Category: England

Walking home.

14 December 2019 – Epping Forest.

Standing in the kitchen at the flat in St Leonards, I am cooking my new favourite quick comfort food; chorizo and white bean stew, looking at the photos I took almost a month ago in the forest and wondering how and where to start writing. Wondering if I should start writing at all. The photos were not inspired and I am not feeling them or any of the words needed to describe the walk. Perhaps it was too long ago and the joy felt while walking has left me. Perhaps it is dry January. Perhaps I am just bored with it all; the photography, writing and blogging.

I have been trying to find some photographic direction, trying a few different things and been found wanting each time. Maybe I should take a break from photography and writing for a while; maybe I will finish these last few posts and call it quits. The blog lasted longer than I expected and I am not exactly using it for anything more than recording my activities, which have long shifted from the original purpose of the blog; travel. It is not like many would miss me. Enough whining.

Let’s get this done, and see what tomorrow brings.

Soon after my list visit to the forest in November, when El and I walked and took loads of photos of the range of weird and wonderful mushrooms, I bought a second hand Canon 5d Mk2 body to replace the Mk1 I broke in May. I had yet to use the camera for anything more than a couple of test shots so today was its first outing. The main reason for going out was to walk, not take photos, so I didn’t take a tripod. This decision  was partly responsible for the dissatisfaction with the photographic output.

I caught the train to Chingford, and walked home, mostly via a variety of forest paths. It was a glorious day for walking; bright sun, not too cold and not too hot, but a bit of a breeze. Not a good day for photos in a forest. I had a few photographic ideas I wanted to play with, but the conditions and location were not really right for them, possibly contributing to the malaise I feel right now.

I started off on Chingford Plain, walking up to the lodge where I stopped for coffee and cake; carb loading before the walk home.

Warren Pond has some lovely old trees, cleared of undergrowth and saplings, it is a nice open area to start a walk, though the light was incredibly harsh. Too harsh even for some high-key photography which I was hoping to experiment with again, not having played with the technique for quite some time. The trees make up for anything lacking in my ability to take photos of them.

There was smatterings of colour other than green in the trees on the way down to Whitehall Plain. There has been a lot of rain lately and the ground was wet, muddy and occasionally slippery underfoot. I am glad I wore my old trail running shoes with good grip.

Crossing over Whitehall Rd I picked up the River Ching. When I walked through here in summer it was so dry it was non-existent in parts, bone dry. I have never seen it this high in the six or so years I have been walking or riding this strip of forest. Admittedly this has not been a lot lately.

There was even a tiny waterfall and I could hear the water moving, that is unusual!

This section of the walk home passes by the edge of Woodford Golf Club, normally I steer clear and stay under the trees along the side of the river, but today there was no-one on the course. I walked up one of the fairways and took my favourite photo from the walk.

Crossing over Chingford Lane, I entered the section of forest that contains Highams Park Lake. Most of the walk from Chingford is under tree cover, until I get to Forest Rd, which unsurprisingly is not in the forest, it is lined on both sides by houses. The council, or Epping Forest, have put up a load of signs, presumably to make walking to and in the forest less challenging. Not that it is challenging at all; if you don’t mind getting a little misplaced on occasion.

One of my favourite trees is in the part of the forest and today I was fortunate to find a squirrel in it, though the squirrel did not pose for long.

I was really surprised at how few people were out walking round the lake, normally this place is quite busy, maybe everyone is out Christmas shopping? I was not complaining as I walk for the solitude, and the forest is one of very few places I am not playing music through headphones. The lake was looking good under this, almost, clear blue sky.

Crossing over Charter Rd, and then Oak Hill I enter Walthamstow Forest and the last section under the trees before the last mile of road walking home. I like this section of woodland, but have yet to fully explore it. It is not big, but it is on the way to somewhere else, so I only ever pass through. I promised that when it next snows I will come here with the camera and take some photos, before going up to the main forest.

The path crossing over the A406, the dreaded North Circular, though it was flowing nicely today.

Just over the bridge is a narrow strip of trees separating the houses on Beacontree Ave from the motorway, and that is where the tree covered, reasonably quiet and sheltered from the wind walk finishes. The rest is just a downhill schlep along Forest Rd to home. Passing the lovely Peoples Republic of Waltham Forest town hall building.

The Arboria Luminarium

24 November 2019 – Arboria Luminaria, Lloyd Park, Walthamstow.

I have had a very good run of being able to spend Friday working at the flat, as well as being able to do a couple of Thursdays as well. For the past couple of months I have been there once a week, which is a lot more than I expected. I am quite happy with this. I will get back next weekend, but that will be it until Christmas when we have the week off and will spend most of it in St Leonards.

El and I both worked there on Friday, even managing to be at the same table for the entire day and being quite productive. It was the start of a nice weekend.

We had planned to meet some friends back in Walthamstow at lunch time on Sunday so we were on the 9:53 train from St Leonards and back in London with enough time for me to nip down to the supermarket for a couple of provisions.

