Actually I do, I'll start with the weather, it was rubbish. That's that covered. Let's talk about what happened at Stanton Moor.
Firstly; we got lost, not once, but twice! We parked in the wrong place and ended up on private land. It was my fault, I didn't follow Jame's book and tried a shortcut from Google Maps. When that didn't work we got back into the car and tried another lay-by. That also turned out to be a bad spot and only resulted in us wasting more time walking through nettles and prickly bushes. We lost about 40 minutes in the woodland and by the time we got to the correct lay-by the sun had already started to set.
The viewpoint we were interested in at Stanton Moor was a place called Nine Ladies stone circle. It's a Bronze Age stone circle that has special meaning to Pagans. To get there from the correct lay-by meant walking through a field of cows, that's not a problem for me, but I can't say the same for Tracy as she is pretty scared of them. She plucked up the courage and went for it. We were fine. We walked for another 10 minutes or so (it was getting dark now) and eventually found the stone circle, we weren't alone.
There were two men already there, one was sat down about 15 meters or so away, he looked like he had a hood on but wasn't particularly doing anything. The other chap however had what can only be described as a staff in his hands. I didn't have the guts to take a picture of him on my DSLR but my little Sony Action Cam (video) was already on. This is the only still image I got of him:
Hopefully you can make out that it's not just some tree branch in his hand, the top of it was some kind of milky smooth colour plastic or imitation ivory fork. He circled around the stones a number of times at pace and then just stood at one for a minute. He then walked off never to be seen again. There were also little piles of white ash at the foot of each of the stones:
The other hooded chap was still sat down watching us, it was un-nerving and put us on edge. We decided to just take a quick snapshot and leave. The photo is absolutely terrible, it certainly didn't help that the light had faded into darkness so a long exposure with a higher than usual ISO was all we could manage. I feel like all I am capturing at the moment is black and white boring landscapes, the photo from this location though is all about the story. We got back through the field of 'evil cows' and left for home. A disappointing evening from a photography point of view but at least we came away with an interesting anecdote. The weather forecast for tomorrow looks good, fingers crossed! This is definitely a location to reshoot if we stay ahead of schedule. We will return!
