Last week I met up with Photography Days Out crew over at Ladybower Reservoir, for a walk to Alport Castles. I’d asked for this route to be pencilled in, as we’d last done it as a group back in 2008, and for the first few hours just got utterly drenched, so our time at the castles was spent huddled under a rock sheltering from the rain for lunch, and the cameras didn’t come out till much later. A few pictures from that day can be found over on Flickr. Hopefully this time we were going to get better weather.

Fortunately the rain was limited to a heavy hailstorm whilst we could still shelter with a coffee at Fairholmes car park, and a brief shower 10 minutes later. Thankfully the light was also soon much better than the flat grey we were pretty much treated to for the whole of the Wolfscote Dale walk last month.

We headed north following the road alongside the reservoirs till we got to Ditch Clough, then headed up the hill back towards Alport Castles. Up top we were greeted with grand vistas across the top of Derwent Valley, and a strong head wind.

Turning around to see the route you’d walked gave one of my personal favourites of the day (above), and also a chance to catch your breath.

At over half a mile long, Alport Castles is the largest landslip in the UK, and makes for a hugely impressive sight, even on a repeat visit, and definitely worth the effort of the walk to seek it out. The wind was even stronger here, which made standing, never mind trying to take a sharp photo a challenge (shooting 17mm @ 1/200th and had to junk blurred shots), so we headed into the landslip area to get shots of the tower, and to grab some well earned lunch whilst sheltered from the wind.

Tech
All taken with Canon EOS 6D with Canon EF 17-40mm F/4L USM + Lee 0.6 Hard Grad & minor post processing in Lightroom 5