Brighton 2009

A visit to the English seaside, London's West End shows, and the Mendip Hills.

Brighton

• The Promenade, really an esplanade, but whatever. The drizzle had driven off the tourists which should normally pack this place, but left it with a lovely sense of loneliness between the pillars and vines.
• Waves crashing on the pebble beach. All beaches should be like this - sand is such an overrated material.
• A splash in the groyne.
• Pebbles.
• Sponges.
• Public transport.
• Electric train. At 126 years old, it is the oldest operating electric railway in the World.
• Decay in the train shed.
• Brake wheel.
• Points lever.
• Level crossing.
• The 110 year old Brighton Pier, the biggest attraction in Brighton, despite having ridiculous prices.
• Groyne.
• Pier supports. My favourite of all the Brighton shots.
• Decaying supports.
• Fractured support. Amazing that such a thing can still hold itself together.
• Gulls on the pier.
• "(5)CreateFile error!"; Horse Crashed.
• How serious?
• Apparently very serious. The remains of the 143 year old West Pier.
• Deck chairs.
• Deck chairs.
• Pebble art turtle.
• The remains of the end of West Pier. The pier was burned down by arsonists in 2003, after being derelict for 28 years. The timing was convenient for the Brighton Pier, as the West Pier was due to be refurbished, and reopened as competition for the Brighton Pier. Local rumours, of course, suggest that was not a coincidence, though without any substantiating proof.
• Gull.
• The wreckage of the pier dome. Apparently there are plans to remove it and replace it with a tower. A pity, given that the wreck is as much of an attraction as anything else here, and really does look quite impressive.
• The wreckage, clearing the sea of debris.
• Wreckage. I would love to get on that with a camera, and wonder around the rotting carcass.
• Support pole.
• Brighton Pier at night.
• A stolen kiss.
• West Pier at night. A 1 second handheld exposure, taken with very high ISO - too much grain, but any lower ISO would have made a handheld shot impossible.
• Night boat.
• The promenade at night. The lens flare is somewhat unfortunate, but it felt better to leave it in, rather than edit it out.
• The Royal Pavilion, easily the best looking building in Brighton.
• Museum gate.
• A little unusual compared with my normal pictures, but it will make sense later.
• Elaborate mummy wrappings, around 3000 years old.
• Kitten, ibis, and infant crocodile mummies.
• Preparation artifacts.
• Ra's Boat (I guess).
• Instructions for applying makeup, right?
• Beautifully preserved intact, 3000 year old mummy of a girl, with extremely elaborate decorations on the wrappings, and canopic jars. The bandaged feet are just visible where the wrapping has split open.
• Burial mask.
• Hop over a few thousand km and a few thousand years, to the Samurai armour, around 150 years old.
• Tudor houses.
• Gothic church. That's it for the architecture.
• Nautilus model at the Sea Life Centre. The prices for access are utterly ridiculous, and unless they have something truly impressive in there (they don't), it's just not worth the money.
• Request For Comments about this rather cheap-looking knockoff.
• This speaks for itself.
• Window.
• Masts at the marina.
• Chinese boat. They all look like this in China, didn't you know?
• Herring gull in the rain.
• Weed.
• Fishing boats - apparently this marina is not just for the more-money-than-sense crowd.
• Traps.
• Thief.
• Brighton, like much of the South English coast, is on the rolling chalk hills that make up the South of England - the South Downs at this part. It's not too far from Seven Sisters, or the white cliffs of Dover, and similarly has the trademark white cliffs.
• Scum on the water. And a flip-flop.
• Cliff walk at the marina.
• Swan's nest.
• Boat made from an engine, strapped to a piece of a jetty/floating dock. I would say "whatever floats your boat", but that would be too obvious, so I won't say it.
• Cliff walk.
• Doh!
• Jumping on the harbour wall.
• Jumping on the harbour wall.
• View animation.
• Doorway into ... ? Given how unstable chalk is (those gravel beds are there to catch falling debris), it doesn't strike me as a smart idea to tunnel into it like that.
• Planks left from the massive timber cargo shipwreck a year earlier.
• Indeed.
• Ouch. Those too.
• Hoary stock. Sometimes the jokes are just too easy.
• Hoary stock.
• Rearing the young gulls on the cliffs.
• Solution tube in the cliffs.
• Driftwood.
• Cliff and rolling hill near Rottingdean.

London

One marathon away...

