So I decided to visit Buxton, a Victorian Spa town in the Peak District. It's a good few years since I've had a look round the town of which I have fond memories from childhood: back in the pre-Beeching fifties, when even a small country town like Ashbourne had a railway service, a visit to Buxton on a steam train was a favourite Sunday or Bank Holiday treat. I remember sunny afternoons spent in the Pavilion Gardens feeding the ducks and eating ice cream.
If Matlock Bath, with its over-abundance of fish and chip shops and amusement arcades can be considered the Blackpool of Derbyshire, then Buxton, with its Pavilion, Opera House and Crescent would have a far more upmarket parallel: something like Harrogate, or even Bath.
I started my tour in the well-tended Pavilion Gardens, still well populated with water birds. These two were very friendly with each other and seemed to be suffering from a spot of species confusion:-
I watched them for several minutes, the goose following the swan everywhere it went. I couldn't see any other geese or swans around, and they really looked the best of pals!
From the gardens I continued on into the town itself. I was a little disappointed by the current state of the town. It seems a little drab and in need of a facelift. Indeed, whilst stopping for a coffee, I read in a local paper that decisions are about to be taken on plans for re-furbishing the famous crescent. I also noticed that the famous conservatory in the Pavilion is closed because of the ubiquitous 'health and safety' reasons. And round the rear of the pump house I found an appropriate opinion on the surroundings by a local artist:-
Behind the Pavilion there is a road containing some very large Victorian houses. One in particular caught my eye and I immediately thought it had the possibility of making a nice monochrome shot. In processing it I initially struggled to get a result I was happy with: I just couldn't get the right sort of contrast to give the sense of drama that I had envisaged when pressing the shutter. I was almost ready to give up when I had the idea to try a technique called local contrast enhancement, which I sometimes use to give added 'pop' to a colour shot. This involves using Unsharp Mask with a very large Radius (50) and a small Amount (20%). I've no idea what this actually does at pixel level, but to my delight it produced just the result I wanted:-
To me this sums up Buxton: a glorious past, a little drab at present, but not totally run down, and a prime candidate for refurbishment and improvement in the future.
There was still plenty of afternoon left, so I decided that on the way back home I would pay a quick visit to Tideswell Dale, one of my favourite dales for wild flowers, just to see if there were any signs of early arrivals. Walking down into the dale from the car park at first I thought I was on a wild goose chase. But then as I got to the small bridge that crosses the stream I did discover a few very early Butterbur flowers. The flowers on this plant appear before the leaves (which are very large and rhubarb like). In a few weeks time the banks of the stream will be absolutely covered in these conical pink flowers. For now I was glad to be able to see the few early ones and capture this specimen:-
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