Lengthening days

Rob

Spring comes late in the Cambrian Mountains and the hawthorn in the lane has yet to show much sign of it. Nevertheless, sitting outside this morning, writing this, there’s a spring-like feel to the air that I’ve only really noticed in the last week.

A pair of ravens have been nesting down by the stream for the past couple of weeks, apparently turfing out some crows that had been starting to build there. This morning, I watched a grey squirrel in a territorial dispute with a woodpecker, eventually chasing him from the dead tree, so it looks like the squirrel is also rearing young.

The rooks are nesting on the green. I was told they used to nest there every year until the day someone took a 12-bore to one of them, at which point they scattered everywhere before settling in another tree across the main road. For a couple of hours they stayed there, making an enormous noise and giving an uncanny impression they were holding a meeting. A little while later they left for the churchyard, never to return to the green. That was many years ago and they seem to be back now.

February snow

Rob

The early snowfall in October could have been a warning sign of things to come, the snow finally arriving in force this week and forcing me to park my car in the village for the past few nights. Even so, the knee-deep drifts on the lane up to Marsh’s Pool this afternoon still came as a surprise.

This view was taken looking southwards over the pool, which, not for the first time this winter, is starting to freeze over. A local farmer told me people were skating on it a few weeks back.

Source of the Severn

Rob

I must admit, I’ve been quite enjoying what the media seem to have termed the “Big Freeze”, and this afternoon I decided to take a trip up the Severn Way to the source of the Severn.

From this small peaty pool, marked with a single wooden post, the river Severn begins a course of over 220 miles to the sea, losing just over 2000 feet in height on the way. Surprisingly, over half of this height has already been lost by the time it reaches the waterfall of Severn-Break-its-Neck or Hafren Torri Gwddf, just 4 miles downstream.

Despite having lived most of my life in the area, this is only my second time at the source of the Severn, the first being an ill-advised trip a couple of years back on a sweltering August morning. On that day I rather underestimated what I thought was just going to be a quick stroll and, struggling with heavy camera equipment, with nothing to drink, it half killed me. Not one of my best ideas.

I have none of those problems this time round. The temperature feels around freezing point and all I’m carrying this time is a mobile phone, complete with pretty accurate GPS—albeit not a substitute for my Magellan. I’m a bit ambivalent about these kind of things; the delicate device feels well out of its comfort zone up here, I certainly wouldn’t want to rely on it to come off a mountain. In any case, once you’ve run the battery down with the GPS you’d better hope you don’t need to make any emergency calls.

The wind up here is biting, and surprisingly strong, blowing billows of cloud across the peat bogs between the source of the Wye and the Severn. Once known as Fferllys, the land between the two rivers was believed to be home to the Tylwyth Teg or fairy folk, and the local ferns are supposed to bloom with a small blue flower on St John’s Eve. By collecting the flowers in a white cloth, the holder apparently becomes invisible, allowing them to enter their lover’s room undetected. Or, if they choose to stay in Fferllys, an elf will come along and purchase the flowers for gold.

All charmingly daft but, with the light fading fast, it’s time to head back through the darkening forest. With the infant River Severn as my companion, I’ve a few miles to do yet, and nearly a thousand feet to lose on the way back down to Severn-Break-its-Neck.

The top of the falls

Rob

Around a month or so either side of the winter solstice, the rising sun finds its way straight up the small valley behind the village of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant. The valley itself is unremarkable, and the single track road that undulates and twists its way along the northern flanks would be little used without the secret that lies at its head.

Here, at the foot of Moel Sych, can be found the 240-foot waterfall of Pistyll Rhaeadr—often considered the highest waterfall in England and Wales, and mentioned in George Borrow’s Wild Wales.

Arriving at the car park by the stream, I take the small path that zigzags through the woods and steeply up to the moorland of Rhos y Beddau. It’s minus 4 degrees and the path has frozen into thick black ice—not really what I was hoping for when I’m weighed down with camera gear. I always forget how steep it is as well.

Further up and the track levels out, with a path leading down into the trees. A short distance later and the view opens out at the top of the waterfall, above a dizzying drop for anyone brave enough to take a look. From here I hope to capture the water tumbling into the valley in the early morning light.

I’m a little bit late though, the sun is already too high in the sky and the light is harsh and contrasty, making the composition a mess of highlights and deep shadows. I console myself with the fact that the atmospheric conditions wouldn’t have been quite what I was hoping for anyway. Maybe another time.

I’ve actually had this photograph in mind for a few years now but it’s a long journey for me, and it’s also extremely weather dependent. I don’t want to get too obsessed with it.

Messages

Rob

I sometimes get asked by friends and colleagues for advice on what camera to buy, because I’m “into cameras”. Of course it’s important to have a good camera but I can’t say I have a huge interest in them for their own sake. I certainly can’t get excited about fancy features because I never use them.

The camera is a tool. Photography, by extension, is simply the medium. Surely the purpose of any photograph is the message. It seems to me that by obsessing too much over the equipment and process of photography we risk missing the point and reducing it to a purely technical exercise.

In many ways I find it surprising that a mechanical process allows much scope for artistic expression at all, but it is the physical link with reality that makes photography—with all its limitations—so powerful. For me, good landscape photography lies on the balance between straightforward representation and creative expression, and my aim when photographing the landscape is to capture a sense of “place”.

I don’t claim that there is anything hugely deep and meaningful about my photographs. I usually just try to show something that I consider interesting or beautiful, but I sometimes wonder what it is that attracts me to these subjects and places.

Seemingly without evolutionary purpose, aesthetic appreciation of the natural world is almost universal in our culture. Does our love of the natural landscape simply come from romantic notions of a former age, an age without some of the concerns of the modern world? Or, at the risk of sounding a bit “new age”, is it a sense of our disconnection from nature that causes us to respond in this way?

I don’t know the answer but it isn’t an obsession with camera equipment that gets me out into the wild at unsociable hours to be bitten, soaked, frozen and sunburned. Photography just gives me the reason to be out there in the first place, to experience nature and to reconnect with it in some sense.

If there is a common message to my work, I would say it is simply that we need to learn to value our countryside in an age where the wild places are under greater threat than ever. I hope that photographs of the natural landscape can further inspire us to protect what we have, rather than simply becoming a record of what we have lost.