• Well, it was supposed to be Oliver, but due to a booking error, it turned into the complete opposite - drag queens and transexuals; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Oh yes. But it turned out to be a worthy mistake, and a far better show than any of us had expected.
• Cameras are forbidden. No show shots. Go and see it instead.
• Piccadilly Circus. The picture is a little blurry, but that's actually quite appropriate, since it shows how I feel when confronted by such crowds - and this is the less packed part of it. Circus indeed.
• Where's Wally?
• OK, too much now. Got to head out into less populated areas.
• Golden Jubilee bridge.
• 3250 year old hieroglyphics on Cleopatra's Needle (which predates Cleopatra, being around 3500 years old).
• Cormorant at the Thames.
• Old Blackfriars bridge.
• Minellium Bridge (name intentional - it deserves no respect) with St. Paul's Cathedral behind it. The bridge is a stupid design based on a pile of rat turds infused with slug mucus, that failed to cope with humans walking on it, and even after extra damped supports were added, it still sways noticeably even in light winds. What do you expect from something as fleeting as the minellium, eh?
• Reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.
• Southwark Bridge and the famous Tower Bridge.
• Lights on the Minellium Bridge and St. Paul's. The lighting is very poor, failing to light the dome, and leaving most of the bridge in the dark.
• Lights and rainbow reflection on the London Eye.
• The Palace of Westminster - the Houses of Parliament, seat of the UK government.
• Clock Tower, containing the famous Big Ben bell.
• Lighting on the Golden Jubilee bridges.
• Here I go again. Couldn't resist the picture.
• A voyage, inside Seven of Nine. How many people wish they could say that?

Mendip

Since we had run out of things to do in Brighton's miserable weather, a short detour was made to visit the Mendip Hills. The Mendip Hills are a large plateau near Bristol, consisting of a limestone sheet that has been uplifted and then had its top cut off. This causes the edges to consist of steeply sloping limestone, riddled with caves, and spectacular karst features like gorges. It is one of the major caving areas in England, and a major tourist attraction.

The limestone, like that in South Wales, is around 300 million years old, but the gorge development is much older than most South Wales karst features, dating to as much as 1.2 million years, being formed by periglacial meltwater. By contrast, the age of most of the karst features in South Wales can be measured in thousands of years - typically only upto the last major ice ages, or so heavily modified by the ice ages that older features have disappeared.

