Follow My Tracks

Having not long discovered HDR, I felt that I needed a repeat visit to Thorpe Marsh to do it justice. I was not disappointed. The day was brilliant but the wind blew so hard that i had to hold my tripod onto the floor to stop it from blowing over at times.

A caravan had appeared on site with a large quantity of wood chippings and a generator. There had been talk of them now preparing to demolish the rest of the site and i wondered if this was now the beginning of that end.

We tried to steer clear of the caravan and as we pulled away in the car, a National Grid van was heading the other way. There is still a live sub-station on site and i wondered if we had been picked up on CCTV.

[SinglePic not found] [SinglePic not found]

(BACK DATED POST)

I was at the farm and Urbex was something I had been Google-ing for a while and I had planned to spend the weekend up at the farm. I stumbled across Thorpe Marsh. It was about an hours drive from the farm.

It was in the middle of nowhere and you follow the cooling towers on the horizon for a good thirty minutes as you drive towards Thorpe Marsh. It is such an empty place that there is a manned railway crossing where this short woman in her hi-vis who comes out of her small wooden hut, opens both gates, waves you through and closes them behind you.

We parked up outside the power station. There is very little left, but what’s there is still an impressive site when compared to the miles of flat land that surrounds the site. The gaps in the fence meant that getting on site was easy and then  i was off with the camera.

All but one cooling tower had been stripped out and the other was like a maze of small pillars that guided you around the long base. In the middle of the cooling towers stands a structure that i am led to believe is a dust silo and there was a very precarious wooden ladder tied to the bottom of the cut off stair case some 15 feet above.

I scaled the ladder and found the gap between its top and the stairs to be quite sizable. I quickly rigged a sling to act as a foot loop in the step across and made the small leap over the void and found myself on a solid concrete floor. The wind that blows through the site at a generally impressive speed was so much more intense and there were no walls on opposite sides to protect you and it blew with such strength that it felt like I could have lept upwards with a gust and been blown away.

I clung to the floor and snapped a few photos before reversing my little move back down onto the ladder and to the ground.

The site itself seems to have sued water to push the coal around from its entry into the site to large storage piles by what is now a nature reserve.

With numb finger tips and a full memory card, enough was enough and we headed back to the car.

[SinglePic not found] [SinglePic not found] [SinglePic not found]