Just a couple of miles from Bury in Lancashire is a place that I’ve been exploring for over a decade: Cheesden, a valley that time forgot. It’s a deep cut thrutch, a gravelly, wooded vale of a few miles in length, embracing the industrial and agricultural remains of...
Out in Cheesden there is a track deep cut into the hillside which arches the distance between a brace of mouldering Regency mills sat within the valley basin. It’s a route that has drawn me in for over a year: a deep gouged passage, scuttled with flecks of patterned...
“That what each of us must do is cleave to what we find most beautiful in the human heritage - and pass it on ... And that to pass these precious fragments on is our mission...” Michael Ventura, 'The Age of Endarkenment' * It might have been a figment of my imagination,...
Snowfall in the valley that time forgot
There are some places that confound the idea of a continuous present. St. Michael and All Angels, Gwernesney in Monmouthshire, is one of those places. Here, it felt like the present and past were bleeding into each other. I’ve often wondered if these wuthering networks of light might hold...
It took just an hour with my camera-eye, to help release the voices of the past trapped in the medieval framing like flies in amber. This screen.. This door.. This hinge... Tells a story. It starts with the fixing of it: the torque and torpor of the maker's hand fossilised...
Venturing Into The Valley That Time Forgot
St. John the Evangelist, Elkstone
The polyphony of hill and home...