"Home is..." Three Days in Wales

A return to Wales last week on my days off from work, and the opportunity to shoot some more pics for both the “Home is…” (again focussing on the main living room set) and the underwater photography projects…  First up, something of a mega-update on "Home is..." showing just how much can be crammed into 3 days, when you get up to start shooting pics at 5am...

With Thursday forecast for rain, we decided to just spend the day doing recce runs to various locations.  Our first stop was the quarries above Tanygrisau, a spot we had visited extensively during previous shoots and projects.  Up at high level in the quarries are the remains of buildings, tramways, all sorts of bits of machinery which they never got around to removing when the quarry went bust.  However it’s a long walk carrying the furniture despite its merits as a location, so we chose instead to go for the memorial garden which is located at lower level nearer the car park.  This landscaped spot on a former waste tip has wagon turntables, rail lines, trees, all sorts of bits and pieces (as can be seen in these older shots from my last visit to the site a few years back).

Annoyingly (and marking the start of a day of disappointments) we found the site closed, due to what could be best described as catastrophic erosion of the paths and retaining walls by the bad winter weather.  My attempt to bypass the collapsed retaining walls were cut short by the sound of more slate shifting under this mess, and I realised I had better things to do than be buried under hundreds of tons of slate waste if I managed to trigger a landslide, so we left.  There is one possible location here, at this bridge (which has a high waterfall directly under where the pic below was taken from), but it would only be good after heavy rain…

Moving onto the next location, an abandoned goods yard on the derelict Blaenau Ffestiniog-Trawsfynned railway line.  The yard was formerly used by Cooke’s explosive works back in the 80’s/90’s to load their products onto trains.  Looking on Google Earth, the site seemed abandoned, and being suitably remote, should have provided a good spot to photograph.  Being as Cookes are long gone, the railway is closed, and I was unable to establish who owns the site, we thought we’d take a look. 

We got a tantalising glimpse of the site from the road over bridge, but to our irritation found a rather new looking gate securing the site on the access road.  Being as this is an ‘official’ project for a gallery we are doing, we decided not to risk being cautioned/arrested for trespass and so aborted the recce.

To add further annoyance, another location we’d chosen nearby on a previous recce, a lay-by with fantastic views over the mountains is now being used to dump skips in.  We still toyed with the idea of this location, but found that we can’t fit the car, the chair, and the tripod all into the remaining space and keep the skips/car out of shot.

And to cap-off this day of minor irritations, our final stop was at Penrhyndeudraeth, where there used to be a bath high up on the hillside, in use as a cattle trough, and which we had figured would make a pretty good ready-made bathroom set for a picture with the addition of a few props and light set dressing.  And typically for this day, upon arrival we found that it was no longer a bath, but a modern, purpose-made plastic cattle trough which was on the site. 

For all of our successful shoots so far, it is somewhat annoying that about 8 of the major locations we had in mind for this project when we started out (all used in previous projects) are now inaccessible:

Cwm Prysor Viaduct- now in private ownership with CCTV

Cwm Prysor railway cutting- now in private ownership with CCTV

Blanaue Ffestiniog slate loading dock- access blocked by new wall along road and CCTV

Tanygrisau Quarry- access blocked by landslides

Penrhyndeudraeth Bath- removed

Maentwrog Goods Yard- access blocked by new gate and CCTV

Maentwrog Lay-by- access blocked by builders skips

Trawsfynned Level Crossing- heavily overgrown

After this day of disappointments, we decided to use Friday as an opportunity to reshoot a couple of pictures instead…  The morning saw us back at the partially-logged woods in Tanybwlch, which were suitably misty and spooky.  No random passers-by this time, and a rather lighter sky which aided things considerably.  A more dramatic backdrop of logged trees was used this time compared to the previous visit too, meaning a much better image resulted.

During the day we also did a recce to try and find a new slate quarry location, given the previous days problems at Tanygrisau, so this time we headed for the Nantle valley.  Working as we were off a 30 year old OS map, we hoped to find the abandoned tips and inclines marked on the map, but were somewhat annoyed to find the area now very green, gentrified, and very, very heavily fenced off in private ownership.  We were forced to turn back as well about half way along by the very large herd of cattle being moved along the single-track road.  We did find a possible location though, a fishing lake high up in the hills with a concrete jetty, boat shed, and paths with good views, so decided to return the next morning.

A trip down the coast to Barmouth followed, and was used partially to get some underwater shots, and partly to scout some more locations.  One thing I’ve certainly never seen before was a lifeboat being moved overland, which made for some interesting images and a pleasant distraction from the recce shots…

More slight setbacks followed on the recce though; I had previously visited the mothballed airfield at Llanbedr (a former RAF base which had been closed back in the early 2000’s, but the site now just consists of a few grubby looking sheds, and frankly I can think of a few better locations we might use compared to this one; most of the ‘interesting’ things like bunkers, radar towers etc have been removed since I last visited for a University project (the below shot, from that last visit, shows pretty much all that is there now, only the sheds look rather tattier).  Equally, the abandoned museum at Maes Artro just up the road has been cleared and is now covered in holiday lodges and log cabins, rather than the mothballed clutter of old tanks, planes, and crumbling buildings which once existed here.

 

The evening saw a shoot which was a re-do of one of the concept pics, actually shooting in the dark under a streetlight right outside where we were staying, with a new model posing for us (in pyjamas, slippers, and dressing gown no less).  A good image, if a little rushed because of the ever-present midges.

Saturday morning provided the opportunity to do a shoot at the one decent location we found in the Nantle Valley, the lake with a concrete jetty and boat house, so we set off early, arrived, and found the lay-by blocked with a camper van, the driver evidently choosing not to pay for a site anywhere when he could park for free.  Had we been able to park up, they wouldn’t have taken kindly to us disturbing them at half 6 in the morning, so we were forced to abandon (twice now due to people sleeping in lay-bys, it must be a Welsh thing).  We did however decide not to waste the morning, so headed back to Aberglaslyn to redo a shoot from last week which had been scrubbed due to bad lighting.

We got the shot we wanted, using a slightly different angle to last time, but encountered a minor spot of bother on the way out from another driver who arrived onto the car park and, spotting me carrying a lot of furniture back to the car, must have leapt to the assumption that we were some sort of travelling armchair thieves, as he proceeded to furiously scribble down our details, car licence plate, etc.  Had he opened his windows we could have talked to him and actually explained what we were doing; and being as we weren’t pulled over by the fuzz on the way home for suspected Grand Theft Bookcase, so we’re guessing he was just a bit of nosy type.

So that’s that then: a few days of mixed disappointment and success.  We have a possible 4 days left to take pictures in Wales dispersed over the next week, but we’re rapidly running out of scouted locations up here anyway.  We’re hoping to get one more beach shot (on a shingle beach this time), and maybe another go at that concrete jetty on the fishing lake, before we leave Wales as a venue for the project.  Autumn and Winter will be mainly focussed on the North, specifically various bits of Yorkshire, as well as the Midlands over Christmas.  More on our last few days in Wales on the blog shortly, but the next Blog entry will probably feature our other ongoing project, the underwater photography…