On the way I took some photos of the trees of Lime Tree Walk outside Walthamstow’s mall. There is a plan to massively expand the mall and to add at least two very tall residential towers on top. This plan has doomed the lime trees in the square by the front of the mall. This has upset a lot of people, us included. These are beautiful trees, and provide a lovely shaded walk from the mall to the station in the summer. Less so as winter approaches!

Our friends came round soon after we got home and sorted and we all walked to nearby Lloyd Park, home of the wonderful William Morris Gallery, to see Arboria.

I am not quite sure how to describe Arboria, a luminarium designed and built by Architects of Air. I will quote some words from their literature. “ARBORIA is inspired by the beauty of natural geometry and by Islamic architecture. It features winding passages of small domes inspired by the repetitious forms found in the bazaars of Iran.” Does that help ?

It is a series of large ‘tents’ sealed and pressurised to maintain shape, the tents are joined by a series of passages and made from a coloured material that allows light and shadow to play inside. It was free and very family orientated, there was a huge queue and a lot of kids. We had a priority booking which meant we skipped the queue, thankfully. This was a perfect place for kids to be running about and having fun, and I did not mind them one little bit.

After taking our shoes off we enter through one door into an ‘airlock’, before entering through a second door into the pressurised Green Dome. It was pretty wow in there. Amazing light, hot air is pumped in causing a small amount of humid mist, it was not very obvious inside, but photos show fuzziness around heads.

There were a few people in there, impossible to get a photo without people, but it wasn’t over busy, and people, especially the young kids running through the tunnels, made it more enjoyable.

There are three domes, red, green and main, and three trees, red, green and blue, all connected by short passages. I had taken the camera and was very glad I did!

Red Trees. I liked the nooks for sitting in.

Main Dome

Red Dome.

We both took photos of each other.

After an enjoyable 30 minutes or so we left the luminarium and wandered up the road to the Collab for vege burgers and beer. A great end to a very good day.

Hey Colossus Supported by Mullholland @ The Piper, St Leonards.

06 November 2019 – Hey Colossus with Mullholland @ The Piper

Hey Colossus are a bit of an odd beast; a sort of noise/droney/experimental/metal with a bit of pop, band. They are impossible to accurately describe, and each album is a little different to the previous. They are resolutely low-key. I had not heard of them in NZ, yet they have been around since the early noughties, releasing records and touring. They released a new LP, ‘Four Bibles’ in May, and it sits very high up on my album of the year list. I was pleasantly surprised that they were playing a gig in St Leonards, and for a paltry £5.50. OK it was a Wednesday, but now I have discovered I can work from a Hastings office a Wednesday is not as tricky as it could be.

After a busy day at work in London I had a fairly stressful drive down to the flat. It was as busy as you would expect for rush hour. I am not a big fan of driving in the dark, off the main highways the roads are crap and I don’t drive often enough now to be totally comfortable on the road. I am becoming one of those slow and overly cautious drivers I hated being stuck behind when I was in NZ. I am seeing the other side now.

Arriving at the flat not long before the gig started, I dumped the load of stuff I brought down, and headed to the pub almost immediately. Rushing  didn’t help the stress levels. I really like The Piper, it is a new pub, having opened since I have been in St Leonards. They have bands, most of which I like, the music in the pub is often really good, and they have a really good house red at a decent price. [*note; 3 weeks later, the good house red at a decent price seems to have ended.]

Hey Colossus were supported by Mullholland, a young instrumental duo from the Channel Islands, now living in Brighton, I am guessing there is not much of a music scene on Jersey. I thought they were brilliant, they have released a couple of albums, which I had listened to at work, but they were very much a live band. I took a few photos, and am looking forward to hearing the next, pending, record.

Hey Colossus are a six piece guitar, bass and drum band. A bit too big for the stage at The Piper, and too big for the 20mm lens on the GX800 (basically a 50mm lens on a normal camera). I could not fit all of them in a single shot. This is the first gig on a European tour, they are from London and the south west, so I guess this was on the way to the ferry to France. There had been no sound check, it was at times a total wall of noise, at others the sound was crisp and clean. Either way it was pretty damn good. The vocalist was standing directly under that hideous purple spot light, so I was forced to convert these to black and white.

When they hit the stage I am fairly sure they was more band members than audience, something I was pretty upset about, though it did fill out a little once the the music started. I know this is small town coastal England, Brexit country, small ‘c’ conservative, and yes Hey Colossus are never going to be Ed fucking Sheeran, but they deserved a much bigger crowd than this. They are innovative, noisy, talented, though to be fair I doubt they gave a shit. Small audiences are what they are used to I guess.

I was mesmerised by the vocalist, he does not look like his voice. Maybe it was the ‘tache.

I loved them. My ears less so, they were still humming well after I got to work on Thursday.

I posted  couple of photos on Instagram on Thursday night and Mullholland asked if they could use them, which was very nice. My photos on their Instagram feed get more likes than any photos on my feed!

