Sometimes I think we should have chosen a different name for 73in73, today I would have gladly renamed the whole project; "Getting lost in the Peak District". There is a photo in James Grant's book - Peak District Through the Lens that I love, it's location number 47, Lathkill Dale. The specific photo is viewpoint number 4, Parson's Tor. We decided that we would try and shoot this one at sunrise, it was a short drive but a bit of a walk and meant another 4 a.m. alarm.
Neither of us had ever been to Lathkill Dale before and that was a bit of a problem in of its self. You see, Tracy and I don't have the best sense of direction in the first place, this issue is somewhat multiplied when it's almost pitch black dark outside and all you have is a torch. We followed the directions in the book and also the maps/signposts at the Dale its self. We soon found ourselves at the entrance to a farm, had we taken a wrong turn? We weren't sure, there was a signpost that pointed back to the way we came that said "Lakthhill Dale" on it and nowhere could we see a public footpath or access sign that went through the farm, we must have gone wrong somewhere... we turned around and doubled back.
I know I have mentioned it a few times now, but Tracy is genuinely scared of cows, even more so when there are calves around. The field that we had already walked through was now filled with cows... with calves. Tracy was hesitant and so was I. What choice did we have though? It was the only way we knew led back to the first path. We waited around for a few minutes but the cows weren't moving for anyone. We walked cautiously between them and got back to the path.
The weather was nice but there had been rain over night, our feet were absolutely soaking wet. We had wasted about 45 minutes getting lost and now the sun was just about risen. We decided to try one more 'path', that turned out to be a dead end. I have to admit, neither of us were in a good mood, we were both tired, wet and lost. We set the camera up on the path and took a couple of shots of a tree, wall and gate. We placed grace on one of the posts and instead of a landscape photo we took a Gracescape photo:
I will have to have another go at editing the image, I'm not happy with the post-processing but the image we took wasn't great to start with. What's that saying about polishing something? Yeah, well, that comes to mind. To be honest, the shot we took the first time (before we got lost again) is probably better even though there isn't any foreground interest, the sky looks pretty cool:
We packed up our things and started to walk back to the car, guess what we had to go through? Yep, more cows! These ones must have been let into the first field we went through by the farmer because there was definitely no cows there on the way. Tracy grabbed my arm and held on tightly as we carefully walked between them. We checked the map at the entrance to the dale and followed the path with our fingers, low and behold, the path we were on originally was the correct one, we should have gone through the farm! We soon got back to the car, it hadn't been a great start to the day. As we drove home we saw a red hot-air balloon, we stopped the car and took a quick shot of it:
