Stretch the Horizon

Across Catlow Fell in the Forest of Bowland, between lofty Raven’s Castle (482 metres/ 1581 feet) and the craggy Bowland Knotts (430 meters/ 1410 feet) stands a jumble of boulders jutting from the raised grassland. This easily-missed collection of  grey rocks is named Cold Stone (402 metres/ 1318 feet) and once you get close to them, you realise that the stones form a slight ridge that runs for around 300 yards or so, with the right-hand edge being the highest and most prominent point. 

Further to the left, the ridge gradually disappears into the ground and it’s around this point that I spotted an amazing pareidolia effect within the shadow-cast rockfaces, in conjunction with the overhead Sun, which created an actual ‘rock-face’ within in the weather-worn gritstones! 

Reminds me of something you would find in old monster movies, once the adventurers’ had made landfall on a distant and mysterious island and the special-effects geniuses would then work their stop-animation magic over a backdrop of towering cliffs, usually with a cave opening that looks like a just-visible face in the rocks…

*Shot on a Samsung S10+ 12mp phone camera with camera settings at ISO-50, aperture at f/2.4, centre-weighted metering mode and an exposure time of 1/900 seconds*