A Brief Tour Of Rivington Terraced Gardens At Sunset
I took a wander through Rivington Terraced Gardens on Wednesday evening after work. The weather was pleasant and I was hoping to catch a nice sunset at the top.
I parked at the end of the main drive that leads to the hall and barn, then set off through the woods. There are a good number of different routes running through the woods and I'm not entirely sure I've explored all of them, but as I'd only arrived on site at 17:00 and sunset was due around 18:30, I took one of the more direct ones I know in the hope I could make it to the top in time. It's only a mile or so from where I parked to the top, but it's steep and I'm struggling with a lot of leg cramp and shin splints at the moment, so I had to take my time.
I didn't fancy lugging the GFX kit up there (the body isn't heavy, but those lenses soon add up) and I think the little X-T50 isn't at its best in dark woodlands, so the Z8 was the camera of choice on this trip along with the Nikon 24-70 f/2.8S. I brought my usual filter kit along too, but never ended up using it. All images taken hand held and processed from single raw files in Capture One Pro 23.
Note, the thumbnails for these images look quite dark against the bright white background of this website with its default theme (#ffffff !!!), so they're best viewed full screen (or as close as possible) where you should be able to see plenty of shadow detail on a well calibrated monitor.
The Only Way is Up
Here, I'm stood at the bottom of Lever's Bridge looking up towards one of the summer houses. I've taken a number of shots from this spot over the years, sometimes including all of the archway, but that tends to lose the summer house in the image, so I chose to frame this a bit tighter, which I think works better. It's also a bit tricky centring the summer house in the archway without ending up with the steps looking a bit wonky, but I think I've done a reasonable job here.
Across The Bridge
This is the view looking back across Lever's Bridge towards the archway in the previous shot.
Up The Steps
Here I'm continuing up the steps towards the summer house. Well, technically, I've stepped off the side of them and onto the leaf covered grass to get this specific angle on the steps.
When these structures were originally built near the beginning of the 20th century, this was all part of Lord Leverhulme's private estate and the summer houses didn't need to have various iron bars across the windows entrances to keep miscreants out. Unfortunately, without such measures in place these days, you get people starting fires inside of them, using them as toilets or worse.
View From A Summer Place
This is looking back down from the roof of the summer house towards the arch at the foot of the bridge.
Sunset At The Italian Lake
There are two lakes in the gardens, the Japanese lake, which is South of here and the Italian Lake, which is just down the slope in front of me here. For some reason, possibly maintenance, cleaning or even a leak, the Italian lake is largely empty at the moment, so it's not particularly photogenic when viewed in full, so you can only see a little bit of it, that does contain water, near the bottom centre of the frame.
The point I'm standing at is above a water feature that feeds down to the lake. This was also pretty dry, probably because we've not had the usual helping of torrential rain for the past couple of weeks, so the supply from moors has fallen to a trickle. When I took this, I couldn't really see what I was doing as most of the image was black in the viewfinder, I was also a little constrained by my location (no scope to move further back) and the 24mm lens being the widest option I had with me. If not for all of those things, I'd have liked to include a little more of the jagged edge of the path at the bottom of the frame.
I didn't have much hope for this image when I shot it, or when I first looked at it in C1P as the foreground was really dark, but when I started adding elliptical layers around various areas and lifting both the shadows and blacks (typically with separate layers to diffuse the effect and hide the edges better) I really started to like the way it looked, tonally at least, so much so that I wish I'd spent a bit more time composing it.
Water Feature - May Not Include Water
This is the water feature mentioned in the previous shot. In fact, the previous shot was taken a little to the left of where this shot was, with the jagged edge of the path being the lower bounds of what would be a little pool if there was any significant amount of water in it. I'm not sure if the stone pedestal was once home to a statue or something, I suspect it was, but I've been unable to find a name for this particular feature of the gardens, so it's difficult to look up more information about it.
Tower At The Top
Eventually, I made it to the top of Rivington, with a couple of minutes to spare before sunset, which was handy, because the Irish Sea Permafog™ was about to do its evil deeds and suck the life out of the scene as the sun sank beneath it.
Still, for the few minutes before it hit the fog bank, there was some nice colour to enjoy and I hastily ran around at the top of the hill trying to find interesting compositions between the tower and disappearing sun. This was an obvious one, stood on the road* behind the tower and looking up at it. Fortunately, I left enough space to perspective correct it a little.
* I have no idea how you get a vehicle onto this road, but you occasionally see large dual cab UTEs up there, you'd probably need something like that if you didn't want your car to be shaken to bits by the extra rough cobbles**.
** I did once try going up what I suspect is the start of this road in my X3, but turned back after just a few yards of being violently rattled by the cobbles. Clearly the X3 isn't man enough for the job.
I Believe That Tower is Looking At Me
On the far side of the cobbled road is, what looks like, an abandoned sand quarry, the land surrounding the diggings in there is generally raised relative to the foot of the tower by something in the region of 10-20ft, so I scrambled up onto the top of one of the higher mounds and zoomed up for this shot in an attempt to be more square on. There are a small pair of arrow slit styled windows near the top of the tower, with another pair on the opposite side. As I was relatively square on when taking this, I could see straight through to the windows on the far side, giving those on this side the impression of glowing eyes.
One Last Look at the Tower
Back down to ground level and looking up (with a touch of perspective correction to reduce the converging verticals). The tower, known locally as The Pigeon Tower, was commissioned and built by Lord Leverhulme as a birthday gift for his with Elizabeth. Inside, there are four floors, accessed by a spiral stone staircase, with the top floor furnished with a stove for heating (the boxed extrusion for the chimney forming the nose in the previous image) and originally kitted out with musical instruments and sewing equipment for his wife's entertainment. Usually it's locked, but occasionally they open it up to visitors to take a look around the inside. It's quite interesting, but that staircase clearly wasn't built for a 6ft man and I can't say I'd fancy going up or down it by candle light.
Dark Paths
Speaking of which, it was getting pretty dark by the time I'd made my way back through the woods to the bottom of the hill. Here, I'm still about half a mile away from the hall and barn, making my way down dark, treelined paths and without a torch too as I'd left my head torch in the camera bag I'd used for my moorland hike last week. That path is not short on trip hazards either, but I made it back in one piece. Result.
