There have been a couple of times I have gone to this photo thinking, “it is about time I showed this photo”, but for some reason I never got around to editing it. This image was captured in Eggleston Hall Gardens in Country Durham. At the time this was taken I was planning to visit the real Angel of the North up in Gateshead in the following months. Unfortunately we were leaving the gardens at the time this was taken, so I didn’t go any closer to the sculpture that this, but from what I remember of the day it was about 6-7 feet in height. Nowhere near as tall as the original Angel of the North, which can be seen by clicking here.

When I was looking for signposts for Barnard Castle last spring I was expecting a castle but Barnard Castle is the name of the local town as well as the town’s castle pictured above. I don’t think that makes this ‘Barnard Castle’s Castle’ but it did confuse me at first. I wanted to publish this photograph because of the fantastic textures on the side wall. It was founded by the Norman’s in the 12 century and was a lovely ruin to walk around with lots of open space and interesting stair cases and a great view looking south away from the town centre. The way the path comes in from the bottom left corner makes look towards the two lamp posts and then to the stone work in the castle walls. Certain photographs like this are very difficult to showcase online as the quality of the downloaded image (even when clicked to see a larger preview) is around 6x less then the quality of the original file that came out of the camera, so sharpness and general quality suffer greatly.

The above photograph was captured in Eggleston Hall Gardens in County Durham and I believe from looking at various other photos in the achieves, this weather vane is purely ornamental. That is, it doesn’t serve it’s original purpose as a wind or weather vane because it is only about 8 or 10 feet off the ground with lots of taller buildings and trees all around.

That being said, does it matter? In an lovely gardens like the one at Eggleston Hall it looks great. My dad and I both saw it at the same time, and it was one of those moments where we looked at each other and said, “I saw it first, I’m taking its photo”. Needless to say we both have pictures of this weather vane. I’m sure that many people simply walk past it but I thought it worthy of a photograph.

There didn’t seem much to photograph when I pulled up at Eggleston Hall in County Durham. Then I saw a sign pointing to gardens, and so had an explore. It was much more interesting. On the far side of the gardens was a wall, so I followed the wall to the end and came across a small gate. Through I went, down three steps and looked up to see the above church. It was only very small, I had to bend over to get under the doorways, but this little area made for very interesting photography. According to a sign the church is “Egglestone Church of the Holy Trinity”. Research on the internet simply says that the village of Eggleston was once a large mining village. Luckily whilst digging through my achieves to find out what the church was called I came across this photograph of a photograph below. It shows the exact same view from 150 years earlier.