Cave Dwelling - A rather wet revisit to Dinorwic

With the advent of Covid 19, travel has very much been restricted, and with it the photography options that come with travelling for imagery. Unusually for me to date (September 2020) I still haven’t been to the Lake District this year, although I’m looking to get up there really soon.

On the spare of the moment I decided to have a few days up in Snowdonia to revisit Dinorwic Quarry, and also to scout out some new locations, one great thing about Dinorwic is that it really does suit cloudy and wet weather, so if the dreaded rain should roll in you can still achieve some great images up there, well, at least sometimes you can, I got a lot more than I bargained for on the first day….

I had a couple of things I wanted to achieve on this visit, to a couple of caves that I had never visited before in the quarry, and also to get some shots with the drone I now own, now I am reasonably proficient with using it.. After checking the weather (which looked cloudy but dry) with big camera bag in tow, plus tripod, and the drone in it’s box, I set off towards the quarry once more. The caves are located to the rear of a gorgeous (and oddly coloured) pool called Dali’s Hole, upon arriving the pool was at a very high level on this visit due to the amount of rainfall that has occurred lately and the colour of it was incredible, a stark contrast to the dull hues of the slate quarry all around, only broken up by patches of colourful heather on the sides. I decided to set up for the first shot of the day, no sooner had I got set up it started to rain, not a lot at first, but enough to make it pointless shooting, so I figured I’d go to the caves and just wait for it to blow over….

Dali’s Hole

I love exploring new places, and this location certainly has a ‘forgotten lost world’ feeling to it, here’s a few shots from inside the caves, the rain made for a great waterfall halfway in:

Home, for a few hours….

Slate cave and old pipe fitting

Inbetween Caves, and the waterfall

The Quarrymen of old

When I came to leave it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to go out as the route was precarious in places and the rain was now coming down sideways, coupled with a very strong wind and the fact I’d only have one hand free to grip onto rocks I decided to wait it out in the cave for a couple of hours as the forecast was saying it would clear then. I set about getting more detailed shots and lighting the inside of the cave with a panel light I carry. A few hours passed, if anything it had just got worse, I checked the weather again and it had now changed to being the same all day! not wanting to spend a full day in a cave I just headed out into it and got completely soaked, taking my time I eventually got back to the car absolutely soaking wet.

Photography wise, the rest of the day was a write off, so an afternoon was spent ‘planning’ with a few Pints and a (really superb) Curry later on. - if you like Indian food then try Spice of Llanberis if you are in town! I’ve been 3 times now and has been great every time - https://spiceofllanberis.com/

The following morning, there was an exceptional sunrise over Lyn Padarn, and I got to explore more of the quarry that I hadn’t visited before, including using the drone, I think I’ve probably done about 90% of it now, but no doubt there are many features that I will still find on upcoming visits.

A selection of images from the trip:

‘The Caban’ and other quarry buildings

Levels

Dinorwic wild goat

Heather & Rust

A splash of nature

Sunrise over Lyn Padarn and Dinorwic

I’m going to try and get a map of the place together, this might take a while so bear with me, it really is an enourmous place, but with care can be visited without a map, exploring it is all part of the fun, very much a sense of discovery in many ways.

Abandoned 1984 Winter Olympics Bobsleigh track, Sarajevo, Bosnia

In 2015 myself and a mate of mine traveled to Slovenia to watch England play Slovenia in an international football match (well he did, I was there for the travel mainly), to make things more interesting we flew to Split in Croatia, and from there made our way into Bosnia, before heading from there to Zagreb and across to Ljubljana. Part of the trip was one place I was really looking forward to visiting, Sarajevo. A city that has seen so much bloodshed, destruction, and unbelievable atrocity as recently as 1996, when the siege finally ended.

Sarajevo is a great city, steeped in history and a real mix of cultures, making for a great visit. While we were there we learned that the sites of the 1984 Winter Olympics were still in place and had been left abandoned on Trebević mountain overlooking the city, this for me was something that really flicked my switch and simply had to go and see before we left, so the next day we set off to try and get there.

Numerous taxi’s point blank refused to take us there, we didn’t know why… eventually we found one guy who agreed and we set off, half way up into the mountains he stopped and removed the ‘taxi’ sign off the roof, saying “no taxis here” or words to that effect, he eventually dropped us off in a small empty car park, overlooked by what appeared to be a completely burnt out hotel complex, we paid him, and before he made his rather swift exit, he pointed us toward a small road heading into the forest.

The weather was great, we were high up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, and there wasn’t another soul around, as we walked down the track signs started to appear on trees, we couldn’t read any of them, they appeared to be warnings and we just presumed they were to do with forest fires… shortly afterwards we saw the Olympic rings painted onto the road and looking up we could see the first curve of the abandoned bobsleigh track above us.

First sight of the track

Climbing up onto it wasn’t hard and were soon exploring away, we walked to the very top where the old viewing stands were still in place, albeit covered in moss and trees, from there we made our way down the 30 year old concrete track, along the way there were strange ‘holes’ in the high walls of the track, obviously man made but for what purpose we didn’t know, (we would find out a day later)

Overgrown track walls

At this point I must stress that we really had not researched this outing and it was a pretty much spur of the moment decision to do the night before, looking back it was incredibly stupid given what had happened here.. as we neared the bottom of the track we realised that we were still really high into the mountains, the city just a distant feature a good way away, we somehow thought the track would just lead us right back to the city… at the bottom of the track there was the finish line bridge with all the old lettering on it, we took turns at climbing up onto it, again amazed that there was nobody around… amazed that was until we walked just a little further on to the physical end to the track, where we found a concrete pill box and absolutely loads of yellow tape everywhere with the wording ‘POZOR / MINES’, yes, we were in the middle of an uncleared minefield, the Serbs had land mined the area before they left .

Mine warnings

As you can imagine this revelation put a different stint on the visit, we were still miles out of the City and no concrete track to take us to our destination, instead there was just an old vehicle track heading downwards with bombed out houses either side, all riddled with bullet holes.. as far as I could see it there were 2 options, walk back up the track and somehow try to call another taxi (if there was signal and we could somehow find a number) or we just cracked on and walked down the vehicle track, walking in where vehicles had been and not in the grassy central area. We chose the latter option as there was certainly no guarantee anyone would come for us given the reluctance of most drivers to actually take us up there in the first place. As we made our way down I was taking pictures of the buildings in a real war torn state, there were some great images to be had but there was no way we could even consider leaving the track we were on so everything had to be shot from a distance, my mate seemed quite amazed I wanted to still take photographs, my reasoning being that if we got blown up it wouldn’t matter anyway, and if we got out OK then I would have the images.

To cut a long story a little shorter after an hour or more we eventually came into a better stretch of road and shortly afterwards some inhabited houses which was a great relief, a guy washing his carpets in the street spoke to us and after realising we were English was really friendly and offered us a drink, we thanked him but we just wanted to get out of there and pressed onward to the city.

Heading back down to the City

Eating our lunch of Kofta kebabs in the city a while later was a great moment and a time to reflect on something that could easily have gone a different way, I think we both learned a lot that day. We later found out that the holes in the walls of the track were made by snipers, used to pick off unsuspecting members of the public, trapped by the siege, just horrific.

Locals look on at the war torn buildings

Travelling light, all images from this trip were shot handheld on the mirror-less Fuji X100S with wide angle adaptor, and LEE 100 x 150 mm filters.

A set of images from the trip can be seen in the gallery on the right hand side of the blog page.