Fungi

Sunday 03 November 2019 – Epping Forest.

Sunday turned out to be a much better day than Saturday, no stormy weather, no high wind, no rain and very little cloud. It was almost lovely. El and I took the opportunity the weather presented us to take the car up to Chingford and go for an autumnal walk in Epping Forest, hoping to see some colour changing in the trees.

We didn’t really see a lot of tree colour, very early into our walk we took an interest in the fungi that was growing in the damp conditions. This is prime fungi season, though there is a complete picking ban in the forest, which has led to there being a vast amount of fungi, of all different shapes and shades. Wonderful. I took a lot of photos.

We did a fairly short loop, probably only a couple of miles, but it took a good couple of hours to complete, mainly because we walked stooped low, looking at and photographing mushrooms. The variety of colour was quite something.

Though occasional photos of trees were taken.

This log with a massive family of small mushrooms was he highlight for me.

I had brought the new Lumix GX800 camera with me with a fixed 20mm lens. It worked well enough, but looking at the images it was not focusing exactly as I thought on all occasions which was a little disappointing, but overall I was happy with what I captured. This is my favourite photo from the walk.

Once I had uploaded the photos to my laptop and started to edit them in Lightroom I realised how difficult a touch screen is to focus with any precision, especially with stubby fingers. This was the moment I realised that I was not going to be truly happy with this nice little Lumix GX800 camera. It is a nice bit of kit, has great low light and pretty good tone, but it is not as crisp and it just doesn’t ‘feel’ right. I went on to eBay and bought myself a second hand Canon 5d Mk2 body to replace the Mk1 I broke. Looking at its Wikipedia entry I see it was announced on my birthday, in 2008. It is hardly a new camera, but it is for me. I am very excited about it. I just need to get a new 50mm lens now 🙂

A stormy sea front walk.

31 October 2019 – St Leonards.

I had arranged to meet the electrician at the flat on Friday. After trying to secure a date for him to do quite a list of small tasks, I reduced the list just one urgent thing, install a Hive central heating controller. The Hive allows me to turn on the heating remotely using my phone. I need this, the flat is cold now that autumn has sent in. We want to spend some winter time here, planning to do Christmas, and the last thing we want is to turn up of an evening and have a freezing cold flat. It works well, I love technology. Sometimes!

I came down on the train after work on Thursday, it was a nice night so I walked the 30 minutes to Hastings old town. There was a day of the dead thing happening, but it didn’t happen too much in front of me; and I was not engaged enough to get any decent photos. At least there was something happening though, good signs for a healthy nightlife in a fairly deprived coastal town.

I did take a few photos in Bottle Alley as I walked there and back home again.

I worked from the flat on Friday, I get a lot done when I am working here, no distractions, and importantly I am close to coffee and the stereo. It was a very productive day. I will do more of them. I walked down to the supermarket at lunch time, via St Leonards Park, which is round the corner from the flat and is a scenic and largely car free way to get to the seafront.

I have started working on a photo project to document the ever shifting beach along this stretch between St Leonards and Hastings. Every time I walk along here it is somehow different. I love how the beach furniture is slowly disappearing into the stones. It was not the best of days, a good one to be working inside.

On Saturday I was returning to London, the weather was really bad, with high winds and at times horizontal rain. High tide was as at 14:30 and looked to be a big one soI decided to stay until then and get down to the sea front and try and get some photos of the sea crashing on the wall. I also wanted to finally get to see what the sea is like is when it strong enough to push stones over the lower boardwalk. My original plan was to walk to the station via the sea front, but as high tide approached the rain was very heavy and I did not fancy 90 minutes on the train soaking wet. I just went for a walk instead. I got soaked.

The sea was pretty wild, the wind was howling, probably one of the strongest I have experienced. I walked down to the beach straight down the hill from the flat, near the Azure bar. There are often stones on the path here, so it was a place to see some of the waves coming right up the beach.

Almost immediately I was experiencing the waves, luckily they were quite slow and I did not get sea wet, though I did have to make a few sudden runs to jump onto a seat or step. I did get very rain wet though. Less fun, but just as cold.

I see how the stones get there now…

I walked along to Goat Ledge Cafe, which was open and had a few visitors. I took a warming coffee, though I was tempted to sit with a glass of red and watch the sea through the window, but I was pretty wet and didn’t want to sit down for long. There were a surprising number of people out considering the conditions. Though I guess they were so bad that they were almost good.

Leaving Goat Ledge I walked to the nearby shelter of Bottle Alley, the wind was blasting through but at least I was free of the rain.

I stopped to take photos in one of the bays, and BOOM, a massive wave burst against the side, I was leaping back and snapping the shutter at the same time, expecting to get a complete drenching. Not the best quality photo but the timing was good!

What actually came through was a mere trickle of the wall of water that hit sea wall. Luckily.

