Barrowden is in the little county of Rutland, East Midlands. Its name means, predictably, burial-ground hill. Click here to see an Ordnance Survey map of the place. It is on the north slope of the Welland Valley west of Stamford. Actually I was only doing an errand in Stamford, but decided to check out where a couple of folk club venues were. One of these is in Barrowden. Thinking this place would be picturesque, I took the camera, but by the time I got there, the light was failing, so as you will see, I didn't get the usual village green and duckpond pictures. A couple of places visible from the bottom of the green caught my attention:
Below: Harringworth viaduct...
We are just seeing the top edge of a railway viaduct built in 1878, three quarters of a mile long, 57 feet high and comprising of 82 arches. It carries the old LNW line between Rugby and Peterborough. It can still carry trains, but guess what, was closed commercially in the Beeching cuts in 1966.
Also, below, what are these?
The structures above are iron-ore calcining kilns, which were built by German prisoners of war during World War I. They processed iron ore from the nearby Wakerley Quarry, owned by the Partington Steel and Iron Company of Warrington, Lancashire, which supplied the Corby steelworks, which themselves were closed, along with the mine, in the late 1970s. There isn't smoke coming out the top, they are trees...
Right, local history lesson over, back to the photography. I am supposed to say now that I took these photos on a Canon Power Shot A620 digital, and that the settings I used were...... that I set it to Auto, pressed the shutter and fired. I did find though that it made a tremendous difference to the picture whether I angled the camera at the sun, above it or below it to get different light effects. All the pictures on these pages were taken within minutes of each other.