Desolate Landscape

Last weekend my friends and I went on a short hike near a small town called Trefil, not far from Ebbw Vale. The weather was not as good as the day before, see below for evidence, as it was horrendously overcast. It even threatened to rain a few times, which is not a nice feeling when you have an expensive digital camera in you hands! Luckily it decided in the end that rain was a bad Idea and it did brighten up a bit.
The walk itself was very interesting; the landscape is completely different to my local mountains, completely desolate in places, lots of large rocks about the place and seems to be littered with small piles of rocks and massive craters. We’re not sure weather these craters we created naturally, from bombing during WWII, collapsing mine shafts or from blasting at the local quarry. Either way they were very interesting and absolutely huge as you can see from the picture below, I asked my brother and Adam to scramble down into the bottom of this one to give the shot a nice reference point.




We also chanced upon the chartist caves, which were used by the Chartists from Tredegar, a local town, had made and stored weapons before they marched on Newport. The caves themselves were very interesting and pretty deep, I tried to take a few long exposures inside the caves themselves but the didn’t come out very well due to the high dynamic range that was present from the sunlight hitting the outside to the darkness of the recesses.




We also had a chance meeting with some wild horses, not something I expected to see on top of a mountain. We walked passed them as they were grazing but a little later while photographing a cairn the two horses started to run about all over the place, I managed to get a few shots, the one below was the best of the bunch.




Here is a link to the rest of the shots on my website.