The Boathouse

This painting captures the old boathouse at Woodchester Park, a place where beauty and legend intermingle. Rising quietly at the water’s edge, the stone building seems suspended in time, half-hidden in the soft veil of mist that so often clings to this secluded valley. The light filters gently across the lake, dappling the surface in muted tones of green and grey, while the surrounding trees dissolve into an otherworldly haze.

Woodchester is a landscape steeped in folklore. Tales of hidden traps in the waters and the haunted mansion that looms above the valley weave an air of mystery into the stillness. Fog lingers here like memory itself, settling across the lakes and hills until the whole scene feels both ethereal and haunted.

Yet for all its associations with ghosts and legends, I have always found a quiet, magnetic beauty in this place. When painting, I wanted to draw out not only the solitude and stillness of the boathouse but also the atmosphere that surrounds it—the way the valley seems to breathe, how the mist carries whispers of forgotten stories, and how light softens the sense of foreboding into something contemplative, even tender.

This is more than a lonely building: it is a doorway into the layered soul of the landscape.