Roche Abbey – Steel City Snapper photography

The week after we returned home from Italy, I decided to go out and shoot some more large format film with my Chroma 4×5 camera. I decided to visit Roche Abbey, a 12th century Cistercian monastery, or what remains of it at least. It does beg the question of what it would look like today had it not been destroyed as part of Henry VIII’s disolution of the monasteries? Indeed, what would the entire area have looked like – one might imagine a whole town at least, rather than a ruin in a lovely looking valley. Still, trying to imaging how things might have played out with a change in a historical event is quite the rabbit hole to disappear down, and whole novels have been written about such things.

The monastery is under the auspices of English Heritage and there is a fee to enter (although there’s a conveniently placed public footpath just the other side of a fence with full view of the ruins if you don’t feel the need to get right up close). Accessing the abbey is down a narrow cobbled lane that provides some serious rumbling through your car’s suspension and tyres (more on this later…).

Taking in the ruins — Two other visitors had photogenically colourful sweaters on, so I included them in the picture.

I had four sheets of HP5+ to shoot with the Chroma, but I also packed my Olympus Trip 35 in the bag too, figuring I might be able to shoot more of the Fuji 200 that was still in the camera from the Italy trip. This was fortuitous.

Entrance to the abbey — This is the entrance to the abbey. Through that arch is the track back to the carpark where my “surprise” awaited me.

I found a number of compositions for the 4×5 and carefully focused, aligned, and exposed the images. This was the first time I would be shooting the camera since McGuyvering another fix for the light-leak issues I’d been having with the camera, but I was pretty confident that I’d fixed them. Spoiler alert: I hadn’t.

In between making the large format pictures, I also shot about a dozen frames with the Trip. This saved the day, photographically speaking.

Remnant — A smaller part of the abbey structure still standing. There are helpful signs around the place explaining where you would be if the monastery were still intact.

There were two notable negative outcomes from the day. The first was that my light leak fix didn’t work. Upon developing them I found that all four images had massive light leaks in exactly the same way I’d encountered them previously. After making the effort to drive to the location, pay admission, take the time to shoot the images, and then develop them the next day, this was very disappointing

The second outcome was spotted when I returned to my car and noticed that the rear tyre had a noticeable and – given I would have to drive on a motorway, worrying – split in the side wall. Given that cars these days rarely have a spare anymore – just a repair kit – I was left to decide whether to call out a breakdown truck, or to take the risk that the tyre would hold out for the journey home.

I decided, possibly foolishly, to take the second option. The split looked worrying, but also like it should last the thirty minutes or so it would take to get home, although I planned on driving especially carefully and as slowly as possible. Driving back up the cobbled track was a nerve wracking experience, and I expected to hear a loud pop as the tyre burst with every bump of the wheels, but it held out ok. Back on the main road, the car was similarly fine, although I was hunched over the wheel, prepared to react should something happen. After a while I drove past a tyre shop, but it was on the opposite side of the road and I was already past it by the time I realised. However , a short distance further on, there was a tailback of traffic and a police car was parked astride both lanes for some undetermined incident. Deciding that this was a sign, I turned around and returned to the tyre shop.

Entrance house — The building at the back is the entrance to the abbey. The valley was landscaped by “Capability” Brown in the 18th century and is very picturesque.

Unfortunately, there were no new tyres of the correct size, but they did have a used tyre available. I would never buy a used tyre under normal circumstances, but on this occasion it seemed a better bet than the actual damaged tyre on the car. It was also remarkably (and worryingly) cheap, so I decided to go ahead.

Thankfully, the trip home was, while a bit stressful, uneventful, and the used tyre survived without a blowout or any of the other catastrophic failures my mind imagined might happen. I replaced the tyre with a brand new one from my usual tyre dealer the first chance I got though.

Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken 13 May 2023.

I shot a couple of rolls of film over the past weekend and I’m writing about them in reverse order. On Saturday I shot (most of) a roll of Bergger Pancro 400 with my Pentax P30T – I’ll post something about that in the coming days – and on Sunday a roll of Fomapan 200 with the Yashica Mat 124 G. It’s that roll that I’ll talk about here.

I didn’t have any specific photography plans in mind for Sunday – my wife had gone out, and I was dependent on my eldest being around to look after his younger brothers if I was to venture anywhere. I was also in two minds as to whether to just laze around the house and watch TV – I’d recorded the documentary film, Finding Vivian Maier, and was planning on watching that at some point.