Thankfully I stayed completely untouched, though it was a good reminder of how strong and unpredictable the sea can be. I waited for a few minutes to see if another boomer came though, before walking along to the pier end of Bottle Alley. I wanted to get a bit closer as waves were breaking over the end of the pier.

Annoyingly I only had a 20mm lens on the GX800, the effective equivalent of the 50mm on the big camera. Not the best for close up photography when it comes to wild seas, but good enough for the closer images.

I was hoping to get some shots of the sea breaking onto the sea wall at the end of the pier. The beach is really close to the wall at this point, so I was expecting some decent wave action, and I was not disappointed at all.

There were a few others taking photos, or just watching this magnificent wind blown sea crashing on to the land, none of us get wet when this wave came to say hello, much closer than the last one!

I was wiser after that one, so the next was less of a surprise for me.

I have taken a number of photos using the pillars of Bottle Alley as a frame, today was such a good day to use them to show off that lovely wild sea.

It was getting to be time to go home, it had stopped raining, so worth taking the walk back to the flat, get changed and get back to the station before the next wave of heavy, cold and horizontal rain arrived.

I walked back along the front, the path was reasonably dry in most places, but past the slight bend in the beach just before Azure it was really wet, ankle deep in parts and I was lucky to avoid wet feet, finally giving up and taking some steps to the upper boardwalk.

Now knowing what the sea looks like when the beach stones are pushed up on the path, and seeing another wall of rain coming, I turned up the hill and walked home. Missing the downpour by seconds.

It was fabulous out there today!

I have since bought a replacement big camera. Finally acknowledging to myself the Canon 5d was an absolute gem. After two years of thinking about upgrading the mk1, and 6 months since I dropped it, I have now picked up a second hand Mk2. No way could I afford the £2400 Mk5!

I am looking forward to using it.

Kingsdown and St Margarets Bay, Kent.

13 October 2019 – YHA Weekend, the south Kent Coast.

Our Walthamstow social group has been holding a weekend away for many years, well before I came on the scene. These are family affairs with 20 or 30 people or all ages attending. This is the fourth year that El and I have gone, and these weekends have appeared in past posts. The events are held in Youth Hostel Assocation (YHA) or similar properties, often in off-the-beaten-track locations. This year we were staying in a big old hostel building in Ringwould, just up the coast and slightly inland from Dover. I am guessing there was about 25 of us, including the ‘kids’, the youngest are all at university, so maybe kids is not quite right, maybe youf is more apt. Everyone was of drinking age, and there was a lot of drinking.

I have recently become a director of the residents association for the block where my flat is. The AGM was on Friday night so I worked from the flat during the day, attending the meeting in the early evening before joining El who had come down to join me after work.

The Saturday activity at the YHA weekender is a bike ride, as El doesn’t ride we didn’t rush up the coast from St Leonards to Ringwould. We eventually arranged to meet some other non-riders for lunch in a pub in the small coastal Kent village of Kingsdown.

I severely under-estimated how long it would take to drive from the flat, thinking it was going to be an hour or so. It took close to two hours, and not just because of bad traffic, it was a lot further than I expected. Apparently maps would have me this, lesson learned. I was very tempted to stop on the way and take some photos; it was quite gloomy out, lots of drizzle and low cloud. It would have been a great day to visit Dungeness, a place I had just finished reading a book about. However, we had committed to meeting friends for lunch, so I carried on. I finally conceded we were going to be very late so we rang out friends and found their deadline had changed so they could not wait for us any longer than they had. I then stopped and took this photo of the pylons half shrouded in cloud, my favourite of the photos I have taken on the Polaroid. These cameras are made for a ghostly bleak environment.

Even though our friends had left we chose to visit Kingsdown regardless, it is very close to where we are staying and had a pub that looked like a nice spot for lunch. The Zetland Arms was mentioned in another book I had recently finished reading and as it was right on the beach I thought it might make for some good photo opportunities. It did. It was also a great pub, with a very good pint of red ale, a friendly vibe, and a difficult to choose from excellent menu. We both had fish chowder and it was delicious.

I immediately liked Kingsdown, it is a small village nestled in a narrow strip between the sea and the cliffs, and it will not exist when the sea level rises. Off the main road the ‘streets’ are pebble, like the beach. The line between the beach, the roads and gardens is a blurred, marked by fences and chains. After heavy rain the ‘road’ was full of luckily, not deep puddles.  Its permanence seems quite temporary.

Kingsdown sits between the northern end of the white cliffs of Dover and Walmer/Deal. It is not on any tourist trail, maybe with the exception of the Zetland Arms and its great view and menu. Camera and Polaroid.

After lunch we took a very quick walk around, and I took some pictures on both the Polaroid and the digital cameras. I really like this place, and I love this stretch of coast for its not quite barrenness, it’s almost isolation and it’s almost bleakness.

After our late lunch and the brief photographic stroll we drove the six minutes to the YHA and let ourselves in, everyone else was still out. Once settled I had a glass of wine; the less said about the evening the better! Sunday morning was slow, very slow.

