The Stone Hole, Woodhouse Eves, Leicstershire

 Over the Christmas break I visited my family in Leicestershire, where I spent the first 20+ years of my life. I love the countryside there. Charnwood Forest is an area where granite sits proudly in outcrops on the surface and there are always plenty of native deciduous trees. There’s also lots of hiking opportunities and this snap* was from one of those on Boxing Day.
This cave is a place I know from my childhood. And it’s a place my dad knew well as his school and the church where he was a choir boy was minutes away from it. What kind of influence might a place like this have had on my young mind? Looking at it now I was surprised to see such familiar colours from the slate greys to the orange tinge from iron deposits. The shape was also very familiar and this is probably because ‘The Stone Hole’ was once a mine, and is very similar to ones I have explored at Combe Martin at home in North Devon.

This early 1900’s image was found whilst I was trying to find the name of this cave. I was stuck by the fact that it was a commercially available postcard and that there is a group of well dressed people in it. I sometimes feel I was born 100 years too late! I’ve seen similar Victorian pictures of landscape where people are picnicking, studying, rockpooling and enjoying for it’s wildness whereas now those same places are our toilets and rubbish tips.

*for my fine-art images I would take considerable time, use a tripod, shoot sometimes over 100 photographs,  spend hours (possibly days) processing the frames and constructing the image to my memory of the place. This really was a snap-shot with compromises on camera support, iso, aperture etc.