England is still in the 2nd lockdown and as a result my travel to take images has reduced to stay within the spirit of the lockdown. The guidelines do allow a more liberal interpretation of where we can take exercise and for how long this can be done.
I’m not going to be back in the Lake District as that clearly is to far away, so I’ve been researching other places to go a little closer to home. The weather has been really rubbish recently, but Friday looked good enough to go explore somewhere different. The location is Holcombe Hill which is near Bury (still inside Greater Manchester in my view).
My research told me that I good place to park would be outside the Hare and Hounds Pub, as its closed it should be ok to get a spot, and sure enough I got a spot outside the main entrance. Like most places there are lots of routes to take and I was pleased that there were a lot of walkers around which told me this is a good place.
I started to follow the roads up towards the hill side and I could see a tower in the distance on the top of the hill. This looked interesting to photograph and during the course of the couple hours or so that I spent walking around here the tower seemed to find its way into the photographs.
On the way up to Peel Tower
I did take a few wrong turnings as you’d expect in a new location, but I eventually ended up walking up a path where I could see the tower up a head. This first image shows the tower as I walked up the path towards it. It was a decent weather day so the sky was blue with some lovely clouds. The tower is called Peel Tower and is dedicated to Robert Peel and family who have really close links to Manchester, and in fact the family have lots of business interests around Manchester.
Peel Tower
The tower dominates this area and can be seen for miles. The scale of it really hits you as you get closer to it. I think the tower is open to the public under normal circumstances, but we are not in normal circumstances at the moment. There are a lot of steps to climb to get to the top, but I’m sure it’s worth it for the view over Manchester and the surrounding areas.
There are lots of paths to walk around the moorland areas and there were lots of walkers doing just that. In fact a good number of them had brought picnic lunches and had taken the opportunity to eat them on the steps of the tower. I did take quite a few images of the tower from various angles but given that it was the middle of the day the light wasn’t the best.
Black and White Tower
My walk around camera was with me on this walk my Sony A6600, with the 16 to 55 f2.8 G lens was also on the camera. This is effectively 24 to 82.5 mm full frame equivalent range which is really good for walking around and offers plenty of flexibility to take images. The third image is relatively close to the tower and taken looking upwards. When I looked at the images in Lightroom later I tried out one of the pre-sets. This image has one of the black and white pre-sets applied to it. I think it works as a black and white as there is a big contrast between the black of the tower and the white of the sky.
Cairn on Harcles Hill
I walked beyond the tower onto what my OS map said was Harcles Hill. The country side is really lovely here, despite the wind and bits of rain we had. As I walked further along the path I came across the cairn stone that you can see in this last image. It seemed quite strange that the cairn was in the middle of what looked more like a moorland than a hill. I guess this was due to the ascent to the height was done when walking up the paths on the early part of the walk.
What I liked most about the view from up here was not only could you see the Peel Tower in the near distance, but also you could see the skyline of city centre Manchester off in the far distance. This image shows quite clearly the sky line despite the haze, and it really isn’t as clear in some of the other images I took.
I seem to be saying this a lot recently but I will definitely be back up in this part of Manchester to explore more and hopefully bag some more good images.
If you like my work and would like to support my photography or if you’d like to buy a print please feel free to visit my Ko-fi page HERE.