The Sanctuary

[See this picture in the On Land section of the gallery.]

Well, things are slowly moving in the right direction on my new project, but for the meantime here's another golden(ish) oldie(ish). Or, at least, a random pic that I happen to have a few things to say about.

I didn't print this shot for a really long time because it reminded me of that day - mostly spent sitting in my car on Dungeness hoping that the torrential rain would stop. It didn't. The clouds just descended further until they were scudding along at treetop height - ah, the British summer!

This is a shot that I wanted to get though - thinking as I was at the time about Power and what that meant - the tiny chapel and huge lumbering nuclear power plant in the distance. I grabbed one shot, dried my camera off and decided to sod it and go for fish and chips at the Pilot Inn. You can't even tell it's raining in the final print.

But, anyway, there's another sort of power here that I wasn't even aware of at the time. It turns out that the church is a fake - built during WW2 to conceal a pumping station for Operation Pluto, secretly transporting fuel under the channel to France. After the war the station was abandoned, and the handful of people who live out on the Ness renamed it The Sanctuary, and started using it as a sort of social hall, and even for the purpose it had been pretending to have.

Of course, none of this is apparent from looking at the photograph - and that's really the only thing you're supposed to do with it.

(Less aimless jibber jabber and more new pictures soon, hopefully.)