Buttermere Trip October 2025.
- Jon Brock
- Oct 25
- 11 min read
Updated: Oct 28
Day One
Last week I managed to escape for three nights to Buttermere in the English Lake District. Booking last minute on the Wednesday night I drove over after finishing a meeting on Thursday morning. It was a relatively painless drive over and around early afternoon I found myself in Borrowdale for an afternoon session. I took out the Phase with the technical camera and had a wonder around an area that I have got to know well underneath Kings Howe.
The colour was surprisingly advanced for October - if a little patchy and invevitably it was the birch trees that were most advanced. I setup several images but two in particular worked well I thought. Firstly isolating a fabulous tree that I first photographed with my Mamiya RX67 medium format film camera back in 2016 when I first scouted out this area.
I always find the best way to get going on a trip is just to start making a few images to tune in. This was the third composition I setup and by this stage I was definitely getting into a flow.
The second image I was happy with was shot a few minutes later. I setup my camera as high as I could on the tripod and created a circular composition with the trees and lovely bracken collaborating to make the image.
I needed the height to position the top of the frame with the mountainside behind rather than the sky as would have happened if I had shot lower. Fortunately a handy boulder behind the tripod gave me something to stand on so I could operate the phase.
I keep a screen loop around my neck to be able to look closely at the images on the Phase back as well as carrying my trusty Linhof Viewer - a heritage of my old Large Format 5x4/10x8 days. Although I now shoot 4:3 as my go to aspect ratio, I still find the linhof viewer in 5x4 to be an integral part of my process. It is a bit of a comfort blanket now as I also have an app on my iphone that is also setup to operate as a viewfinder (viewfinder app) but for various reasons that I may elaborate on at a later date I find this tool to be essential to my process.
By that stage the momentum was going out of my session. I made a couple more compositions but as the light started to fade it was time to head over to Buttermere to check into the Bridge Hotel.
Day Two
It was going to be a day of two halves as I had a short meeting scheduled for lunchtime . So immediately after breakfast I wandered around the lake with my phase and headed into the trees. I have photographed the Buttermere larches many times over the years - though usually in early November when for years I used to bring my parents over to Buttermere for a few days.
So it was a nostalgic and slightly poignant session. I made an image of the larch with my long lens (I was carrying four of my Rodenstock lenses - 40/70/120/180 which is typically what I will do unless I know I need another specialist lens) and I set this image up.
I had to activate the base tilts of my Cambo Actus to keep the film (digital back) plane upright and parallel to the composition to avoid the trees leaning in. I find the base tilts to be very helpful - although only operating in steps of 5 degrees they allow me to increase the effecitve rear rise or fall. When combined with the Rodenstock lenses I have plenty of rise and fall movement available on a very lightweight camera. All my Rodenstocks have amazing quality and sustain that over a large image circle, especially the longer lenses like this case. I like the mixture of green and yellow and the hillside behind makes a nice cooler background to the trees.
Walking further along the path I tried my hand at an idea I had first explored two years before. Some of the larch trees are being felled due to disease and that makes for some gaps in the trees and an interesting intersection of horizontal and veritical tree shapes. Again I setup with a zeroed or upright back and made this image with my 70mm Rodenstock (on my camera very close to a standard lens - just a tad wider).
Continuing further I walked up to a stream I have often photographed to see if the trees were good. I hunted and found a composition that was worth a shot
To be honest I was rushed as the time was ticking towards my meeting and before long I had to leg it back to the hotel.
The afternoon was a relaxed session. I drove into Borrowdale again and decided to visit the quaries below Castle Crag. I first visited them on an advanced Large Format workshop in the mid 2000s when I was shooting my Linhof Technikardan and 5x4 film. I wandered up to the first main quary and climbed around the outside to the side. The birch trees have grown up over that time and I made an image with my 120mm lens.