Once packed up we all drove to St Margarets in Cliffe, another village one Kent coast. Just south of Kingsdown, between there and Dover. The weather continued to be poor, not cold, but windy, damp and miserable. I have been here before, a couple of years ago when El and I did a week long tour of the south coast; trying to find the perfect location for me to buy a flat. Not that we were looking at St Margaret’s Bay, there is nothing here, but it does have a view of some white cliffs, which is what we were came here for back then, as now.

We had a brief walk, and stare at the sea, I took a couple more photos before we got in the car and I drove us back to Walthamstow.

Unpacking the car at home I managed to drop the Polaroid again, this time it was in \ bag, and juggling for house keys while carrying too many things I dropped the bag. The camera did not recover this time, and no longer works 😦

I was very angry and upset with myself, this was a gift from El, something I had wanted for a while and I had broken it inside five weeks. I was lucky that El was more forgiving. Thank you lovely xx

I have now bought a replacement, the same model and of similar vintage, thankfully they are reasonably common on eBay. I hope it works as well and as magically as the one El bought me.

The Polaroid.

24 September 2019 – London and St Leonards.

In May I attended a photography workshop in the North Yorkshire Dales where we primarily used Polaroid and Instax cameras to make images. I had a lot of fun that day and have wanted an instant camera ever since. It was my birthday last week and that want became a reality as El picked me one up from ebay. A Polaroid Impulse AF. My first ever instant camera.  A plastic  work  of art.

First made in 1988, this is a proper vintage Polaroid camera, and it certainly looks it. I am not sure when this one was made, but you can buy them new from Polaroid Originals, a company started in 2017 by the Impossible Project. I don’t think this one is terribly new. The Impossible Project is Dutch company founded in 2008 when Polaroid announced they were no longer going to make the film they were so famous for. Impossible Project bought one of the manufacturing plants and continued to make the film, before restarting the brand and releasing new cameras.

I was surprised to find the camera had a film in it with some shots left. I had to test it out immediately, so snapped a photo of El sitting on the couch. She was a bit quizzical about the whole thing.

Coinciding with the arrival of the new camera and my birthday, and not directly related, was the separate arrivals of my sister and my daughter. My sister is over from New Zealand for work and has a week with us before returning home; my daughter is here after working in Croatia and is on the way to a three month Yoga teaching job in Sri Lanka. It was lovely to have two family members visit at the same time, though my daughter did have to sleep on the floor in the back room!

Saturday afternoon the three of us went for a three hour loop walk including a section along the River Lea from Tottenham Hale to Walthamstow Marshes. A loop El and I have done on a few occasions. I wanted to show my sister a little bit more of Walthamstow. I took the Polaroid with me.

I love this section of the Lea; Tottenham to Stratford is a lovely walk with a nice variety of things to see. River boats, water birds, families walking, cyclists and fisherman, old cranes, trees and the river. I was pleased to see that this, the second photo I took with the Polaroid, and the first in daylight, came out OK. There was some artifacting which was fine, I like that in a Polaroid.

I was carrying the camera, among other things, in a cotton tote bag slung over my shoulder. Putting the camera away I completely missed the opening of the bag and the bag flew past the opening of the bag, crashing on to the path on the edge of the river bank. My first reaction was ‘crap, it’s going to fall in the river’, but luckily it didn’t. My second thought was hoping it was all OK. When I picked it up two images came out at the same time, not a good sign. The both looked like this abstract image, which I actually quite like. Having a weird abstract image as the last from a broken camera was not going to be any sort of comfort, and I was not looking forward to telling El I broke the gift she had just bought me. This is the first she will know about this….

Not much further along the river are these lovely old crane booms. This was a good opportunity to test if the camera was OK after its fall. Clicking the shutter release, another two frames came out. One looking pretty good, there was some striping, which is not too bad. I actually really like this to be honest.

The second frame was just the striping. I was hoping this was not going to be it for the camera. Gupl!

20 minutes further on, at the bridge crossing the Lea to the Walthamstow side, I took a photo of my sister and daughter and thankfully it came out very nicely and there was no wasted, damaged frame with it. Phew. It all seems to be OK. This was the final image from the film that was left in the camera. I have no idea how old the film  was,nor  how  long  it  had  been  in  the  camera.

The camera has three exposure settings, I am guessing a -1 stop, neutral and +1 stop. The first film I shot on neutral and it was a bit under exposed in my mind.

The next day, Sunday, El, my sister and I visited relatives on both sides of my family. An aunt and uncle on my father’s side and the same on my mother, with added extra uncle, a cousin and their children. After a very large lunch we headed off down to St Leonards. I wanted to show my sister my flat, and a little bit of the area I (occasionally) live in. We arrived late afternoon, still full from lunch, once settled we went for a short walk along the sea front.

