Earlier in 2010, I decided to spend a Sunday exploring the railway stations of the Coryton Line. This is the surviving section of the Bute’s Cardiff Railway, the last of the great railways built to bring coal down to the Cardiff docks. I’m sure I read somewhere that the Bute’s original intention was to run this railway along the route of the Glamorganshire Canal (which the Marquis had earlier bought), but that ultimately he wasn’t allowed to close the canal, and so had to come up with an alternative route for his railway.
Today, the Coryton Line is a single-track commuter run that swings east to west across the north of Cardiff. There are no services on a Sunday, making it the perfect day to explore these stations.
The Photos
Taken from the platform, looking north towards where the Coryton Line starts to make its turn west to Ty Glas Railway Station and beyond.
Looking south along Heath Low Level Railway Station’s platform. The station is approached through a little alleyway between houses, and is the only one of the Coryton Line stations that does not have the familiar red-and-white railway station sign outside it.
At its southern end, the railway quickly disappears beneath this road bridge before joining the main Cardiff to Caerphilly line.
The single best view of Heath Low Level station is from the road bridge. From here, you can clearly see the housing that backs onto the station.
For me, Heath Low Level wasn’t just the last of the stations I explored along the Coryton Line, it also contained by far the single most interesting photo to take. This public telephone can be found in the brick shelter at the station. I didn’t check to see if it worked, though.
Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. blog | twitter: (photography) (all) | facebook: (Merthyr Road project) (all).
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If you’re reading this in the RSS feed, my original blog post also includes a Google map showing where this photo was taken. Unfortunately I haven’t managed to get the map to appear yet in the RSS feed, so for now you’ll have to click through to my blog if you want to see the map. Sorry.
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Download the full-size picture to use as your desktop wallpaper.
Continuing this week’s theme of castle shots from our holiday in North Wales last summer, my choice of desktop wallpaper today is this shot of the unusual bridges at the front of Conwy Castle.
It’s such an obvious shot that I was expecting to find plenty of examples of this via Google when creating this write-up … but if a search on Google is anything to go by, everyone actually prefers to take a shot down on the footbridge instead.
Sadly we never made it down there ourselves; this has gone onto the list of places I’ll be heading back to for a whole day at some point soon.
Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. blog | twitter: (photography) (all) | facebook: (Merthyr Road project) (all).
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Whilst out looking for a suitable photo for Guardian Cardiff’s July photography challenge, I spotted these three folks hauling their luggage along the road (presumably heading to Cardiff Railway Station).
Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. blog | twitter: (photography) (all) | facebook: (Merthyr Road project) (all).
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Download the full-size picture to use as your desktop wallpaper.
Today, my choice of wallpaper has gone from the Welsh castle that’s too shy to be easily spotted to one of the great English castles that’s too proud and mighty to be easily captured by the camera.
One of the few pieces of photography advice that has stuck in my head over the years goes something like this: you can’t photograph the mountain whilst you’re standing on it. And the same surely goes for castles … you can’t photograph a castle’s tower whilst you’re standing inside it. Except … sometimes, just sometimes, these centuries-old ruins can offer up exactly the right spot to stand in to appreciate just how awesome they were in their day.
Now, I’m sure that this tower in Conwy Castle would have looked very different back in the day; there would have been one or two floors above this point, with a connecting spiral stairwell perhaps allowing staff and the garrison to travel up and down to see off the pesky Welsh natives. But just imagine being one of those Welsh natives, cast into a deep dark dungeon, with little hope of survival or of seeing the outside world ever again.
How are you going to spend the day looking at this photo? Thinking of the English, and the lost splendour of the castle? Or thinking of the Welsh, gazing up at the sky and a world that they’d never see thanks to the invaders?
Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. blog | twitter: (photography) (all) | facebook: (Merthyr Road project) (all).
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Mount Stuart Square, a designated conservation area since 1980, is home to something like 60 listed buildings. Some of these listed buildings are considered landmark buildings; some are not.
The crown jewel of Mount Stuart Square is the Coal Exchange, where the world’s first 1 million pound business transaction was conducted. Today, it’s a multi-purpose building, and a walk around the outside of it reveals gems like this fading sign for the Shipping Federation Limited. I haven’t had a lot of luck tracking down information about this former office, but my best guess is that it was the Cardiff office of the Shipping Federation, an association of shipping owners formed in 1890 to oppose what was originally known as the National Amalgamated Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union, which became the National Union of Seamen before it was swallowed up by the RMT in 1990.
References
Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. blog | twitter: (photography) (all) | facebook: (Merthyr Road project) (all).
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If you’re reading this in the RSS feed, my original blog post also includes a Google map showing where this photo was taken. Unfortunately I haven’t managed to get the map to appear yet in the RSS feed, so for now you’ll have to click through to my blog if you want to see the map. Sorry.
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