most of the time), and most wildlife have adjusted, either jumping over or crawling under the barbed-wire fences as they go about their business. Life seems to be endless trade-offs, and in this case, I’ll trade some aesthetic ugliness for the peace I gain.
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I’m not so much against fencing as I am humanity. We live harmoniously with nothing.
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I’ve fenced with a few fences before. I usually came down on the losing side.
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Is that like tilting at windmills? Or are you just trying to get to the greener side?
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Just trying to get to the OTHER side without falling.
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They also make perches for birds, lizard and small mammals. As long as they aren’t too terribly high, the deer can jump right over a fence.
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[…] I warned in my recent post Fences, I have tons of photos of rural fences and gates, most taken while walking my dogs in the […]
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