There was a very typical, colourful, cloud strewn sunset. I set the camera at what I thought was +1 stop to let a bit more light in for the sunset, however after playing with the -1 setting the following day, I must have had this around the wrong way. I took these two images one after the other, it was a little cool so there was a not enough time for them to process fully before I realised that they were going to be so dark. I do really like them though. These are the first two shots from a new film, so I am A) very happy that a camera bought from ebay is very good, and B) the fall yesterday did not damage it!

I had also brought the digital camera with me, just in case.

The following morning El and I too Sarah on a longer walk around St Leonards and Hastings, taking a walk up Hastings Pier. Walking to the end of the pier is not something I have done before.

I also took a photo on the digital camera, back over the St Leonards sea front, fast becoming one of my favourite views.

I love the walk from St Leonards to Hastings, under a mile, but the sea air, the sound of the waves on the stony beach, the fact it is not deserted but also not crowded. It is just a nice walk in any weather.

At The Stade I took a quick detour down amongst the old tractors and bulldozers used to haul fishing boats up and down the beach. They were a nice subject to experiment with the Polaroid, though mostly came out over exposed. The sun was quite bright and I was pretty much shooting directly into it. I am happy the way these turned out, and experimentation is always fun.

I was quite surprised at how busy the old town was on a Monday, and most of the shops were open, given this was the end of September, verging into autumn, this is a good sign for the state of Hastings at the moment. My sister liked it as well, thankfully. Picking up a bottle of wine we went back to the flat for a pre-dinner drink before heading down to Farmyard in St Leonards for a very nice meal. There are a number of really nice eating and drinking establishments around, Farmyard, possibly being my pick of the bunch at the moment. London prices though!

I am still learning the art of scanning, the second film were scanned better than the first. The images have all been through Lightroom, but I have not done much too them, bit of sharpening and tone adjustments, so they are very close the original. I am happy enough with the camera that I have bought another three 8-packs and hope to get out with it next weekend.

A most excellent birthday present. xx

I am now experimenting with some leaf photos, a bit of still life for the winter.

Back to the forest

07 September 2019 – Epping Forest.

It’s all a bit a green, this forest. Up, down and around, no matter what direction the eyes face, a sea of green. The dark of the dense and wild holly, the light of the highest leaves filtering the sporadically shining sun, the moss on the trees and dense ferneries, the golf course, everything and all. Monochromatic, green.

Late summer is not my favourite time in Epping Forest, it is too close, too narrow, dense, prickly, it can be humid after rain and claustrophobic. It is noisier than I recall, and not good noise either; cars and dogs and too many people, a tannoy from the running club blaring, a jack hammer breaking up something in the distance, planes overhead. I need to visit a few times to learn again to filter these out and the natural sounds, and silences, of the forest dominate. 

It is my first visit to the forest in 11 months, and bloody hell, did I enjoy it.

For most of 2018 I managed to get to the forest at least once a month. It is hardly far from home, I can walk to the fringes in 10 minutes and drive to the middle in 15. There has been no particular reason for not going, obviously St Leonards is taking up most of my spare time, but I am in Walthamstow enough to at least have visited once. The lack of walking has been noticed and really struck home this morning when I pulled my walking trousers on and had to take a few deep breaths to do them up. A baggier t-shirt than normal went on top, cover up the overhang. I am getting fat.

I took the bus to Chingford and walked to The Woodbine Inn to the north; catching a bus, a train and a tube back home. I won’t repeat it. The walk was great, the journey home was expensive, long and a come down from the high of the walk.

I wanted to make this a decent walk so started by walking along the side of the golf course and up to Pole Hill. The path is wide and used heavily by walkers and mountain bikers, the scrub on both sides of the path; one separating the path from the road and the other the golf course, has not been maintained for ages, and it is full of bramble and nettle. Council cuts due to austerity; I bet the golfers hate it, though this is Tory country so austerity is their own fault. I do not sympathise for them.

I tend to not use the formal walking paths, but this is the only option for most of the walk up the ‘hill’; at about 70 meters it is not much, more a large mound than a hill. There is a good view of London city from the top. Though I don’t usually stay, just turn down one of the dirt tracks and head back towards the forest proper.

As I mentioned a post or two ago I bought a new, cheap(ish) mirrorless camera, the Lumix GX800. I had this with me today along with one of the old lenses I had from when I went to Sri Lanka in 2013. The camera is very small and light so I didn’t need the camera bag to carry it. I took the light tripod, though as often happens when I got to the forest I did not use it. One of the very cool features of this new camera is the ability to shoot natively in 16*9 format as well as the traditional 4*3.  16*9 gives a much more landscape look to the image and is great for woodland photography, allowing for more width and less sky. Obviously I could do this crop in Lightroom, but being able to do things ‘in camera’ is much more my style.

Hawkwood, the strip of forest down the side of the golf course is not very wide, and is under some sort of clearance regime at the moment, a lot of undergrowth has been cleared, hopefully this will not mean a mad rush of holly over the autumn and winter. There is quite a line between the cleared and the yet to be cleared.

