Scott's Pit

On the road where I grew up there was a magnificent, tall stone building.  We called it the Ivy Tower as it was covered in, erm, ivy.  As boys, we used to ignore all the warnings and climb up it.  Only the very bravest made it to the crumbling top.  I wasn’t one of them.

The tower once housed a pump used to extract water from the mine workings below.  But the mine (Scott’s Pit) proved too tricky to work, and being unprofitable shut down.  The nearby tunnels were capped off and the pump house left to ruin.

Thankfully it was never demolished and was in fact renovated to a degree around 30 years ago.  It now remains as one of only three such structures in the World, the others being in Cornwall where they were used in tin mining.  The old workings at Scott’s Pit are still visible as are the now grassed over spoil heaps.

So, early one very frosty morning last week with the weather set fair, I drove the five minutes or so from my home (I never did move far away) to the “tower” to make this image. I prefer dawn light to sunset; the light is usually much softer and the colours gentler on the eye.  I took my back-up camera, a Fujifilm X-T20 with its kit lens.

Unfortunately there was little interest in the sky, it being a cloudless morning.  But my patience was rewarded with the dawn sunlight striking the tower's chimney, sending the copper coloured brickwork glowing like gold.

Fujifilm X-T20, Fujinon 18-55 f2.8-4.0, at 18mm
1/13th of a second at f11, ISO 100
tripod, remote shutter release

I also managed to get quite a nice aerial shot with my drone.

DJi Mavic Pro
1/40th of a second at f2.2, ISO 100

As always, thank you for looking and I really hope you like the images.