The gate on Cinderhill, St Briavels: the photograph I kept taking

There is a wooden field gate on Cinderhill, where the lane drops out of St Briavels towards the Wye. The ground falls away on the other side of it, first a rough sheep field, then woods, then the whole valley at once: the river somewhere down in the trees, the far bank stacked up in ridges, and the weather moving through all of it.

About ten years ago I photographed that gate over and over, from the same place, through an autumn and a winter. Nobody asked me to and I did not plan it.

The same gate, over and over

At the time I was driving to a second job, having just got myself out of a chapter of my life that needed getting out of. The commute went down that lane at about seven in the morning, and every morning the gate was there, and every morning the view on the other side of it was doing something new.

Some days I had time to pull over and take a photograph. Some days I only had time to look. Some days there was no time at all, and the view went past the window like a postcard somebody was taking away again.

Grey morning, mist down the middle of the valley, one larch on fire.

The photographs were not good photographs, by which I mean I was not trying to make good photographs. They were more like taking a pulse. Same gate, same fence post, same bend of hillside, and then everything else different: mist lying along the river like a dropped scarf, or the whole valley the colour of rust, or frost on the top bar and the far ridge catching the first orange light of the day.

What the photographs were for

Every time I took the photo, the view looked different. The world was going to keep changing around me. And if I stayed in the pit of despair, it would just carry on, and I would be missing out.

That took months to arrive, in pieces, at seven in the morning. It did not fix anything by itself. But the photographs made it hard to argue with: the mist burns off, the leaves turn, the frost comes and goes.

The same gate at the other end of a day.

I still look back through them. The gate has not moved. I have.

Frost on the top bar, first light over the far ridge. The morning worth being early for.

Cinders under the grass

The name is older and stranger than the gate. Cinder is the old word for iron slag, and Cinderhill is a name you find wherever medieval forges left their waste in heaps big enough to name the ground after. St Briavels was iron country: in the thirteenth century the castle up in the village ran a works that made crossbow bolts for the crown, tens of thousands of them, and the woods and hearths of this parish fed it.

So the hill under that gate is partly made of old furnace waste, with seven hundred years of grass grown over it. I did not know any of that when I was stopping there.

Ten years on

whimsee started in three places, and this gate is one of them. The others are near St Arvans, further down the valley, where I grew up. All three are views I kept going back to.

The little app we now build does, more or less, what that gate did for me. It gives you a reason to go and stand somewhere real, and it keeps what you find there.

What was yours?

Most people have one: a view, a tree, a bench, a gap in a hedge somewhere. The first glimmer, before you had a word for it.

If you can, go back to it this week. Take the photograph, even if the light is wrong. The view will be different next time.

A note on this one

The photographs are mine, taken with an ordinary phone on ordinary mornings between November 2016 and January 2017. The iron under the hill is checked against the sources at the foot of the page. The gate is still there.