I really like the walk through Bury Wood and Black Bush Plain, I generally start on one of the mountain bike tracks and then wander off down one of the side tracks, generally heading in a northerly direction, though I don’t really care. I am not going to get lost and this is a lovely, varied bit of forest. Host to a fine stand of hornbeam surrounded by ferns.

This area has been cleared by the Epping Forest Volunteers who have removed the holly and new growth saplings to allow grasses and ferns and more traditional undergrowth to flourish. The ever expanding and ubiquitous (and evil) holly, is a species introduced in the past couple of hundred years. Traditionally self managed by cattle and wildlife, with nothing to curtail it it grows wildly and densely and does not all anything to grow beneath it.

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Heading up through Hill Wood, one of my favourite sections of the forest I followed a lose path up to High Beach.

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I stopped for a coffee and sandwich before carrying on into territory relatively unknown. I have not walked in the section north of High Beach before, I have visited to the north east a few times, but this section was new to me. It was also very busy and I was a little uninspired by it, though I was now following one of the main paths, primarily as I thought I had at least an hour of walking to go. It turned out to only be 45 minutes, which was disappointing, I could have wandered off into the trees and seen a little more, and been a little more alone.

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Crossing Claypit Hill Rd I came across a really nice little downhill mountain bike section with a couple of tasty jumps I would have enjoyed 10 years ago. It was not long, but it looked good. I must get back on to my bike again. The final section I walked through was a flat plain, I think it was Honey Lane Quarters. There were some nice trees and I would like to have taken more photos but the camera had run out of battery! On the fringes of the trees just before the road I spotted three small deer. In truth they spotted me first, and I only saw them as a flash of movement, only realising what they were when they stopped further away. As I turned towards them they ran off and out of sight.

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It was close to my final destination, The Woodbine Inn, so off there I toddled. I have heard good things about the pub, good beer well kept and a welcome place for walkers.

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I did not find it that welcoming, the staff were friendly, but most of the customers seem to be staring at me like I was some sort of alien. I drank my pint, caught the bus to Waltham Cross Station and waited for the outrageously priced train back towards home. A pint in my local was more enjoyable, and I do not feel particularly home there either.

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I loved being out in the forest again, I took a few photos, summer is not my time for photography, but it is a good time to walk.

The lovely ruins of Bayham Abbey.

06 September 2019 – Bayham Abbey, Kent.

Bayham Abbey in Kent was founded in 1207 and existed until the dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1541. It was a Premonstratensian, or White Canon abbey and was built when two nearby abbeys failed and combined resources to build a new one. The ruins were modified in the 18th century after the new abbey was built to provide a better landscaping feature. Whatever was done to it, certainly did not detract from the ruins as it is a magnificent structure. One of the loveliest I have visited, and it has been a while since I visited one.

The abbey can be found just off the A21 on the way from Walthamstow to St Leonards, probably not too far off half way time wise. I have been planning to stop here for a while, and with no rush to get back to London, today was the day.

I took lot of photos, way more than I have here!

I was mostly alone during my visit, at different times three couples also walked around, but that was about it, I liked it like that. It was peaceful. I picked up the habit of walking around the outside of a ruin, before going inside when I visited the Khmer ruins of Angkor Wat. At that time it was a way of avoiding the crowds, though sometimes there are things to see on the outside that most people miss as they just charge straight through the centre. I walked round the outside first today.

On the edge of the abbey ruin is a summer house and the old gateway. I went there first.

The gate was closed and had a sign saying advising that on the other side it was ‘Private Property’, though the amount of bramble and head high nettles on the other side of the gate makes the sign rather redundant. No-one was going to pass through that mess.

There were not many original features left, this was one of the few original carved faces I found, a number of new ones have been added in modern times, as you will see later.

Entering the ruins I spent some time strolling around the various spaces, all slightly different.

I found lots of archways, I am a big fan of archways, one of the things I like the most in European ruins, particularly abbeys.

There were some small amount of detail left in the ruined walls.

My favourite bit was this tree growing on top of one of the old walls, this very much reminded me of the Wat Ta Prohm site in Cambodia where some of the trees that took over the ancient sites were left in situ, growing on and over the walls and buildings. I loved that place, and I love this one as well.

I really enjoyed the ruins, a highlight of the week, and highly recommend you visiting them if you are on the A21!

Checking out my new(ish) neighbourhood.

September 05 2019 – St Leonards-on-Sea.

One of the unexpected joys in this inter-departmental civil service transfer that I am doing has been getting an extra week holiday, albeit in this case an unpaid week. Things are never simple in the civil service and one of the things that is more complex than it needs to be is moving to another department. This is especially so with all the Brexit changes going on, with staff being seconded and loaned all over the place. Nailing down a start date has not been easy in this transfer from the Cabinet Office to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. However, it is happening and I am starting my new role on Monday 9th, not the 2nd. The extra week off has been good.

I spent last week back in Walthamstow, getting a few things organised; buying some clothes for the office, attacking the mega ironing pile, all the little tasks that need to be done before starting a new job. I also went back to the office for the final time and handed in my laptop and security passes, it wasn’t time for a final farewell; that is happening over drinks next week.

