Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard: HOLME FELL: a sample of landscapes, Number Five (an odd one out)

I have been posting excerpts (poems and photographs) from my next collaborative book, Holme Fell: a Sample of Landscapes, developing descriptions of the book as I go. Here, for example, is the most recent post, which features a prose passage from the work: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard: HOLME FELL: A Sample of Landscapes Number Four. 

This post, for variety, is somewhat different. I do not quote from the book; I only show the photographs via the book cover, for, yes, we are near to the stage of revealing publication and the publisher.

 

My work as a poet was to comment (if that’s the right word, it’s not) on Trev Eales’ photographs of the Lake District. But I had not visited the area depicted. This was not a problem: I keep the artifice and artistry of photography to the fore in all of my responses (yes, that is the right word). Not going there might be thought as advantageous to the concept and process. But in late April we decided to visit the location. I described it in my diary and what follows is a very lightly edited version of the diary. To repeat, this prose DOES NOT appear in the book. There are a number of posts which do, and you may access them from here: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One, a hub post as I call it.

 

To Holme Fell and Hodge Close in it: Diary: Monday the 27^th April 2026

 A grey morning, I set off, towards Ulverston (for the third time in my life) on the train, to meet Trev [Eales]. The weather cleared up after Lancaster, and I abandoned The Guardian, for gazing at the view! Carnforth with its graveyard of diesels and its memories of Brief Encounter though I ruefully recalled that Coward had Weybridge station in his mind, writing the play [where I used to commute]; Grange-over-Sands with its layered streets overlooking not just the waste of sand, but a grass fringe where the water no longer reaches, sheep grazing. At last, at Ulverston, Trev and his car. Off to lunch, alone in a restaurant, and some chat, half about the book. In fact, a message from our publisher arrived as we sat there!

Then off to the Lakes. Driving fast, the peaks appeared and loomed larger, as we accessed smaller and smaller roads, until we trailed Coniston Waters, and remembered Donald Campbell, as people of a certain age cannot fail to do, and found the  ‘village centre’, a phrase I'd not encountered before on road signage. We turned off into a single- track road alongside a beck that appears, frozen in one of the final pages of the book, in both photo and poem. We had to reverse for a large vehicle with a trailer of slate pebbles; you see them now as loose paving in city houses, ‘quarrying’ of a sort back in fashion.

Parked, we walked: up to the edge of Hodge Close. The deep, sheer walls were a surprise, the dark, deadly water at the bottom rather grim. At ground level, everything was blossoming, but there was little sound at all, little bird song, one non-plussed deer. (There had been sheep on the road, black and white cows in the field, alpaca at a farm, on the way.) The ground was strewn with pebbles and there were piles of discarded slate (I took a chunk), and, when you looked, ruins of huts, remainders (and reminders) of industrial machinery. A wall that had helped create a reservoir. Decidedly post-industrial, though re-invaded by nature: fallen trees blocking our potential route up and down the quarryside.

I was surprised by how compact everything was, and remote - the single track road, past the holiday cottages was long. And yet how wide a vista – everything I had seen so far in Trev’s magnificent photographs was bordered. Had borders. But while place is an arena of borders, space is an area – or areas – lacking borders or boundaries. Spookiness grew, too, and a feeling of wanting to … not quite escape… but move on.

To Ulverston. We parked near to Stan Laurel's birthplace. Blue plaque and terrace house. A couple of pubs. More personal chat. A few plans for the book.

And off, in opposite directions, to Barrow and Liverpool.

Apart from ten minutes of dark cloud, a beautiful day, the sort of day Trev hates for photography! He didn't, I should note, bring his camera.

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Trev Eales is a photographer specialising in landscape photography and rock concerts and festivals, based in South Cumbria. He and I met at university in Norwich in October 1974, over half a century ago, and we’ve been in touch over all those years. We meet up regularly in Lancaster for discussions and entertainment, and now in Ulverston, of course. He has a website here:  Trev Eales Photography. You could spend hours lost in his back-catalogue. Here’s an interview with him about his work:  Capturing the Festival Spirit with Trev Eales · Lomography. 

If you read this blog you know about me, but this may help: Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com : Follow on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social. All posts here are indicated on Bluesky.