It was trapped.

With my finger poised, and the hunter instinct kicking in - I circled the sunken void, having picked up my quarry’s scent from the cobbled river bed.


A sprinkling of odd artefacts led me in - somebody had been here before me.

First contact was incongruous - a hazy line and textured plane - fleeting with movement amongst the trees.

Neither was my prey visible from the filigree canopy above, it had taken on the hue and cry of the wooded melange.

Nervously, with my camera at hand and shutter ready to pounce, I was seeking out signs of a lost civilisation - the spirit of which slinked within a forgotten valley, not far from Washwheel.

The first sighting was gifted by the sun reaching out to define and delineate.

As the shadows deepened and the hazy lines sharpened, there arose from the ground a labyrinthine massing of fired clay and stone - balanced like the Norber Erratics.

Deeply veiled by a feral arboretum, knotted and rooted in a pitted hollow, I’d found my Holy Grail.

What to make of it - these man-made protrusions from the sodden earth?

Segmented stones rising like a serpent from the briny.

Taking on the hues and tones of antiquity.

Stripped of its metal bones - just the carcass remains.

“A thousand years from now they’ll say ‘Ritual!’”, I thought.

I see faces...

They’d find a sacrificial slab...

above a sacred void...

spangled by tree roots.

“Instead of clinker they’d say ‘Inca’, and they’d come in droves to see the altars that were really stoves.”

Chuckling quietly within the future crypt that was really a wheel pit -

I switched off my camera and zipped up my bag ready to climb into the light, until I caught something out of the corner of my eye: half buried within the leaf mould, a faded orange triangle - on it an etched eye and some words beneath:

Illuminati Confirmed

Deeply Vale Mill

Deeply Vale Mill is in the Cheesden Valley situated between Rochdale and Bury in the North West of England. The whole valley is full of the relics representing the full evolution of the industrial textile industry.

Deeply Vale Mill

Deeply Vale Mill is in the Cheesden Valley situated between Rochdale and Bury in the North West of England. The whole valley is full of the relics representing the full evolution of the industrial textile industry.

Andy Marshall

Andy Marshall is an architectural and interiors photographer based in the UK

I put my heart and soul

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