The Roaches is a great place to visit and explore, and I have been exploring parts of this location before. However, I haven’t been to Roaches End and taken any images of the barns. Now a quick search of instagram you will find a good number of images of the Roaches Barns, as it is a great location. My thinking is that I want to interpret a location for myself, honeypot location or not.
So Friday morning I set off to the Roaches, I decided to head to Leek and then take the Buxton Road, and this then takes me very close to the main road through to the Roaches. I have taken the route through the hills but as much as thats a nice route I wanted to get there as quickly as I could, as time was limited. The previous times I’d visited parking was limited but in Friday with the weather being a bit claggy, there were lots of places to park. This included the small lay-by by Roaches End Farm, so thats where I started my exploration.
To be honest I hadn’t seen the barn from the road as I drove up, so I decided to get as high as I could so I could scan the location and decide where the barn was and where might be good to shoot from. This image is taken from almost at the top of the main path that leads into the Roaches itself. There are two large rocks perched just before the top of the path and I headed for the rocks. My main reason for doing this was to get some respite from the wind, its fair to say it was blowing a gale.
As I stood in the shelter of the rocks my eyes wandered across the landscape, and the image above gives you the vista that I saw as I looked out. My eyes were drawn to the water in the distance, this is Tittesworth Reservoir, but my eyes soon picked out that I could centre it in the middle of the group of trees, and have the barn in the mid ground. he image gives a great view of the whole scene, but the foreground is a little boring, with just heather and not very colourful heather at that.
The image above was taken from the end of the wall the you can see on the left in the first image. Maybe the thought of that horrific chopping down of the tree on Hadrians Wall was on my mind, but I decided that I wanted to capture the big tree as well as the barn. Quite alot of he instagram images of the barn makes the barn the subject, but as is stood braving the strong winds and cold, it struck me that the tree was as much a part of this scene as the barn itself, hence the composition above.
This image will absolutely benefit from some colour in the sky, and yes I will have to research when that sort of light maybe available. For now I do believe that these two images have merit and there is the opportunity for me to put my own spin on a honeypot location image.
These images where taken with my Sony Alpha7IV, with the 24 to 70 f2.8 GM lens, the second image has a two stop Lee Graduated medium filter.