I did go out and buy a new camera. I own three other cameras, none of them work properly;

  • The Panasonic GX1 I took travelling all those years ago, which no longer works, but does have three lenses.
  • The Canon 5d Mk1 that I dropped and broke the battery cover and is so old I cannot get a new one. It is also starting to be unreliable and I have been thinking of replacing it for ages.
  • The Canon G16 compact. Three scratches on the lens, one right in the middle which does effect image quality.

I have been thinking about new cameras for ages, the 5d is 12 years old, but I have lenses and other things that I could transfer to a newer version, a Mk4 or 5, but those camera bodies are over £2000. It is a magnificent camera, but it is really heavy and impractical for travelling or hiking. I looked at the Fuji and Sony systems, smaller and great quality, but I would end up spending similar amounts by the time I got lenses to go with the cheaper body from a different brand.

In the end I decided on going for another Panasonic Lumix – probably two of them in fact, one small and ‘pocket’ sized and a second, more professional version; though I can share lenses between them both, and having some already helps.

I bought a Lumix GX800 to start with, the cheaper ‘pocket’ sized camera. I like it because I can change the lens, which is unusual for a compact.

This week was going to be test week. My post from the gig on Tuesday night showed that its low light capabilities were excellent, way better than any of my previous cameras, which is a good sign. 

Which takes me back to the rest of the week. With another week off and El working I chose to come back down to the flat, with no tasks to do it was just going to be a relaxing time. Walking, reading, typing, photography was all I had planned, and pretty much all I achieved.

My first activity was to head back to Bexhill, and then walk to St Leonards. I wanted to see how long it would take. The answer is only 90 minutes, so it was closer than I thought. It is a great walk, mostly dead flat, but there are loads of small things to look at along the way. I may have to do a series of photos of the shelters along the Hastings, St Leonards and Bexhill sea fronts. I like them.

The following day I wanted to do a longer walk and get a few hills into the legs. When I was looking at the map of East Hill the other week I saw Ecclesbourne Glen Cave, and given my surface interest in caves and in the weird history of Hastings I decide that I would endeavour to find that on this walk. The cave can be found in Hastings Country Park, which I discovered today is bigger than it looks on the map.

It was pointed out during last summer’s drought that when flying over fields of drying and dying grass you could the outlines of things that had been buried or marked in the grass. Sites of ancient interest, some previously unknown became clear through the way the grass grew on top. While this is no ancient site, I have never seen football pitch markings on East Hill before, but this Google Maps image clearly shows ghost football pitches coming out of the grass. Love it.

I walked along the seafront, it was a busy day, I had thought the kids were back at school, but discovered it was a ‘teacher only’ day so there were a lot more families out than I expected. I took the steps next to the funicular up East Hill.

I particularly liked this shadow on the wall as the steps made a turn to run perpendicular to the very bright sun.

Back on East Hill I had a quick look for any sign of the Black Arches from above and was not disappointed to not find them, I had no luck when I was properly looking. The park is narrowish, so I headed off in the general direction of the cave. I was sort of hoping to find a sign, but if not I would use a map on my phone. The first sign I came across was not helpful.

As I was wondering what to do two teenagers walking a dog came down and just crossed the fence, they told me there had been landslides but it was safe and passable. I too crossed the fence; they went down a path heading towards the beach and I went along a path traversing the hillside. Looking at the map again with more knowledge and I could clearly see the landslip, it happened two or three years ago and the path was fine. Though vague in parts it was obviously well used.

I ploughed along for a while, finding different paths to follow, vaguely heading in the right direction, before finding a sign pointing to Ecclesbourne Glen, immediately followed by another saying the path was closed. Ignoring it the same as I did the last I started down the hill, seaward, eventually stumbling across the cave by good fortune rather than by good luck.

I do not know when the cave was first dug out of the small sandstone bank but I do know that in the late 19th century there were cottages nearby and gardens up near the cave. In 1893 John Hancox came to Hastings after his business had been bankrupted in London. He was given permission by one of the landowners to live in the cave, which a door was added to.

John lived in the cave until his death in 1918. He was found in the cave, which contained almost nothing. He slept on the ground and had a small fire for cooking. Though no one officially, or otherwise lives in the cave now, it is well used, and there have been numerous small fires lit in and out the front, along with the sad but not unexpected piles of empty drink bottles and food containers.

Leaving the cave I climbed back up to the main path and carried on walking through the Country Park, it is very nice up here, cool under the trees and fairly quiet, only dog walkers seem to come this way.

I walked as far as Ecclesbourne Reservoir before deciding to turn back towards Hastings. I was hungry and had no food on me. My normal careful planning, :), though I did have water, I am not completely stupid 🙂

I didn’t do a lot else with the week, took a few photos, learning how the new camera works so I don’t have to keep stopping, digging through a bag or pocket for glasses so I work out what button I pressed. I am very much liking the new camera.