Edge of the Vale

In the summer I spent a few evenings and early mornings shooting the hills surrounding the valley of the River Stour — the Blackmore Vale — in North Dorset and South Somerset.

For much of the year, the clay and low limestone ridges of Thomas Hardy's vale of little dairies provide little to keep a landscape photographer occupied for long.

But in the golden hour light, the steep scarp slopes of the chalk downs to the south and east can. The Dorset Downs in the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Cranborne Chase in the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs AONB — all part of the extensive chalk formation that forms much of the upland and sea cliffs of southern England — provide promontories, like Bulbarrow and Fontmell, and islands in the vale, like Hambledon and Duncliffe.

And the more gently rising limestone that divides the Stour flowing south east to the English Channel from the Yeo, flowing north west to the Bristol Channel, dropping in its own scarp into the Somerset Levels, with its own peninsulas and islands at Corton Beacon and Cadbury Castle.

These photos all taken in August and September 2012, but more can be found in the Dorset gallery.

Hill climb

The dismal town of Yeovil

It's difficult to find a nice thing to say about Yeovil, the nearest proper town to where I grew up.

But I could go on at length about the awfulness of it. The miserable generic shopping precincts with a skin of decaying and derelict buildings...

...trapped inside a fortress of traffic crashing through the town centre...

...on dual carriageways with municipal flower arrangements draped over central reservation guardrails.

I don't think I've ever found anything there with any great character, any beauty, any real kind of life, only boxes speeding through from roundabout to roundabout, cutting the town into perfectly isolated chunks of bland housing and bland light industry, no interest or activity amongst it.

I was given some driving lessons there once and, though I quickly stopped them, I think they left me permanently with a Pavlovian response to getting in a car: there is always a fear that I will end up in Yeovil.

I know, it's just a dismal small town, they're not uncommon. But the west country is fortunate to mostly escape them, and there are none so dismal as Yeovil in this part of Britain.

Purdown Transmitter

Another one of those shots that I've taken again and again and again, capturing it in all seasons, lights and conditions, in this case because it was on my commute for several years.

The BT tower on Pur Down, in the north of Bristol, a thin and increasingly isolated sliver of green space, once farmland, consumed and constricted and now cut off from the surrounding country by the growing city: one of those locations where you can pretend that the city isn't there if you get the camera angle and conditions right.

When I returned that way a few weeks ago for the first time in five years, the microwave transmitters which were the original point of the tower had gone, like those on the BT Tower in London.

View Larger Map

Kilve and Lilstock Beach

Where the Quantock Hills AONB meets the Bristol Channel on the West Somerset coast.

And the waves from the Atlantic wash away the silt of the river estuaries and undercut the shale cliffs.

Leaving great intertidal platforms, sections through the Lilstock Formation of Jurassic and Triassic rocks, and revealing the fossils of ammonites and dinosaurs.

While ships pass up the channel to Bristol and South Wales, guided by the landmark church tower.

Pictures from April 2008. More in the Somerset gallery.

View Larger Map — Ordnance Survey Map

Brunel Locks

There are some places I keep taking pictures of again and again, building up a time series through the changing of seasons and urban renewal. Not necessarily deliberately, but just because I happen to pass that way regularly.

One of the earliest of those time series was at the Clifton Suspension Bridge, looking south at the Brunel Locks.

Brunel Locks is where Bristol's Floating Harbour flows out into the tidal River Avon. Bridged by the ridiculous 1960s flyovers of the Brunel Way junction, and with the wonderful backdrop of Ashton Vale's three landmark tobacco bonds.

It must be time I went back for the 2012 view.

More pictures in the Floating Harbour gallery.

Winter fogs past

I love those freezing winter nights, when everything condenses into one big fog.

And the light blurs...

And the shapes merge...

Brean Down

A great limestone scarp runs the breadth of Somerset, the Mendip Hills, famous for their karst landscape — the gorge at Cheddar and the caves at Wookey Hole.

Where it meets the sea in the Bristol Channel, it takes the form of a 2km long peninsula beside the village of Brean, Brean Down, and 4km beyond that headland an island, Steep Holm.

Brean Down stands 98m above the surrounding flat farmland and wetlands of the Somerset Levels, with views south to Brent Knoll, north over Weston-super-Mare bay, out over the Bristol channel to Wales and inland along the Mendip scarp.

The Down was home to an iron-age hill fort and a Victorian coastal fort, later taken over for rocket and weapons research in the Second World War -- a large concrete arrow directed bombers to one of the test sites.

These days its main claim to fame is as the site of the often-proposed-but-never-got-very-far Severn Barrage, which could in theory generate 5% of the UK's electricity.

But at the moment it's home only to a few people walking around the rocks and windswept rowans.

And a herd of National Trust goats.

Most of these were taken one day in february 2007. There are more photos under the Brean Down tag.