In the end I watched the film in the morning after my dad left following his usual Sunday visit, did a few chores, and then decided to go out upon seeing that the cloud cover had broken up and there was some decent light.

My destination was Roche Abbey, the ruins of a 12th century Cistercian monastery that lies in a pleasantly landscaped valley just to the east of Maltby. It’s about half-an-hour’s drive and I’ve visited the place once before in 2003 back when I had my first ever digital camera – a Fujifilm Finepix A204 compact, capable of a whopping 2 megapixel resolution! I mock it, but I still have the camera in a cupboard, and it still works ok, and I was very happy with the shots it took at the time. In fact, here’s one of the shots of the abbey I took with it back then:

Dscf0021 — Roche Abbey – taken in August 2003 with a Fujifilm Finepix A204 digital compact camera.

The weather on that day in 2003 was very pleasant, and I visited in the morning with the sun rising up behind the remaining standing structures of the abbey. This time, the weather was against me to some extent, and despite the location not being too far from home, the cloud cover had thickened by the time I arrived, covering the sky with a largely featureless grey blanket. Oh well, not what I’d have chosen, but not the end of the world.

The abbey is down a small, cobbled lane that descends into the valley, and which didn’t seem to do the car’s suspension a great deal of good, but at least there was parking space at the bottom. There also seemed to be some sort of organised foot-race / marathon taking place as there were numbered runners passing by frequently and, in the old, vaulted gatehouse to the abbey, there was a table set up for them to take drinks.

The entrance to the abbey grounds themselves are via the Abbey House. The abbey is managed by English Heritage and a fee is chargeable upon entrance through the house (which also doubles as a gift shop and small museum). I became a member of English Heritage a couple of months ago when I discovered upon arrival that my impromptu visit to Bolsover castle would cost me over £10 to get in, and so I decided to instead pay the £50 one-year membership fee and try my utmost to visit other EH sites and get my money’s worth throughout the next 12-months. This visit to Roche Abbey was the first trip to recoup some of the investment.

For visitors not willing to pay the entrance fee, the Abbey structure can be seen easily from a public footpath running alongside the property, albeit behind a metal fence. This doesn’t allow you to get in amongst the ruins though, and probably doesn’t give you the nicest vantage points.

Anyway, I shot the full roll of Fomapan 200 (bar the last frame) during my visit, including a shot of the Abbey House, three shots of the main towers, one of the sluice that runs through the grounds, and a number of shots of memorial benches and signposts. The last shot was of one of the runners approaching along a curved track as I was returning to the car, and then I finished the roll with a photo of a potted Rhododendron plant in our back garden. It wasn’t the most productive of rolls I’ve shot, with seven of the pictures being keepers (again, your definition of a keeper may differ from mine!), and the others being a little humdrum – the shot of the sluice doesn’t really work, as does one with three benches in the frame, and the shot of the runner isn’t great either. The Rhododendron is, well, a shot of a potted rhododendron, so make of that what you will, but I’ve not included any of these pictures here (although it’s possible that some of them will go on my Flickr stream at some point).

This was my first roll of Fomapan 200 (though I’ve shot the 100 variety in 135 format before) and I’m happy with the results. The negatives are very curly though, and I did notice a large number of scratches that I’ve had to try to remove in post-processing. I’ve not really encountered this sort of scratching on other rolls I’ve shot, so think it may be the film, rather than the camera or lab (Peak Imaging, who always produce great results). A search online revealed that I’m not the only person to suffer from this. None of the scratches were sufficient to detract too much from my amateur shots though.

So, without further ado, here are the ones I like the best…

#1. This is the Abbey House as seen after you’ve entered the grounds. You come out through the lovely old studded door you can see in the picture.

#2. The two remaining major abbey structures.

#3. The southern tower. I’d not intended to get the OOF foreground in shot, but it was a result of the parallax difference between the viewing and taking lens of the camera. I don’t mind the effect though as I think it gives the shot a nice sense of depth.

#4. Another shot of the southern tower, but this time with the focus on foreground stonework. I like how the sprinkling of daisies stand out in the black and white of these shots.

#5 & #6. A couple of the memorial benches under the trees to the west of the abbey ruins. I really like the second of these two, again because of the daisies giving interest to the foreground.