Sunken lane

I first discovered this lane a few years back, ablaze in the evening sun, its verges of cow parsley and red campion in ragged pools of light. I was quite impressed with it and I’ve been back a few times since.

The left bank of the lane is actually part of Offa’s Dyke, and is mentioned in Jim Saunders‘ book Offa’s Dyke: A Journey in Words and Pictures—well worth a look for its excellent photography. The road itself is older and forms part of the Roman road up Long Mountain, eventually leading to the Roman ruins at Wroxeter where, in the nearby field, I landed in a hot air balloon around this time last year.

This time of year often marks something of an end to my photography. As summer approaches, the leaves turn darker and the light loses some of its attractive quality. As if this wasn’t enough, the uplands are plagued by midges, the roads choke with traffic, and holiday cottages become prohibitively expensive as the schools break up.

But I don’t want to think about any of that. In the meantime there is nothing better than this lane, fading in the flaxen light of a late spring evening. Bats hunt beneath the trees as I head back to the car, and a silence descends.

I guess I’m a Romantic at heart

I’m in the Lake District at the moment and the weather is decidedly un-May-like, generally made up of uninspiring light interspersed between rain showers. Maybe not ideal conditions for landscape photography, but this got me thinking about these “ideal” conditions and what we mean by this.

I often feel that many landscape photographers are preoccupied with calm conditions and “golden hour” light, to the exclusion of anything else. There are so many images of colourful sunrises and mountains reflected in lakes. This isn’t the nature I know. The nature I love is dark, exciting, wild and just a little bit untamed.

Ynyslas

I have spent a couple of evenings at the coast recently, which is something I almost never do. Partly as a result of spending too many summers in Cornwall, the Cambrian coast doesn’t really do it for me. Having said that, I did find some promising locations that I’d like to come back to when the light is a bit better.

One thing I quickly found out is that it’s not until you take a camera into the dunes that you realise just how much the sand gets everywhere. Trying to change lenses was a mistake I won’t be making again, and my well-travelled tripod also seemed to take on a lot of sand, giving me another excuse to upgrade it.

The sleeping landscape

I can’t help thinking that with the nationalisation of the railways began a bizarre experiment to cure this mode of transport of any shred of the excitement or romance it may once have had. On a winter’s night many years ago, sat in a stuffy, overheated carriage with just my reflection for company, the “golden age of rail” seemed a world away; consigned to the pages of novels, if indeed it ever existed at all.

There were very few people on the train that night and, as we left the station, I was surprised to find that I still had the carriage to myself. The fluorescent lights were flickering disconcertingly and I gave up trying to read. I soon found myself staring into the blackness, watching the edge of the track rushing past in the light from the carriage windows.

Needless to say, the journey was passing quite slowly, when the lights suddenly gave up altogether and I was pitched into darkness.

Except that it wasn’t darkness. In front of me, visible for the first time, lay miles of English countryside—a land of misted brooks, twinkling villages and cold, moonlit spires; of fields, woods and twisting lanes, hedges pale with hoarfrost.

It was hard not to feel a sense of loss: a feeling that somewhere in all of our technological progress, a part of our collective spirit seemed to have gone; some of our innocence lost. We are a nation of story-tellers, yet we now travel hundreds of miles across the countryside with no tales to tell, and it takes a circuit breaker to trip in our manufactured world before we experience what lies beyond the darkness at the end of the platform.

The legends and superstitions of earlier centuries were the products of a society less enlightened in all ways, yet in the moonlight it was easy to see where these tales could have sprung from, told around flickering firesides and similar in some ways to experiences I would have later—coming down from Moel-y-Golfa on a scented summer night, the woods rustling with badgers; or on the Old Kenmare Road in western Ireland, sure to have had its share of… ghosts.

A flickering light at the other end of the carriage: the guard, fiddling with some control panel on the wall. He never got the lights to come back on, and I was glad of my escape from the manufactured world.

In light and shadow

I tend to find myself reaching for certain lenses more than others, which can restrict my photographic style. For this trip up the River Wye I forced myself to take just one lens: a 70-200mm f2.8 that I don’t use very often. Sometimes, by deliberately restricting the possibilities, I get to discover images that I might otherwise miss, such as these beautiful caustics in the river.