MY wife thought I had started to lose my marbles when I got up before sunrise, put on several layers of clothing and a woolly hat to go out and explore the countryside, which at that point was covered in a thick blanket of freezing fog.

I know freezing fog is not everybody's cup of tea and if planning a road journey then this has to be one of the worst conditions to drive in. Even if you're planning a walk to look at wildlife then these conditions are far from great. To start with it would be very hard to see anything, let alone normally secretive wildlife.

Birds also tend not to sing in thick fog, thus creating a rather eerie atmosphere. So why on earth make a special effort to explore the countryside in the fog?

Firstly, the landscape completely changes, which means you can have an interesting adventure navigating through what was only a while ago familiar territory - particularly when it is dark and things can become very creepy. A familiar walk done many dozens of times before can suddenly transform into a nail-biting adventure full of scary, twisted shapes that seem to loom out of the mist like giant beasts before you recognise them as trees. It's not for the faint-hearted as it is so easy to lose your sense of direction and there's a strong possibility you could become genuinely lost.

The above is true for any foggy day, but what makes freezing fog so special and well worth a little extra effort to explore is the way the damp conditions and freezing temperature allow ice crystals to form dense jagged shapes on even the most delicate of surfaces. At this time of year it also includes spiders webs and it these that I set out to look at. The silken threads that were finer than hair and almost impossible to see were now covered in a wonderful sparkling frost. Traditional orb webs now looked like elaborate Christmas decorations and the less elaborate webs wound their way round trees and scrub looking like silver tinsel on Christmas trees. Each one was fantastically beautiful, but the real showstopper is the numbers in which they appear.

Without the frost you would hardly notice the webs, but with it they appear to surround and coat almost every natural shape. Fantastic for us to look at, but in this abundance they are deadly traps to insects that seem to present horrendous odds of any of them escaping the attentions of a spider.