Through the Mist and the Memories - a photo on Flickriver

            We used to come here when we were kids.  That halcyon era of long gone summer holidays before our grandmother sold the cottage she’d inherited at the edge of the moor.  So many wonderful memories of clambering over rocks, racing across fields and falling headlong into ice cold rivers that coursed, eddied and bubbled down from the high ground towards the towns and coast beyond.  Memories of us cowering behind the protective figure of our dear old Grandad with his gentle Cork brogue, shooing away the herd of bullocks that stood and stared, gazing without expression and barring our path to wherever we were going as they nearly always did.  Now I'm a Grandad myself. Towards the end of that era, around the beginning of the eighties, by which time I was a sullen teenager, we came to this place a few miles from the cottage.  Brat Tor. Or Widgery Cross as we knew it.  Beyond the car park lay a broad area, thick with rusting bracken, that led down a steep slope to the water where we set up camp, broke out the picnic basket and swam in the deep pool with the natural diving platform next to the waterfall.  Then, when I was sixteen, the cottage was sold and those holidays became part of life’s hinterland.  I’m not sure we really ever got over it.  Holidays were never quite the same afterwards.

It was the last location we visited on our day trip to Dartmoor.  The west facing Great Staple Tor had been the favourite for the final act throughout much of the day, its proximity to our earlier stopping off point making it the obvious choice.  But then again, we’d shot it a couple of times before.  Shouldn’t we try one of Dartmoor’s many other beauty spots, we asked ourselves?  For Dave and myself, Brat Tor would be a trip along those hinterland childhood memories.  A time when we were little more than brats ourselves for that matter.  But this time we weren’t with our parents and our sister.  Instead, we had chattering Lee - Lee with a Leica.  He should start a YouTube channel with a title like that.  And I should charge him royalties for coming up with it. 

I couldn’t even remember exactly where it was until we passed through the gate and parked the car on the grassy green space late on the Sunday afternoon.  As I looked upon the scene for the first time in more than forty years, I recognised the world in front of me - remembered where the river was, and felt the familiarity of the cross on top of the tor.  A tor I never walked to the summit of back then.  I think Dad might have done, but us kids were always entranced by the water and the rocks.  Could we skip across without slipping and spending the rest of the day with one soaking wet foot?  It was only ever one foot that went in. Sometimes we made it, while in other moments we’d feel the cold river seeping into our socks.  No point in walking all the way to the top then, but today, a warm September afternoon all these years later, that cross beckoned.  Besides which, we needed altitude to get a clean shot of the view to the west.  The view towards Bodmin Moor and our homes somewhere beyond that, an envelope of burnt orange light between the darkening shadows of the sky and the land.

We didn’t have to go all the way up to that cross.  We just needed enough height to clear the trees and scrub that clashed with those views, and in order to do so we needed to troop at least as far as its lower slopes before the scene opened up behind us.  And that involved marching through those swathes of fading bracken, down to the water and hopping over the rocks again - no soggy feet this time - before climbing up through the browns and greens on the opposite side.  Eventually, maybe twenty minutes after leaving the car, the slope began to steepen, and I turned around to survey the panorama beneath a brooding western sky.  And I thought I’d better take a few shots now - just in case the light disappeared in the final breathless struggle towards the top.

And a good job I did too, because by the time we sat on a huge slab of granite just beneath the cross, all of the orange had gone, replaced by a thickening fog that advanced with the silent stealth of a ghost and wrapped us in secretive grey swirls that took the landscape away, reducing our world to the few yards beyond the the summit.  We waited a while, in case a gap appeared in the sky, but none was forthcoming, and just like those distant days of childhood, everything so quickly became just memories.

Taken in: UK / England / West Devon District / Lydford (show map)

Taken on: September 10, 2023

Tags:

Dartmoor

Devon

Widgery

Cross widgery cross brat tor Sunset orange sky Cloud clouds moody mood glow Cornwall UK Great

Britain Britain Canon silhouette horizon vista landscape landscape

photography

panoramic

panorama

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Moor

moorland

wilderness

Lydford « less

Sets appears in: • Devon • Dartmoor

Groups appears in: • Amateurs • Devon & Cornwall more » • South West England • Photography Week • On Landscape • Flickr Social • Brain Vision. Art. « less

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, f/11.0, 1/50 sec, 113mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
Lens:	EF70-200mm f/4L USM
Aperture:	f/11.0
Exposure Time:	0.02 sec (1/50)
Focal Length:	113mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Manual
Exposure Mode:	Manual
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 12.5 (Windows)
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