I posted some other photos of bridges spanning the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal recently – those shot with my Zeiss medium format folding camera. The ones here were shot on the same day with my Olympus XA3 along the same stretch of water in Attercliffe, Sheffield.
I think I said in the earlier post that this is now a pleasant stretch of the can to walk along. It has a high embankment on both sides which shields it from what is otherwise quite an industrial part of the city. The spring foliage also brings a pleasantly arboreal feel to the place.
When I was much younger the canal was horribly polluted. I remember crossing it on the bus route that took me into the city centre and the water was a vivid orange colour, presumably due to pollutants from the steel industry in the area. Now the water is clear and sustains fish and other wildlife.
I thought I’d go back to posting film shots again today – although I may drop in the occasional digital picture now and then as I still have loads of decent shots taken with my GRIII on my recent holiday. I have another “Walk With a Camera” post coming soon – perhaps this weekend – as well.
Despite the title of the post, this tree has only the most tenuous connection with brides or weddings. It stands, however, behind a cafe where we got a sandwich after my wife had chosen the dress she will be wearing at out eldest son’s wedding later this summer. Maybe the post should have been titled “Back of the cafe tree” as that would be more geographically apt – the formal wear shop where my wife got her dress was further down the road.
This factory, along with it’s distinctive logo, has been around for as long as I remember. When I was a kid I always thought it was a Roman centurion’s head depicted, but the name of the place – Spartan Works – shows I was wrong.
The building is, I believe, currently subject to a planning order that will involve demolition, erection, and conservation of buildings on the site. I hope the Spartan remains.
Part one of this walk ended as I passed through a small area of woodland that marked the turning point where the circular route began its return back towards the starting point. Perhaps the most well known landmark on this leg of the journey is Robin Hood’s Stride, but before I got there I took a small detour to Nine Stones Close (also known as The Grey Ladies), a small neolithic stone circle that stands beside a tree in a nearby field.
There’s something fascinating and a little eerie about stone circles, both in their age, and the limited understanding we have as to why they were constructed, but also – in large part – the fact that they feature heavily in a number of fantasy / sci-fi movies and TV shows I’m fond of, notably the 1979, John Mills starring, Quatermass series, The Children of the Stones, and the Doctor Who story, The Stones of Blood. All heady material for the youngster I was back when all three aired.
After admiring the stone circle (you can see some more photos I took here), I set off back towards Robin Hood’s Stride, first passing a couple of lone trees, one dead, one alive.
Robin Hood’s Stride is a gritstone rock formation, notable for the two pinnacles at the eastern and western end. The pinnacles are named “Weasel” and “Inaccessible” and legend has it that Robin Hood was able to jumped between them in, hence the name of the formation. All I can say, is that Robin Hood must’ve had some sort of Olympian-level jumping skills as the two pinnacles are around fifty feet apart!
Unfortunately, when I arrived the sun was to the south, backlighting the rocks to a degree, so I wasn’t able to photograph the whole structure in the best light. I took several other close-up shots of part of the formation though, including some carved graffiti that has been there quite some time.
I climbed to the top of the formation, although it was tricky with my backpack, tripod, and walking poles, but there were nice views. A couple were up there already, eating their lunch.
The view back towards The Grey Ladies was a nice one, though probably not done justice by the XA3 on this occasions. The stone circle can be just made out in the centre of the frame if you look closely.
After a drink of water, and a careful descent, I took another short detour from my route, this time to another rock formation named Cratcliffe Tor. This is a popular spot for climbing and bouldering, and there were signs of this in evidence with dusty powder marks on the stones where people had sought places to get a grip.
Cratcliffe Tor is also the site of a hermitage dating to the 14th century. The small cave is now fenced off as it was being used as a shelter for climbers, but behind the fence it is just possible to make of a crucifix carved into the rock. You can just about see it on the second picture below about a third of the way from the top right of the image.
After visiting the hermitage, I made my way back to my route and began a descent down the hillside east of Robin Hood’s Stride, passing a bench bearing the name of someone called Hillary.
Looking back up the hill, the rock formation can still be seen above the trees. Another name for the location is Mock Beggar’s Mansion as, from a distance in the right light, it looks a little like a turreted house.
In the hilly Peak District countryside, the descent soon turned back to ascent, and I followed a steeper-than-it-looks lane past a couple of houses on the final stretch back to Elton.
A footpath branched away from the lane, taking me through a number of muddy fields. To my right the path was bordered by a fence and trees. A rope swing hung from one.
Another tree had seemingly absorbed a cable as it had grown, resulting in a shape in it’s trunk that reminded me of someone sucking spaghetti!
To the north, Robin Hood’s Stride and Cratcliffe Tor could still be seen peeping out of the ridge line.
I reached the brow of the hill I was climbing and could now see the houses and Church of Elton come into view.
