Symbolic Forest

The combination of being back at work, and the ongoing pandemic situation (particular disastrous in this misgoverned country) means that photography at the moment is limited to things we can photograph whilst walking-for-exercise (if it was walking-for-fun it would be strictly forbidden, of course). Luckily, there are enough interesting views within walking distance that it doesn’t have to be a completely fallow period. Last weekend, when it was cold, I took the camera out and have already posted here the photos I took of Ridgeway Park Cemetery. However, as it was such a cold and icy day, there were plenty of others too. Being an inner city area, we naturally have dystopian motorway overpasses…

However, there’s also the wide open spaces of Eastville Park.

The park’s pond had frozen and refrozen a few times over the preceding days, and The Children enjoyed seeing how far sticks would slide across the surface of the ice.

The river, though, was unusually clear. We stood a while by Stapleton Weir and watched the river water foaming over the edge.

All in all, it’s not too bad an area to live in.

Keyword noise: photography, Bristol, Easton, Eastville, Eastville Park, winter, water.

Regular readers might remember the post last week about Ridgeway Park Cemetery, a small and heavily overgrown cemetery bordering Eastville Park in Bristol. As our daily exercise at the weekend, I took The Children back there again, but took the Proper Camera with me this time.

It was an excellent winter’s day for taking the camera out, and you can certainly see the difference when compared to the previous photos.

We took the opportunity, as it is winter, to poke around in some of the parts of the cemetery that are completely overgrown and virtually impassable in summer.

I won’t post the full set of photos here because there’s quite a few, but you can go and look at them on Flickr if you’d like; I’ve tried to transcribe some of the inscriptions too.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, Stapleton, heritage, history, local history, Ridgeway Park, cemetery, death, grave, photography.

Another day, another cemetery, although back on to a human one this time. Back in October, Twitter user @libbymiller asked if I knew Ridgeway Park Cemetery. Although I do know it, and I’ve been foraging for brambles there frequently in summer, for some reason I’ve never taken any photos. Today I woke up, saw it was a fine frosty day, so tried wandering off in that direction.

Ridgeway Park is only small, but its history tracks in microcosm the history of the great urban Victorian cemeteries of Britain. It opened in the 1880s as a private alternative to the nearby city-owned Greenbank Cemetery, filled up with graves, and as it filled up and plot purchases dropped off its owners could no longer make a profit from it. In 1949 the owning company was wound up and the cemetery taken over by the city council.

It was built behind a grand old house, Ridgeway House, which in the 1860s seems to have been the home of the private school attended by local celebrity W G Grace. The house was demolished in the late 30s, and there is now no sign of it at all above the ground as far as I’m aware, although Huyton Road runs on the line of its approach drive. Although the house has disappeared completely, the boundaries of the cemetery still follow the lines of previous boundaries. The following map is from immediately before both the cemetery and Eastville Park were laid out, but the cemetery boundaries can be clearly traced on the tithe map from 40 years earlier.

Unlike the still-active Greenbank, and the much-loved Arnos Vale, Ridgeway Park seems relatively forgotten as cemeteries go. The area near the gates is in reasonable condition, just with grass a little long; but as you go in further, towards the park, it becomes more and more overgrown until you are effectively in a patch of woodland with added gravestones.

If you’re local, this is the ideal time of year to visit somewhere quite so overgrown. If you’re not, you might have to wait a while and come back next winter. Or, indeed, in summer, when it has an entirely different atmosphere but is still just as lovely a spot.

Update, January 11th 2021: I went back to Ridgeway Park with an SLR camera and took some more photos. The new post about it is here.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, Stapleton, heritage, history, local history, Ridgeway Park, cemetery, death, grave, photography.

What to do on a Saturday just before Yule? We went for a wander around the Blaise Castle estate, its forests and woods and caves. The museum in the estate’s mansion is not just closed for the winter, but all the windows are securely boarded up; but plenty of people were still climbing up to the folly at the summit of the estate, as ever looking more like a castle than any real castle ever does.

I spotted wild mistletoe in the branches of a tree as we walked under it; I can’t recall ever noticing it in the wild before. We stood back, and realised there were great bushes of it high up in the branches of most of the bare trees in the wood.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Blaise Castle, castles, mistletoe, follies.

As it is such a lovely, sunny, bright and winter day, we went out for a walk, for a picnic on Troopers Hill. The lumpy, bumpy and steep slope overlooking the Avon, crowned with a rough and slightly wonky chimney. It was busyish, not crowded, but full of groups of families, walking dogs, eating picnics and flying kites. We sat and ate our food, tried to look at the view without squinting, and watched buzzards hovering and circling over the woods.

