Hertford Island from the Southwest

For your delectation, here are two final photos of the western shores of Hertford Island, photo #1 showing the entire island from approximately 2 km (1¼ mi) away and photo #2 showing nearly all of the island from off its southwestern end. The two photos were taken seven minutes apart and I’m certain the sun did not substantially change, so the colour disparity between the photos must arise from distance and, likely, haze.

Photo #1 is pretty consistent with the gen­er­al im­pres­sion of castle walls, though the cur­va­ceous round towers that were so visible from close by have pretty much van­ished in this view. There is also way more greenery on the cliffs of the south­west­ern end than one would expect to see on castle walls and the reddish-orange blotches across the top of the middle part of the island (lichen-covered rock faces, actually) don’t help much either.

But photo #2 totally destroys this castle-walls im­pres­sion. From this per­spec­tive—that word yet again!—it is the in­den­ta­tions in the rocks and particularly that tri­angular structure in the centre of the photo that take one’s eye. No castle walls here! It is only with some study that one realizes that this view spreads the south­west­ern third of the island over the bulk of the photo and compresses the northern two-thirds of the island into a short addendum at the left of the photo. Perspective indeed!

I still see the lion at the southwestern end of the island very clearly in photo #2, but to it I now add a human face with a large nose, eye and lips (Glooscap’s?) about a quarter of the way in from the left! Neither, however, shows up in photo #1, so they must both be clearly figments of my imagination!