The quarry is definitley best in the wet but I managed to find a composition where the dry walls were not that significant. My 120mm Rodenstock is an extraordinarily versatile lens. It has to be the bargain of the current modern Rodenstock lens lineup. It is obsensibly a macro lens but its performance at or close to infinity seems to defy physics. It is a worthy successor to my 240mm Fujinon A lens that was beloved on 5x4 and is an almost identical focal length on a modern phase back. It is perhaps not ironic that I am carrying a lens line up now that is almost identical to the 90/150/240/450 lens lineup that I used when I was at my most comfortable shooting 5x4 (around 2006 to 2014).
Amongst the last outings I made with my Linhof Technikardan was a memorable trip to the Lake District and to these very quarries with a group of friends and acquaintances in November 2015. If I recall I came straight from a plane from the US to the Lakes joining the trip a day or so later than everyone else.
Shattered, stressed, totally out of sorts with my photography and in full hangover mode from completing my Mulgrave Project, I had no idea which camera system I wanted to use - I think I had brought two 5x4 cameras (the Technikardan and a Chamonix), possibly my 10x8 camera, a 6x7 Mamiya and was also experimenting with a digital Sony camera. A mental mess would be the best description.
And then to top it all, the conditions were what can only be described as Lake District torrential. If anyone has visited the Lakes in those conditions they will know what that means. The main day I remember was character building and would be hilarious in retrospect if it wasn't so tragic from a photography and gear perspective.
The group split up and at least four of us made it eventually to a small mount under Castle Crag to view some lovely birch trees that were glowing. The rain if anything was lashing even harder. I setup my TK and it was drenched and unusable for the remainder of the session by the time I finished and got things back into the bag. My fellow photographer also thought about setting up in parallel but backed off. However, he left his bag open and his Nikon was tragically floating in a pool of water several minutes later. It wasn't the first or last water related accident on my trips with friends but it was certainly one of the most memorable.
It wasn't the last image I made on 5x4 but it was certainly the start of the end. In November 2016 I brought my parents over to the Lakes and shot with a 6x7 Mamiya mostly. The Velvia images worked but I found it very difficult if not impossible to process the colour negative film I took. I blamed negative film (the truth was I didn't have the digital processing skills to handle colour negative) and a couple of weeks later I was back trying out a digital Pentax 645Z courtesy of the influence of my friend Guy. The gradual and painful transition to digital was in process.
So back to last week. I decided to wander on over to 'drowning mount' and I setup my phase pointing at the birch trees - now much more mature and standing proud against the hillside with early autumn colour.
En-route to the second quarry I had noticed some lovely andesite volcanic rock in the river - smoothed by the action of the water and exhibiting a lovely blueish grey colouring, presumably due to the mix of minerals in the rock. I paused to look and noticed the fallen leaves from a tree over hanging the bank of the river. Very often it is the relationship between two subjects that creates an interesting concept for an image - it carries more meaning than a single islated subject. In the two images above that holds true. Even though at first sight they look like lone tree portraits the quarry image is about the precarious nature of life as the birch tree clings on to the edge of the quarry. In the second, the small baby tree at the front and the small patches of yellow surrounding the main clump of trees adds a visual counterpoint to the main subject.
I could imagine an image with the warm colours of the leaves - barely months old juxtaposed with the cool blue grey rock born 450m years ago as a result of violent eruptions and explosions as vast continents collided, now inert, tamed and smoothed by flowing water. I thought the idea might fit a project I have been working on for a few years.
I tried out a total of four compositions gradually iterating the idea. Although all four images work, it is the last two that feel more mature and they make a nice pair. For the moment they will be the candidate images for the project. Time may change that.
Iterating an image or idea is something that has become more practical with digital capture. In my film days the cost of pressing the shutter was significant - typically £5-10 per sheet. It was also a scarce resource - it was not really practical to carry more than 10 or 12 sheets of film loaded into holders. Now I feel freer to iterate an idea in the field until I get it right in camera.
I love the cool smoothed rock in these two images.
