Twyford Down II

The picture above is the earliest in my current retrospective Twyford Down "project". Somehow it looks a bit ancient, too, in a painterly kind of way. By around 2010 our children were both young adults leading independent lives, so weekend rambles were becoming more frequent, ambitious, and wide-ranging. What, you've never tried dragging a tired toddler or sulky teen across a muddy field? In particular, I had begun to explore the area around St. Catherine's Hill and the Hockley Viaduct, an abandoned Victorian railway structure near Winchester that had become semi-derelict. Standing on the viaduct one day, I realised you could see into the Twyford Down cutting and, as I happened to have a telephoto lens on my camera – then a 12 MP Canon 450D – took some pictures. This particular one was taken in March 2011 standing on some high ground on the opposite side of the M3.

A lot of the photographs made around then were consolidated into a Blurb book, England and Nowhere, that I put together in 2016 (also to be seen in higher resolution on Issuu here). Naturally, I've taken a lot more photographs in the subsequent decade, with higher resolution kit as well as a more practiced eye and more sophisticated processing skills. So, in addition to the wide format photographs described in the previous post, I've been making some more frame-friendly square photographs. I have always enjoyed the challenge of composing within a square – not as easy as it might look – which started for me back in the days of film when I was lugging around a hefty Mamiya C330 as my "serious" camera, and subsequently when I discovered the pleasure of using lightweight old folding cameras like the Agfa Isolette. You can really get down to the essence of what works in a picture by grappling with the constraints of a square frame, and cropping a square out of a rectangular image is not unlike going over a piece of writing and cutting out the superfluous verbiage.

Out of about 300 candidate image files I have now made about 60 squares, of which I'd say 40 are top quality, by my standards at any rate, and the remainder are B+ images, perfectly good enough to be used as linking and scene-setting images in yet another Blurb book sequence, which is where all this is inevitably heading. I think a 20% hit-rate is about right, and there's probably nothing more in there to be extracted, especially given the inevitable repetition of working such a small area over many years.

Here are a few of them, in no particular order. They're not spectacular, in landscape porn terms, but true to the patchwork spirit of the place, and it's undeniable that the clouds up there are often quite something. The fun part of finding the pictures is pretty much completed now, and the hard work of polishing and sequencing has yet to begin.

In case you can't read it at this size and reduced quality, the engraved stone in the first picture reads "THIS LAND WAS RAVAGED BY G. Malone, J. MacGregor, R. Key, J. Major, D. Keep, C. Parkinson, C.Patten, M. Thatcher, C. Chope". Some of those names will be very familiar to Brits who were politically-aware in the 1980s and 90s. I've no idea who erected the stone there, at the very edge of Twyford Down overlooking the motorway – it's very nicely done, and reminiscent of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay at his garden at Little Sparta – but it has since fallen over (or more likely been pushed over) and broken into several pieces. So it goes... But should anyone propose any further encroachment onto this land I'll be dusting off my protesting hat and signing up with the Dongas Tribe.