For the final image in this mini series of Picture of the Day I’m leaving you with a place that’s much nearer to home than most of the others I’ve included. The remains of the building in the foreground will give at least some of you a big clue because there are still plenty of these around, and are the remains of a once thriving industry in this part of the world.

To give you all a fighting chance of getting on the final score sheet I’ll give you 1 point for naming the county, 2 points for naming the once thriving industry and 3 points for the rough location of this scene.

Location – Cornwall, The Tin Industry, Towanroath Shaft near St Agnes on the North Cornish Coast

Date photograph taken – Feb 2019

POSTED – OCTOBER 2024

Scanned from a transparency I took back in 1979, this picture  should be fairly easy to identify as the location has become very popular with holidaymakers and honeymooners.

This island is part of an archipelago in a very agreeable part of Europe where the amount of sunshine is concerned, but it also sits on an unstable part of the continent as well.

Originally, the island was circular until a massive volcanic eruption hundreds of thousands of years ago emptied its magma chamber, forcing the centre of the island to collapse and leave a water-filled caldera behind.

Around 1600 BC, another huge volcanic eruption seriously affected an advanced civilization in this part of the Mediterranean giving rise to theories about it being the site of the supposed lost city of Atlantis. While these claims may well be fanciful, this eruption was one of the largest in recorded history and left the circular island as an arc where two channels give access to the caldera with an active volcanic island in the centre.

The island’s volcanic soil is surprisingly fertile and has given it a prosperous wine industry, not that you’ll see much of it on foreign supermarket shelves, but for people who come here to soak up the sun and lie on the beach, the colour of the sand depends on the nature of the exposed layer of soil and can be either white, red or black.

For 1 point I would like to know the name of the archipelago; I’ll give you 2 points for the name of the island, and 3 points for its capital that sits at the top of the cliff in the picture.

Location – Greece, The Cyclades, Santorini, The Old Santorini Port looking up to the capital Fira

Date photograph taken – Sept 1979

POSTED – SEPTEMBER 2024

Today’s picture should be easier than the last one for most of you, especially if you’re English. If you look closely, you should be able to make out a river that runs through a valley (or a dale as it’s called in this case) and under a viaduct.

This viaduct was built to carry a railway line over the river, but after it was closed down became a popular walking trail, of which there are many in this National Park.

There are two distinct parts to this National Park: Generally speaking, the harsher moorland landscape lies to the north, and a softer landscape of limestone valleys lies to the south.

You can have 1 point for guessing the name of the National Park, 2 points for naming the part of the National Park that this dale is in, and 3 points for the exact location.

Location – England, Peak District National Park, The White Peak (Derbyshire), Monsal Dale

Date photograph taken – June 2012

POSTED – SEPTEMBER 2024

Rightly or wrongly, every now and again I’m going to throw in a pic that most of you will find hard to guess. There are two reasons for this: The first, is that these images are unlikely to feature in any of my blogs, and the second, is that it may just encourage some of you to want to visit somewhere which is off the beaten track.

Only people in my part of England will have any chance of knowing where this is, and even then, I doubt very much whether too many people know it – and that’s the point. With so many places getting overrun with tourists, it has to be worth finding somewhere that isn’t, and it can benefit the local community as well – especially if it has a pub like this village has – the name of which is connected to the last castle to be built in England.

This castle was built by the owner of Home and Colonial, a business that operated before supermarkets had a stranglehold over the main food retailing business in the UK. You can always google this sort of information if you like, but the castle isn’t as close to the village as you might think, although both are in the same county where I live.

Now you know where this location is, I trust you won’t tell anybody.

Location – Broadhembury, East Devon, England

Date photograph taken –  March 2013

POSTED – AUGUST 2024

In my previous Picture of the Day post the picture didn’t appear in WordPress Reader, which sort of defeats the object really for those of you who just use that way of viewing it, but for those of you who go directly to my website, I’ve added a new tab at the top of my Homepage called Picture of the Day which will also enable you to check out any ones that you’ve missed.

There are no prizes for guessing where this picture was taken, but even so, I thought it might interest some of you regardless. This was taken at a time when transparencies were my preferred form of photography, and scanning these images for the digital world is a balance between quality and cost as anybody who has faced this dilemma will be only too familiar with. It goes without saying therefore that the quality isn’t of the highest standard.

As regards the location, I’m still not sure what possessed me to visit the Soviet Union when the weather was freezing and relations with the West were even colder. It must be my inquisitive nature I suppose. I won’t bore you with the details now, but maybe I’ll do a post about it at some point – let’s just say it was an experience I won’t forget.

Location – Red Square, Moscow, USSR

Date photograph taken –  Jan 1979

POSTED – AUGUST 2024

Some of you will know that I have a passion for bridges, and I reckon that the one in today’s picture is a beauty. Not only is it practical, it also blends into the environment perfectly. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it even adds to the already beautiful scenery.

Before it was built in 1984, cattle had to swim across the loch but people were transported across on a small free ferry. Later, ferries were introduced that were capable of carrying motor transport making their way to the far north-west of the country, which really wasn’t that much further away.

The name of the bridge and nearby village probably gets its name from a combination of Gaelic and Old Norse words and is located in a Global Geopark where the landscape is a geologist’s dream.

Location – Kylesku, Highland, Scotland

Date photograph taken – Sept 2009

POSTED – AUGUST 2024