• Burrington Combe is one of the well known but relatively small gorges that drop from the farmland on the plateau, down to the lower farmland at the base. Like most of the gorges, it has long been used as a roadway, and has only a few parts are still totally wild.
• The gorge has many short caves, including the well known archaeological dig at Aveline's Hole, used as a burrial chamber some 10000 years ago - apparently the oldest known cemetary in Britain.
• The last part is gated to protect engravings, so we continue onwards to Cheddar Gorge.
• Cheddar Gorge is a major tourist attraction and by far the most spectacular natural feature of the Mendip Hills.
• It is claimed by many Web sites (use your favourite search engine to search for 'largest gorge united kingdom') to be the largest gorge in the United Kingdom - perhaps confusing the United Kingdom with England, but that must require a very strict (and non-typical) definition of the word "gorge". It is about 3-4 km long, dropping a total of about 230 metres from the plateau (255 - 25 metres), with a maximum depth at any one point of 137 metres (450 feet), and a width of about 500 metres. In South Wales, several gorges are longer, and the Clydach Gorge is typically over 200 metres deep at any point, with a cliff-lined height of 250 metres at its outlet, as much as 1 km wide, and also around 4km long, dropping from a plateau by a total of around 400 metres. The volume is also clearly larger. In North Wales, Llanberis Pass is between 706 and 939 metres deep, 6 km long, and a good few km wide, though its stepped cliffs and lack of plateau may not be considered enough to qualify as a gorge.
• By cliffs alone, Cheddar Gorge is unsurpassed, with the highest being at The Pinnacles, a full 137 metres.
• With the road below such a huge cliff, there are some fences to catch any falling rocks.
• In silhouette.
• Some feral Soay sheep keeping the weeds in check.
• 'Ello.
• There are also some feral British Primitive Goats that were reintroduced, but these seemed to keep to the higher ground, away from the camera. Only sheep.
• Looking down the gorge from The Pinnacles, past a set of cliffs called Wind Rock.
• Wind Rock.
• High Rock, the tallest completely vertical cliff, at 122 metres (400 feet), with the major Coronation Street climbing route. The cliff is sometimes quoted as 330 feet (100 metres) high, but the climbing guides seem the most consistent, showing 400 feet total height, with the climbing route totalling 410 feet due to pitch approximations.
• In silhouette.
• Looking up past Wind Rock again.
• Pulpit Rock.
• Lion Rock.
• Of course, Cheddar is also very well known for the World famous Cheddar cheese. It began here, and is still made here - sometimes even still using the old method of maturing in the caves, in order to maintain temperature and moisture. It's more of a tourist gimmic now, but still worth trying some of the authentic stuff, or even going mad and trying to gorge on Cheddar (yes, yes, not really funny, sorry, but I am leaving it in here anyway).
• Two of the caves in the gorge are show caves, with Gough's Cave being by far the larger of the two. This is the Skeleton Pit, with a recreation of the skeleton of Cheddar Man that was found here. The original skeleton is the oldest complete human skeleton found in Britain, at over 9000 years old.
• Solutional aven.
• A series of gour dams called the Fonts. As with many photos here, this was taken as a handheld long exposure.
• Coloured stal in the aven above the Fonts.
• Supposedly an engraving of a mammoth, but even with the outline drawn on a sign beside it, I can't see it.
• The Grand Gallery, mostly natural, but with the roof artificially scraped flat in places, and the floor covered in a caliche formation known as concretia. A pity, but tourists are wusses.
• The Chimney, an aven formed by phreatic lift.
• The Grand Gallery. The wooden steps up on the left lead to shelves of Cheddar cheese - the edge of two cheese wheels can be seen on the left.
• A small grotto called the Peal Of Bells. As with most of the stal-in-pools in this cave, the pool is fake, made from cement. However, that doesn't seem to stop idiots from throwing money into it, like that's going to achieve something.
• A natural formation known as The Staircase.
• Niagra Falls (I think that's it's official name anyway), a very respectable flowstone formation in Diamond Chamber.
• A reflection pool grotto under it - sadly once again a fake, though the stal is real at least.
• Not all the stal is naturally placed. Some parts were conveniently moved to make "better" grottos. Some of the rimstone dams are also clearly cement. Some of it is blamed on vandals, but in reality, it is a showcave trying to look better than it is. Not that I am saying it is bad, just it would be better if it were actually natural, because the cave itself has made some very beautiful little grottoes - it does not need human intervention.
• Column and Flowstone in St. Paul's Chamber.
• Solomon's Temple, a very impressive flowstone cascade at the end of St. Paul's Chamber.
• Crystal pool at St. Paul's Cascade.
• A very fake false floor, with very fake gour pools. The stalagmites seem to be real, at least.
• Recreation skeleton of Cheddar Man in the museum. The real one is in the Natural History Museum in London.
• Bear.
• The other showcave - Cox's Cave - starts out with the annoyingly typical tourist trash lighting, completely obliterating the natural colours of the cave.
• Crazy colours not enough? Tourists getting too bored? I know, stick a fountain in there! That looks so natural, like it really belongs there. I tell you, I see these all the time underground. There's 5 of them in Aggy alone, and 17 in Draenen. Yeah.
• A reflection pool. Also fake. Well, at least the stal is real, and the lighting is not ridiculous.
• It's actually a very nice little grotto, sadly with a bit too much moss due to the lighting.
• Another very nice grotto, with a huge blob-like stalagmite. The top has been snapped off and replaced.
• Stal in the rift above.
• Suddenly, due to geological shifting, a lava tube broke through into the cave, causing it to glow red with hot lavacles, like a bad scene from the 1959 Journey To The Centre Of The Earth.
• Along with it came several bizzare ... things ... that haunt real caves in Mendip.
• And then The Descent was proven to be real, as the tourists turned into these green things and started hacking off body parts of those who were too slow to change. It really happened, I tell you.
• They really do take this bad joke too far. A dragon, with fog machines stuck up its nose. In a cave. It's a cave, you know. A cave. Not a circus, not a fairground. This really is just too silly, no matter how reasonable the idea might have sounded to whoever implemented it. Gough's Cave may have fake pools (and grottoes), but at least it still tries to look like a cave. Cox's is just over-the-top silly.
• Back to some natural beauty; the view of Cheddar Gorge from the watchtower at the top of Jacobs Ladder, a series of steps up the side of the gorge.

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