The chimney was probably built in the late 18th century for copper smelting. Various copper and brass works lined the Avon and Frome in the 18th century; it was Bristol’s major industry, powering the city’s corner of the transatlantic slave trade. The chimney on Troopers Hill fumed to turn copper and zinc ore into brass kettles and other ware, for sale in West Africa in exchange for people, to be shipped as slaves to the Caribbean for the enrichment of Bristolian merchants. Quite a dark history for a local landmark. The brass works did not survive the end of the slave trade, as they no longer had a guaranteed profitable market for most of their products; by the mid-19th century, the copper smelters had closed. Troopers Hill was still covered by other heavy industries, though: coal mining, clay mining, stone quarrying, and a tar distillery. As the industries declined through the twentieth century, though, it slowly turned into a slightly wild and unruly green space. The chimney, though, was left looking over everything.

The council have repaired the base of the chimney, where the flues would originally have entered it, and built a little passageway into it. Inside, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Troopers Hill, history, local history, archaeology, industrial archaeology, photography.

After a few weekends without touching it, I did a bit more work on the papercraft pinhole camera (previously discussed here, here and here) today. I’m sure The Children have completely forgotten that it was supposed to be for them originally.

Today was the moment that some of the key engineering parts of it dropped into place. Firstly, the film take-up spool was glued into its position.

The main stem of the spool had to be threaded through a triangular hole in a small piece of card with small flaps on the inside of the hole, and these flaps had to be glued to the spool without sticking anything to the main body of the camera, so that the spool is free to rotate. My biggest worry was not pushing that piece of card far enough up the spool, because the spool has to be wide enough to hold a roll of film. It’s one of those things we will only find out about when we try to put a film into it and wind it on, I suspect.

You can see, also, that I’ve tried to fix my earlier mistake building half the camera upside-down, by hacking at the body with a scalpel and extending the frame mask downwards a little bit. I might touch up the edge of that with a black marker.

Next, the shutter mechanism, made by laminating six pieces of card together, trapping a sliding shutter piece in the middle. The sliding piece—itself laminated from two thicknesses of card—is the rectangular piece in this picture.

When the whole mechanism is built up it’s a fairly chunky-feeling assembly, complete with a functional bayonet-mount on the back just like an SLR.

The main “pinhole”, which is a metal sheet, is then stuck in place in front of the shutter assembly with double-sided tape, and various semi-cosmetic rings of cardboard are stuck on in front of it, partly to make it look like a real camera lens and partly to hood the pinhole from glare. I’m quite pleased just how well the shutter itself seems to work, but not really confident in my cardboard-rolling ability for the next step.

Keyword noise: photography, pinhole cameras, analogue, camera, film, film photography, papercraft.

If you have a day to spare at the tail end of autumn, and the weather is all damp and misty, what better to do than go for a walk in the woods? In this case, a Forestry England wood just outside Failand, Ashton Hill Plantation. At its centre is a stand of sequoias, looking suitably mysterious in the mist. For a moment you can start to imagine you’re in some sort of supernatural horror-mystery filmed in Washington State.

However, brief glimpses of the rolling landscape outside the woods, showing off the traditional English fear of outsiders, soon remind you where you are.

Near the edge of the wood is a fairy tree, naturally beloved by The Child Who Likes Fairies, decorated with several tiny doors and various garlands and trimmings round its base. Further up, I noticed at adult head height, something that seemed much deeper, speaking directly to the fairies themselves, not there to entertain children.

A corn dolly pinned to the tree with a baby’s teething toy. Some sort of offering; some sort of old ritual; maybe some sort of prayer.

Keyword noise: North Somerset, Failand, paganism, religion, autumn, The Children, countryside, England, folk custom, giant redwoods, green space, photography, rural, Somerset, woods, sequoias.

Regular readers will know I’m the sort of person who always has an eye for odd little details, odd little quirks of history or mechanical gubbins. You’ll probably be unsurprised to know that this has never really changed much.

Last week I posted photos of my first ever trip to the Ffestiniog Railway, from back when I was still in primary school. I can still remember being intrigued by the “chopper” couplings the Ffestiniog has used as standard since the 1950s (and to some degree since the 1870s—naturally the full details are online). I can’t say it was the first time I had seen them, but it was the first time I had been close enough to notice they were a novelty to me, enough for me to want to take photographs of how they work. So, naturally, I did.