As I walked back through the village to where my car was parked, I passed a man cleaning his car with a jet spray. He turned it off as he saw my approach, but I cheekily asked if he wouldn’t mind spraying my feet with it to remove the thick clods of mud attached to my boots. He was amused by the request, but I soon had clean (wet) boots again. 🙂
Apologies to anyone expecting the second part of my post covering the walk between Elton and Robin Hood’s Stride. That should be here tomorrow – I got waylaid today, unfortunately.
Here instead is another photo taken during the walk but which didn’t feature in the first half of the post published yesterday.
This is the third of these posts, and the second for which I selected a hike from my Ordnance Survey book: Peak District – Outstanding Circular Walks. I was going to be slightly OCD about the routes in this book and do them in order, but I then decided that would be silly and that I should do them in whatever order suited me. In this case, I skipped the second walk in the book because it was a location I’m quite familiar with, and this one is somewhere I’ve never visited before.
The route of this walk is in the Derbyshire countryside to the north of the village of Elton. It’s a short route of just over three miles, with an elevation of 750 feet. While the guide gives an approximate time of 2 hours to complete the walk, because I’m faffing around taking photographs, it took me somewhat longer.
Although Elton isn’t too far, much of the drive there is on smaller roads, so it took about an hour to get there and park up. The weather was a little overcast when I arrived, but with the promise of some brighter spells later. The starting point for the hike is outside the Duke of York pub, across from the village church.
Not long after this, there was a slightly confusing branch of the path in a field that first had me wandering around some farm machinery before wandering off down the wrong fork. It was a little while later, after descending a hill and then crossing a large pool of muddy ground near the entrance to a field that I realised my error. Luckily, re-checking my map, I could see that the narrow road I was now on would curve around and intersect the original footpath, so I stayed on this course. This wasn’t a bad thing as, part way up a hill at a bend in the road, I came across a series of water troughs, fed by a spring.
These troughs are called the Burycliffe Troughs and the spring that fills them has never been known to run dry. Until 1940, these were Elton’s main source of drinking water, and men, women, and children would walk here in all weathers to collect water in buckets and then carry them back up the hill to the village. One enterprising farmer would fill urns of water and transport them in a cart, selling them for a penny a bucketful.
A little further up the road I rejoined my original route and broke off into a field to the left. The path led through another field where this tree stood near the ridge of the hill.
As the path descended, it reached another track, this one leading to a Christian sanctuary / retreat. On the other side of the track a lone piece of farm machinery stood on the grass.
While crossing the next field I spotted a herd of animals off to my left. I soon realised that these were deer. I took a photograph but it should be noted that the Olympus XA3 is not a useful wildlife camera. You can see the deer in this picture though – they are the black pixels about a quarter of the way up the frame. 😀
One thing you find a lot of in the Peak District (and, to be fair, a lot of the British countryside) are drystone walls. This arrangement of walls with a lone tree looked like a decent photograph to take.
In the opposite direction, a track led to a farm sitting atop the ridge of a hill.
A little further along the route, the path I needed to follow crossed a small stream before curving up and to the east through some woodland. There were signs of forestry activity here, and it marked a good place to park myself on a fallen log and take a drink of water. It also marks the place where I’ll leave the first part of this post. In part two there will be stone circles, rock outcrops, and a hermitage!
Over the last few weeks I’ve posted a whole bunch of photos taken with my Olympus XA3 on Ilford HP5+, which I pushed a stop to 800asa.
Or so I thought…
After receiving a comment about one of my posts using this setup, where I was asked if there was a reason I was shooting the film at 800ASA, I replied that it was to aid me during the low light conditions that are prevalent during the UK winter. Given that the camera has no manual control of shutter speed or aperture, this is a logical thing to do to get faster speeds and avoid camera shake.
But after replying, a small exclamation mark began to flash above my head. So I took a look at the camera manual and, lo and behold, it turns out I’ve not actually been shooting at 800ASA at all, but at 400ASA – HP5+’s box speed. Although the XA3 allows the ASA setting to be changed, it turns out that it will automatically override this if a DX code is present on the film being used. The manual control is just for non-DX coded films!
So in actual fact, I’ve been overdeveloping my film by push processing it!
Fortunately for me, the shots are all perfectly usable, and it’s a testament to Ilford’s HP5+’s resilience to these sort of damn fool mistakes that this is the case.
Anyway, here’s a random shot of one of the impacted frames, proving that if you ever accidentally push your HP5+ by a stop in DD-X, you will likely be forgiven your mistake…
The last picture I have to share for the day I walked between West Stockwith and Misterton, is this shot or a bicycle in front of a barge at the marina where the Chesterfield Canal joins the River Trent.
This is my favourite photograph from my walk between West Stockwith and Misterton. I presume this particular bridge is for farm traffic as there is no road atop it, just grass when viewed from Google Maps.
I spotted the composition as I approached the bridge, and then moved around a bit until it looked just right in the viewfinder. I was expecting the arch of the bridge to render more darkly, assuming the camera would meter on the brighter area in centre of frame, but it captured the reflected light from the ripples on the canal beautifully.
Steel City Snapper photography 