The Lake District

If ever anyone needed proof that I don’t quite have all screws in place, this weekend was probably it.

Almost all month I’d been trying to come up with ideas for what I could do over the long weekend at the end of May. I went through countless options, from visiting Northern Ireland, to driving down to Cornwall, or maybe Snowdonia in north Wales, to going to Scotland again. In the end, I settled on re-visiting the Lake District in the county of Cumbria in the North of England. I’d been there before years ago, but last time I went  was the middle of winter (Christmas, actually), and obviously that wasn’t exactly the time to go hiking, or driving around the more remote parts of the area.

So, with the weather looking quite promising, I booked myself into a little B&B for a couple of nights and went about doing a bit of planning and researching photo locations.
One thing I really wanted to do is catch a golden sunrise over the fells. Sunrise is at 4:45am in late May. Just saying. But hey, why not try and photograph my dream sunrise on the first day up there! The only problems were that, in order to even have a decent stab at this, I needed to know exactly where to go (I didn’t), what kind of foreground interest I wanted in my shot (again, no clue), and where exactly the sun would be (*shrugs shoulders*). Oh, and of course, I would have to leave my home in the South of England no later than about 10:30pm to actually make it to the Lakes before daylight. Simple, no? Yeah.. It was hard going, I can tell you.

But, oh my goodness was it worth it!! Seriously, if you err just a little bit on the side of crazy, you must do this. I had to have a little power nap half way through my journey and painfully realised that even though sunrise wasn’t until close to 5am, it was starting to get light MUCH earlier. This helped the drive, of course, but I had to quickly make up my mind where I wanted to try and shoot from.

Buttermere. This rather remote and lesser known lake had stuck in my head from my last visit. I remembered driving along its shore and desperately wanting to stop somewhere, but not being able to. Surely it would be easier to park up somewhere at silly o’clock in the morning. Apparently not – unless you know where you going. So after wasting a little more time, and eventually finding a parking lot, I set off on a hike along the lake. The light was beginning to tint the landscape in some beautiful colours, but I wasn’t quite taken with the shots I could see. It wasn’t until I reached the far end of the lake that the sun started to peak over the fell, with some of the hills still in shadow, but where the light was the colour was so intense and amazing that I decided this was it.
The shot I came away with my absolute favourite in a long, long time. If you’re a regular visit to the site, or my social media channels, or have one of my recent batch of business cards, you’ll know it well 😉

If you need a reminder, head over to the United Kingdom galleries on the website and check out the Cumbria folder. You’ll see what I mean.