I blame my good friend.
It all started with a conversation with my friend about the potential for meeting up in Wales during my holiday, and the routes that we both take to virtually the same place that we frequent in Wales. (like about 3 miles apart!!!)
Me, I like night cruising up the motorway in my RS4, cruise control on, clear road in front of me, no idiots about, and due to my normal, preferred, time of travel, listening to the “Best time of the day show” with Alex Lester on BBC Radio 2.
My friend however, well, she drives up the back roads, and up past the Elan Valley.
It was this discussion about the route, her recommendation that it was a beautiful place, and my interest in the fascinating history behind the Elan Valley that made me decide to wonder home via this route after my few days shooting my fast jets.
Well, I wasn’t disappointed, not by half.
It’s amazing!
It’s like all Victorian Engineering, supersized, supremely simple, but at the same time, craftily complex.
It’s immense, solid, even overkill, but, beautiful, and all well engineered.
If you don’t know about it’s history, or engineering, then I recommend going here to have a look at some of the history.
(Yes, it appears to be a little kid orientated, but, I have to say, I did enjoy reading it, and it did it’s job – provide more enticement for me to visit)
Bottom line, is that the Victorians wanted to give Birmingham some drinking water, and wanted to do it without a pumping station, so, they built a few dams, and one long pipe, and let gravity and nature do the rest.
Yeah – gravity…..
It’s gravity that feeds the water from the Elan Valley all the way (70 something miles) to Birmingham.
Now, to me, that is impressive.
What is also impressive, is that most of this pipe from Elan Valley to Birmingham is covered, and hidden – that took some thought to get done.
Well, enough about the engineering itself, and back to the lovely views that it gives.
When driving around the valley, there are times that you have a nice gurgling stream next to the road, and driving round a corner, you get a *WHAM* – an immense view of a stone damn, rising strong, proud and forceful out the ground to hold back the vast lake behind it.
When I was there, there were a group of engineers on the road above one of the damns, abseiling down the front face to clear the face of weeds and small trees that have started to grow in the cracks.
To do this, the water level in the lake behind had been dropped to allow them to work on the face of the damn without tonnes of water flowing over and down.
I don’t know whether this made for an extra *wow* factor, as this particular damn, Claerwen, being dry, was just so “solid”, I am not sure what he view would have been like had their been water flowing over it.
There was another damn where water was flowing over it, and that one glistened beautifully – at least what little of it was in sunlight when I saw it around 16:00 🙁
And that brings me to my “problem”.
The time of day that I was there, not just at that damn, but overall.
Sunlight plays a massive part in landscape photography, and there are times, like 16:00 in the afternoon, where a location is near as makes no difference, damn impossible to photograph satisfactorily, let alone have the ability to create something truly marvelous, simply because the sun is in the wrong position to light up the scene to do it justice.
All the data you can look up, and plan around, sometimes doesn’t help, you just don’t know what the view will be like until you are there, and in my case, there at the wrong time of day, and that can be a frustrating thing.
The good news is however, there isn’t anything stopping you going back, which is precisely what I am now planning to do 🙂
I loved the day over there, and other than the minor frustration of finding places that I can see the opportunity of a great photograph if I’d been there at a different time of day, I am rather happy with the shots that I have taken.
And with that – here are my photos from the day.
Hope you enjoy the photos.