It was a Tuesday afternoon. I had been at my desk all morning and the week was already going wrong. Sometime in the early afternoon I worked out that what I really needed was to be somewhere else. I grabbed the Intrepid, a lens, some film holders, a meter and a Ricoh R1 that had just come into the house, and I walked out of the office. By half past three I was in the car park at Lancaut. By four I was on the woodland path down to the church.
The church in question is St James’ at Lancaut, sometimes written Llancaut, an eight-hundred-year-old ruin on the banks of the River Wye about two miles north of Chepstow. I had been there before on foot once or twice and never with a camera. It seemed like the right place to go.
A bit of history I did not get right on camera
I waffled some inaccurate rubbish about the dates in the video. Here is the version I should have given.
The site has been a place of worship since at least 625 AD, which is one of the earliest sites of Christian activity in the Wye Valley. The original chapel was dedicated to St Cewydd, an obscure 6th-century Welsh saint who probably came up the Wye spreading Christianity inland from the religious centre at Llancarfan in the Vale of Glamorgan. The name Lancaut comes from the Welsh Llan (church, or land consecrated for burials) and Cewydd. The 12th-century Book of Llandaff records the establishment as “lann ceuid”, with the entry dated to around 625 AD and mentioned again around 702 or 703 AD.
There is a theory that the original chapel was destroyed by Vikings sometime around the early 10th century. Viking raids on the Wye were well documented at the time. The river provided an easy route inland from the Severn estuary, and in 914 a raiding party was bold enough to take the Bishop of Archenfield prisoner for a ransom of £400.
The ruin you see today was built by the Normans, probably around 1067, by the Lord of Chepstow Castle, on what was by then a strategically important Norman frontier. The current chancel arch matches the same sandstone used in the building of Chepstow Castle itself. The lead font that used to stand in the church is precisely dated to between 1120 and 1140 and now sits in the Lady Chapel at Gloucester Cathedral.
A medieval village grew up around the church and the population peaked in the 15th or 16th century before slowly declining. The site is on an isolated peninsula in a sweeping bend of the Wye, with steep limestone cliffs on most sides, and life there cannot have been easy. By the 1750s only twelve services a year were being held. By the 1860s services were summer-only. The building has been in ruins since around 1865.
The best part of the modern story is the bit that made the newspapers in 2015. The Church of England, having had no use for a ruined eight-hundred-year-old chapel on an inaccessible Welsh peninsula for the best part of a century, sold the building to the Forest of Dean Buildings Preservation Trust for £1. Queen Sells Church For £1 was the headline. The Trust has looked after it ever since.
So when I say there has been a church on this site for fourteen hundred years, I am not really exaggerating. The current ruin is about a thousand years old in its earliest fabric and is one of the oldest structures of any kind in this part of the country.
What I forgot
I had bolted out of the office in a hurry. By the time I unpacked the bag at the church it was clear that the hurry had cost me. I had brought a generous selection of filters including a graduated ND4 and a red filter for the Delta 100. I had not brought the filter holder, and I had also left the dark cloth at home. Both of these are genuinely stupid things to leave at home when you are going out with a 4x5 because both are things you cannot easily improvise in the field. The dark cloth I worked around with a jacket. The filter holder I worked around by hand-holding the filters in front of the lens.
Hand-holding a graduated ND in front of a large format lens is not something I would recommend. The filter is heavy enough that it wants to drift downward in the breeze. The grad line is also more or less arbitrary because you cannot see what you are doing on the ground glass while also holding a piece of glass an inch in front of the lens. You are guessing. The compensation is that on Delta 100 at half a second at f/32, the breeze that wants to drift the filter is the same breeze that is wobbling the grass in the foreground. Half a second is long enough for everything to move a bit. The grad line ended up softer than I had wanted, which is probably for the best.
The red filter went on for one frame after the sky had developed properly. I held it flat against the front element and tripped the shutter on a long count. The result on the negative was the kind of dramatic darkened sky that Delta 100 with a red filter does so well, with no obvious mark of having been hand-held.
Inside the archway with Ektar
Once I had worked through a couple of sheets of Delta outside, I wanted to do something different inside the chancel arch. The arch is the oldest visible piece of fabric in the building. It is also a genuinely photogenic frame, with weathered sandstone and light coming through from the far side. I set the Intrepid up with the front standard tilted forward to bring the foreground stones and the far side of the arch into focus together, and I loaded a sheet of Ektar 100.
This was the frame I knew I wanted before I had finished setting up. The colours on the Ektar negative came out exactly as I had hoped. The sandstone is genuinely warm. The green of the moss and the grass beyond the arch is rich and saturated. Ektar gets criticised sometimes for its colour rendering but for old stone in damp British woodland it is hard to beat.
The Ricoh R1 wedge
There were inevitable gaps in the shooting between sheets, while I waited for light or stood around thinking about composition. I filled some of them with a Ricoh R1, the 1990s 30mm point and shoot that had recently come into the house. It is a tiny thing and truly pocketable, and the lens is genuinely good. There will be a piece about the R1 in its own right at some point. For the afternoon at Lancaut it served as the second camera, the one I had in my hand when the Intrepid was on the tripod. I shot a roll over the course of the walk and I was happy with most of the frames.
Two cameras on one walk is something I should do more of. The Intrepid forces a slowness and a deliberation that I value. The R1 catches the bits I cannot stop and set up the tripod for. Between them they make a pretty complete record of a walk.
Chelsea, Connor and Denzel
The best frame of the day came from a chance meeting. I was packing up to leave the church when two people walked up with a small chihuahua on a lead. Chelsea and Connor were having an afternoon out at the church. The dog was called Denzel Washington, which is one of the better dog names I have heard, and is in the running for best chihuahua name of all time.
I asked if I could take a portrait. They said yes. I set the Intrepid back up where I had taken it down and swapped to a fresh holder, then shot a frame of the two of them with Denzel. They were good sports about it. We were all standing in the church doorway as the first of the rain came in, and we sheltered under a tree for a few minutes while it passed.
That frame is my favourite from the whole afternoon. I prefer photographing people to photographing buildings, and I prefer photographing them in places connected to who they are rather than in studios. Two strangers and a small dog in the doorway of an eight-hundred-year-old ruin in the Wye Valley is exactly the kind of photograph the Intrepid was built for. If you are reading this, Chelsea and Connor, drop me a message and I will send you a print.
What it did
The walk did what it was supposed to do. I went home less stressed than I had left. I had a few sheets of 4x5 worth keeping and a roll of 35mm worth scanning. I had a portrait I am genuinely pleased with and a small reminder of how much better I feel after an hour or two with a camera in a place I have never properly explored.
The lessons, such as they are, are not new. Take your camera with you when work is going badly. Pack the bag properly the night before, not on the way out the door. A graduated ND filter without its holder is better than no filter at all, but only just. And if you are anywhere within a half hour drive of the lower Wye Valley and you have not been to St James’ at Lancaut, go. It is one of the most quietly atmospheric places in the south west and most of the people walking the Wye Valley Walk go past it without noticing.
The next outing of the Intrepid will be somewhere properly planned, with the dark cloth in the bag and the filter holder bolted to the lens. The next video on the channel is the Rolleiflex SLX, which I have been threatening to publish for months now. Soon.