
After sitting in a car for two hours (as a passenger – I don’t drive), wandering around a tiny place called Pleasley for four hours and then sitting for another two hours journey back home again, this was the result.
I’m not quite as mad as I sound, the trip was already planned for another reason. My husband was playing an Oxfordshire v Northamptonshire match in Pleasley and, since it was forecast to be a nice day, I just tagged along with the camera. I looked up the area online for a day or so before and found that Pleasley has a disused colliery. Parts of it have been restored, the large wheels for example, but I set myself the challenge of taking a pretty photo of an old industrial building.
I took a few photos of different parts of the buildings at strange angles, and a few out of focus shots using the trees to focus. I then wandered around the lake and sat on a bench watching the joggers going past in their gaudy colours and a couple of dogs chasing sticks into the water.
The joggers disappeared behind me, and the dogs stopped splashing and headed out through the gate in the distance. As I sat eating my picnic lunch, the lake grew calm again and this picture materialised before me.
I’m grateful to the person who first found the view and put a bench there for other’s to see it too.