Bloody Pulpit

Nine years on, this is still the first place I think of whenever anyone asks about the best places I’ve been. It comes to mind most months. The print hangs on our bedroom wall.

A good part of that is how it felt to find. There was almost nothing about Finnich Glen online when I was planning the trip — a few rough directions on somebody’s personal blog and not much else — so getting there meant a pull-off, a walk across a field, a stretch of woodland, and eventually a knotted rope tied to a tree at the lip of the gorge. You go down the rope, on a bank that is mostly mud and not offering to help you. I did it and I’d do it again, and I still wouldn’t tell anyone else they ought to.

What’s down there is a narrow gorge with red sandstone walls under thick layers of moss and water running red along the floor. It’s tall and close and dim in the middle of the day, with dappled light finding its way down in patches. The nearest thing I can compare it to is a slot canyon that a forest grew over, or the Narrows, if the Narrows were green.

I scouted it on the first visit and worked out that I’d have to stand in the water to get the frame I wanted, so we left, I went and bought a pair of wellies specifically for this photograph, and we came back the next day.

There’s one thing in the picture that nobody ever guesses. A small waterfall upstream churns the water and sends bubbles down through the gorge, and over a one-second exposure those bubbles draw themselves out into the white streaks running across the red. They’re doing most of the work of making the water look like it’s moving, but people can’t work out what they are.

This was later in the same Trossachs stretch that opened with The Leap.