Last May my work took me on a long road trip from Sussex to Somerset and Wales and, as I often do, I took a pinhole camera with me to record the places I visited. My first stop in Somerset was a couple of nights in the village of Meare. After a failed attempt to visit Glastonbury I decided instead to take a stroll around the Meare instead. The village church was very pretty but the interior was quite dark and I would have spent an awfully long while waiting for many photos inside to expose. However, the parade of lime trees leading up to the main door was very pretty and worthy of a photo.
Further along the road I found the Fish House. This ancient monastic building was used for salting and drying fish caught in the nearby lake and now sits alone in the middle of a sheep field. I couldn’t get inside, but I used the stone path and long grass to create some drama from its lonely location.
A few days later I found myself in mid Wales, at Llanerchindda Farm. Once my students had departed after our course I went for a stroll down to the Cynghordy Viaduct and back, stopping to take a couple of slow photos. At this point there hadn’t been much rain so I clambered down into the riverbed to take my first photo. When I returned a month later the spot where I’d be standing was a raging torrent of water after lots of heavy rain!
The narrow lane to the viaduct, lined with cow parsley wafting gently in the breeze.
The Cynghordy Viaduct and neighbouring chapel, with clouds scudding across the sky.
As I wandered back to the farmhouse I had one frame left on my roll of film so I took a diversion down a forest track and decided to creat a ghostly self portrait on the path. By standing in the frame for about half the exposure time I appear as a translucent being - a ghost in the landscape.
Photos taken May 2025