England under frost

Yesterday morning I returned from the West Midlands by car.  The north Worcestershire countryside was beautiful, whitened with frost.  We travelled mainly on the motorway network, which has a tendency to leave the traveler slightly dislocated; all of a sudden we were in the East Midlands.  At Broughton and Geddington we had entered an almost magical landscape - sometime intimate, other times vast - where everything seemed in a harmony: blue skies, touches still of frost, beautiful stone built villages, the brown of fields and the more striking green of evergreens in that long slanting light of winter.  Few exceptions to this - the mammoth cement works at Ketton, for instance.  Eventually to Stamford, and the slow, gentle diminution of hills to the Fens.