This time of year is usually very busy with preparations for the Christmas festivities and couple that with the changing guidelines about lockdown, its meant that I have less time on my hands than previously. These are factors as well as more work and exciting things going on in my personal life, means that I have to take the chances to get out and about to work on projects when they arrive. Friday last week was one of those opportunities and whilst the weather was rubbish, to say the least, I was determined to get out.
Barbrook Moor Stone
I’d previously concentrated on the stones that where centred around the Curber / Baslow area, so it was time to move onto the other areas where stones are sited. Not that the Barbrook stone is a long was from Baslow. The OS Map reference that I got pinpointed the stone not far onto the more at Barbrook, open the road to Sheffield. It’s perfectly possible to drive almost beside the stone but the sign on the access road said “authorised cars only”, I’m law abiding photographer. Despite the sheeting rain I set off onto the moor knowing the stone wasn’t too far away. You’ll understand what I went through if you’ve ever tried to do anything in driving wind and rain. You need two hands to set up the tripod and camera, but I was doing that with the added requirement to try to keep me and the camera as dry as I could.
Barbrook Moor
The map reference wasn’t wrong and I quickly found the stone, along with its companion stoop stone. The image here is a straight forward shot of the stone looking across the moorland were the stone sits. If you visit the Projects section you will find an image of each of the stones that I’ve taken images of so far. Once completed there will be a link from that section of my website to the written up pice that I intend to do. This will be published through my website and I’m hoping to get a mention on the companion stones website itself.
Ball Cross Park Stone
Given the inclement weather I decided the next stone to visit would also need to be near an access road to allow me to get reasonably near to it to avoid being completely drenched. The OS Map reference said that this stone was in (or near) the small village of Pilsley. This village is very near the Chatsworth Estate and you drive past quite a few signs and gates that would lead onto the Chatsworth Estate. The sign on the bottom of the access road said it was unsuitable for motor vehicles, but I could see a Land Rover in the distance and thought my SUV can get where they can, so off I went up the road.
Ball Cross Park
It really wasn’t difficult to spot this stone, but I first saw the stoop stone. Unfortunately the stoop stone was on the other side of a big stone wall and it wasn’t possible to get an image of the two together. However, the stone is sat nicely beside the access road at a crossroads with another section of the access road. As you can see from this image its quite well overgrown with moss etc but I think that adds to the look.
Both of these images where taken with my Sony A7 iii, with my 24 to 105 f4 G lens, on the camera. This seems to be my go to lens at the moment but the real, reason for this is the fact that it was on the camera when I took it out of my bag. It was raining so hard that I didn’t want to change the lens to a wide angle lens, which might have meant some rain getting onto the sensor. As it happens I did use 2 microfibre cleaning cloths to keep the front of the lens dry. Another batch is on order from Amazon, you can never have to many cleaning cloths.
I’m not rightly sure when this project will be completed but I’;m tricking off the stones, two by two. Hopefully over Christmas I will get to take images of the remaining stones. Keep you eyes on my website for updates.