I ambled over to the second quarry passing two young D of E groups complete with maps and bags so big they looked to be taller than some of the smaller members of the group. Like all such groups I have seen they looked utterly miserable. I do wonder if this Gordonstoun inspired approach to introducing young people to the amazing outdoors does more harm than good.
I made an image at the second quarry but the conditions revealed nothing new and I gradually wondered back to the car. I filled up on Bridge fish pie that evening in preparation for the mammoth day ahead tomorrow.
Day Three
I had decided to do a proper walk rather than a photography session. With plenty of options available I decided on the round of Buttermere - climbing up Red Pike and walking around to Haystacks. It is a walk I have done many times before including one memorable occasion on a walk with my brother when a whiteout came in and I had to navigate mainly from a combination of memory and a map and compas (pre ubiquitous GPS). I wasn’t sure if I would come down from Haystacks or Fleetwith Pike but that was a decision for later.
I carried my small pack containing my handheld kit - a Fuji GFX 100II with a 35-70mm lens and the 100-200mm (which yet again remained in the bag unused).
Shortly after breakfast I started climbing up Red Pike. Its a relatively straightforward climb up to the corrie lake below Red Pike, Bleaberry Tarn. The final stretch to the summit is steep but interesting in that the scree is red stained. Red Pike is a unique younger igneous intrusion into the two primary geological layers that dominate Buttermere and indeed the whole of this area of the Lakes.
The first geological layer is the volcanic Borrowdale group created around 450m years ago through a process of subduction and pyroclastic eruptions when the ocean crust at the eastern edges of Avalonia crashed into and under Laurentia as the Laptetus sea closed. It typically presents as dramatic rocky andesite and ash tuffs. The second is the slightly older Skiddaw Slates - a layer of sedimentary mudstones and sandstones dating from 485-458m years ago that was lightly metamorphosed during the later Caladonian orogency (mountain building) phase. This layer tends to result in grassy slopes with some rocky ridges like on Blencathra. Each geological layer is easily recognisable on the ground and the transition between them can be very noticeable once you look out for it.
Red Pike itself is formed of an igneous granite intrusion (called the Ennerdale Granite) and the syenite minerals in the rock forms a unique red staining as it oxidises.
The first image was made once I had walked around to High Stile where the Volcanic Borrowdale rocks begin to appear.
I continued along the ridge line - basically a delightful morning stroll and I suddenly got a blast of light. There had been an inversion for most of the last week and today the weather was starting to turn with rising winds and high cloud. A low pressure front was due to come in that night. I quickly composed an image of the ridge.
Walking along to High Crag I started the slow descent to Scarth Gap - a section of the walk I keep blotting out and forgetting. It is torturous going downwards on such hard rock. Anxious to keep going I didn’t pause at Scarth Gap but instead headed straight up onto the scramble to the top of Haystacks. I first did that section in my mid 20s and it was just as memorable this time as the first. Despite the Saturday afternoon hoards of people trying to scramble down and up I managed to make short work of the scramble and before long was sitting on the top of Haystacks. After grabbing a bite to eat I walked along to the wonderful Innominate Tarn to pay homage to Wainwright (his ashes were scattered there).
The wind was definitely picking up and I was getting tired so rather than walk around to Fleetwith Pike I decided to take the track down from Haystacks before I reached the Pike (not the dreadful track down by the side of Fleetwith Pike that hoards of people use but the track down on the nearer side of the river). I made two more images. The first looking down from Haystacks.
Haystacks was Wainwright’s favourite fell and it has to be amongst my favourite in Lakeland. The second was made some of the way down close to the river, attracted by some lovely colour in the trees.
By this stage it was getting windier and I was ready to head back to the Bridge for a well deserved beer.
All in all an excellent trip - for me although no new ground was trodden it was still memorable and was often nostalgic remembering visits past. And how often do you get to spend several days in the lakes without wind? Just what was needed at that moment. I shall return to Buttermere in a few weeks as I start my trip to Scotland. I can’t wait to return.
