On the canals at Castlefield

Until May 2011, when I had to go to a meeting in the city, I'd never been to Manchester. I've still spent barely any time there.

With little time to devote to photography while there, I instinctively rode over to the part of the city centre that looked most interesting on the Ordnance Survey map: Castlefield.

With the world's first industrial canal and the world's first passenger railway, the neighbourhood is a tangle of basins and viaducts and narrow cobbled pathways. The Bridgewater Canal arrived here from the Worsley coal field in 1761, and a second branch of the canal reached the Mersey estuary at Runcorn three years later. The opening of the Rochdale Canal through to West Yorkshire in 1804 put Castlefield on a through-route, and the basin was also connected to the nearby River Irwell — later to be turned into the Manchester Ship Canal.

In 1830 the canals were joined by the railways, with the world's first passenger line, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, terminating at Liverpool Road Station (now the Museum of Science and Industry) adjacent to but not crossing the basins. The first two railway viaducts over the water came in 1849 with the Manchester South Junction & Altrincham Railway lines which fork here as they head west from Piccadilly. These lines were in turn crossed by even higher viaducts with 1877's Cheshire Lines into Manchester Central — victims of the Beeching Axe, but reused in the early 1990s for the trams — and the now disused turreted tubular steel Great Northern Railway viaduct of 1894.

Now it's in the half-done regeneration stage, with mixed decayed and preserved industry, warehouse conversions, empty plots and infill apartment blocks.

I think the instincts probably did a reasonable job.

Winter in Keswick

In February 2010 I booked the train up to Penrith...

only to break the bicycle I'd planned to take on the day before departure....

so changed plans and walked everywhere in the snow around Keswick and Derwent Water, where the boat bus company fought to break the ice...

up over Walla Cragg and Latrigg in the blizzard, and through the fresh snow around the stones at Castlerigg...

and got the double decker bus down to Windermere for the train home...

The squirrel was a lucky catch in the woods below Ashness Bridge.

Hill climb

The Settle to Carlisle Railway

I like the ways that railways fit into the landscape: the mix of bold lines, elegant curves, symmetrical structures and lush green earthworks, embedded in big landscapes — like these ones on the Settle to Carlisle Line in the Yorkshire Dales national park — and tying places together.

I've just not quite worked out whether and how to pursue the theme...

Skiddaw from the shores of Derwent Water

This is another one of those views I seem to keep returning to.

With attempts from the summers of 2007 and '08, the spring of '09 and winter '10.

The distinctive blunted heaps of England's fourth highest mountain, Skiddaw...

...reflected in Derwent Water.

The same view that appealed to and was exaggerated by the Romantic landscape artists.

One day I might even get around to climbing to the top and taking one looking the other way...

Haystacks

Not a big hill by Lake District standards, but a popular one.

Because of its pleasant ascents past the tarns and rock formations.

And the view over Buttermere and the valley.

More on Wikipedia.

Location: Castlerigg

In the house where I grew up, on the side of a kitchen cupboard above the kitchen sink is a small wide yellowed print on a bent and battered cobweb covered card, faded with the light of five thousand sunrises and dappled from the condensation of countless boiled kettles.

It's a print of the stone circle at Castlerigg, the Celtic Carles of Keswick, looking north over the shapely Cumbrian fells of Latrigg and Blencathra, known as Saddleback, in the northern lakes.

A neolithic druidical astronomy set, aligned with the autumn equinox and set centre stage on a minor eminence in a cavernous amphitheatre.

An antique shelter for the sheep, trap for the tourist, and prop for the photographer.

Built to catch the light and the lightning, the sun, the snow and the storms.

More photos in the Cumbria gallery...