IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Steel, HEXHAM, NE47 0HL

I spent some time in this beautiful clearing trying to photograph the coloured lights sparkling from the frosted grass stems backlit by strong sunlight Image

The name of the ruin is shown as Gingles Haugh on the earliest large-scale OS maps. Locals seem to refer to it as Jingle Haugh. There is another photo here Image

As I explained here Image, I spent a long time in this woodland clearing trying to photograph the sparkling multi-coloured lights produced by the strong winter sun shining through the frost-laden grass stems. My inability to capture what I could see by eye was most frustrating. I was convinced it was the light settings and took many shots with varying aperture and speed, all useless. Every time the digital camera auto-focused there was a sudden flash of lights in the viewfinder as the lens moved, but as soon as focus was achieved, and the stems became sharp, all the points of light vanished and weren't revealed in the resulting photo. At the time the significance of this observation escaped me. I only realised back home that the problem was focus, not lighting. The 'fairy lights' were perhaps intensified as I wasn't wearing my glasses, and in the viewfinder they would appear at one particular out-of-focus point as the lens moved. This was the only photo of the set that gives you an idea of what I could see. The coloured drops here are all in the out-of-focus zone. I should probably have set a manual (out-of-) focus to capture the lights, but would have undoubtedly forgot to reinstate the autofocus after, and continued my walk taking fuzzy photos. If the sun shines again this winter I'll have another go.