This is my grainy 110-film photo of the coupling on FfR Car 100. On the far left is its electrical connector, with a hood to shelter it. In the middle is the coupling: a central buffer with a hinged hook fitting into a slot, and a weight (the “bob”) hanging below. Bear in mind that when I took this picture I didn’t know any of this; I was just intrigued by this peculiar metal prong. I’ve learned the technical details since.

After the loco (Mountaineer) coupled up to the train, this is what it looked like. The hook on each coupling is swung down into the opposite slot, but initially it doesn’t drop all the way; it’s blocked by a camshaft attached to the bob. The bob is swung to one side until the hook drops into its running position, and then swung back; the bob’s camshaft locks the hook into place and prevents it lifting. After that, you can attach the brake hoses.

Nowadays, of course, there are probably a thousand videos of how this works online, that you can go and watch whenever you like. I’m quietly pleased with myself, though, that back in the day when you couldn’t do that, this is the sort of thing I felt worth recording on film.

Keyword noise: railway, rheilffordd, Cymru, Wales, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog, Ffestiniog Railway, photography, couplings.

Another weekend, more work on the papercraft pinhole camera kit I’ve slowly been working on. If you haven’t seen the previous installments, part one is here and part two is there.

This time, I spent most of the time on some of the cosmetic detailing. I glued on a whole set of fake camera controls: shutter button, wind-on lever, timer lever and lens mount release button. They’re not the neatest job, but they’re only there to make the thing look like a camera, so it doesn’t really matter if I don’t get them quite right. More important is the film take-up spool, which I’m trying to assemble very carefully and slowly because, fundamentally, it has to work mechanically as well as look good.

On that photo you should be able to make out that the take-up spool looks as if it has an extra lamination. That’s a strip of card added and only glued at the ends. The idea is, the leader is slipped between that strip and the main part of the take-up spool, and that (with a few turns of the spool) that should be enough to hold the film in place. I’m intrigued how well it’s going to work.

The other part I made up that is fundamental to the camera’s workings is the camera back

Given that if the back comes off at the wrong time the whole thing is useless, and that the integrity of the back relies on four small corner tabs, I thought it worth holding the whole thing together with foldback clips whilst the glue did its thing. Normally I’d just rely on a good firm squeeze between finger and thumb, but this seemed rather more important. I suspect I’ll end up taping the back on with something like washi tape when the camera is loaded in any case, because it’s going to be a fine line between a back that’s too tight to go on properly and a back that’s so slack it falls off.

I’m not sure this camera was really designed to run more than one film through it anyway: as I said last time, the instructions tell you to take the whole thing to your local photography lab rather than try to unload the film yourself. Which would seem a bit of a shame, because how are you supposed to learn from your mistakes with a new camera, and learn how it behaves, if you basically have to throw it away before you get the results back? Hopefully it will cope with at least a couple of films before the back falls apart.

The next update on this project is here.

Keyword noise: photography, pinhole cameras, analogue, camera, film, film photography, papercraft.

Occasionally, when I visit The Mother, I look through old photos. Either family ones, or ones from my own albums. My first camera was a Christmas present I’d asked for when I was age 7 or 8: a Halina-branded Haking Grip-C compact camera that took 110 cartridge film. With a fixed focus, a fixed shutter-speed and a choice of two apertures, it was an almost-entirely mechanical beast. The shutter was cocked by a lever which engaged with the film’s sprocket holes (a single hole per frame on 110 film) and the only electrical component was a piezoelectric switch attached to the shutter, for firing a Flipflash bulb if you’d inserted any. I might still have an unused Flipflash somewhere.

A photography geek might look at the above spec and be amazed that I managed to photograph anything recognisable on that type of camera. Frankly, even aged 7 so was I: to go with the camera I’d been given a book called something like A Children’s Guide To Photography which made no bones about this type of camera being a very basic one that it was hard to get good results from. It lasted me a few years though, despite at least one drop that popped the back off; I was still using it in my teens, I think.

Sometimes on this blog I’ve mentioned visiting the Ffestiniog Railway; last December for example. The last time I visited The Mother, though, I dug out the photos I’d taken on my very first visit, on which we did a single round trip from Blaenau to Porthmadog and back again behind the Alco. All the photos were taken right at the start of the day, it seems.

The weather in Blaenau is famously murky and damp; I’m not sure quite how much of the murk and grain in those photos is down to the camera and how much is down to the weather. Still, what the photos lack in sharpness, they certainly have in atmosphere.

Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, rheilffordd, railway, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog, Ffestiniog Railway, Mountaineer, The Alco, train, steam train.