Running on empty

Another hot autumn day. My daughter goes kayaking every Sunday for a few hours - she's practising for her Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award expedition - while the spaniel and I walk around the reservoir at Ardingly. The Ardingly reservoir provides domestic water for most of mid-Sussex and covers an area of almsot 200 acres but its now less than 40% of capacity. A huge expanse of sandy shore has been exposed together with the stumps of trees that were felled when the dam was built and the valley flooded in 1978. Some of the fishermen have taken to rowing boats because the deep mud flats mean they can't get close enough to the water to set their rods. The distant yellow reflections in this image are from the shore line which now rises up five or ten metres above the water level.