It’s been a year since my first foray into wire wool photography and since the nights are rapidly drawing out now a second excursion was hastily planned. Last time out my good friend Dave and I almost got cut off by the black tide rising at the north end of Morecambe Bay so this time we opted for a location that was firmly inland. East Lancashire to be precise and the abandoned communities of Haslingden Grane…

On the surface it was just the kind of place that would interest me enough to take a look – a set of ruined buildings with a back story; in this case a settlement of 1300 or so people connected to farming, local quarrying and the illegal distilling of whisky. The decline of opportunities coupled with the creation of three reservoirs contributed to the area being almost entirely abandoned by the 1920s, by which time the final reservoir had been built and the local cotton mill submerged within it. By daylight it looked like an interesting wander, but it was dusk when we arrived and following a swift half at the nearest hostelry, we wandered into the trees in the direction vaguely suggested by the GPS…

Now if there’s a problem with abandoned and desolate locations it’s the lack of a reliable 3G network, and with the GPS faltering we soon found ourselves at the water’s edge – looking in the wrong direction. A quick backtrack resulted in us losing light and by the time we eventually got to the ruins it was almost pitch black. Dave had edged ahead and stumbled into a deep bog – something he chose to keep to himself as I rounded the corner and sank to my knees. Wet feet aside our dismay was short-lived as we realised we had arrived at the setting we hunted for our creative photography.

If you’re not familiar, the basic premise of wire wool photography is to put the abrasive material into a metal egg whisk, light it and spin it on a chain to create light patterns from the sparks while the camera takes a long exposure shot. As it was dark there was no danger of light pollution so we took it in turns to man the cameras while the other spun the wool.

Take one was mine and I climbed down into the first building and went for it. Success, I thought as the sparks died and the shot was complete. My eyes were adjusting the darkness once more when Dave cried out ‘the floor’s on fire’! I looked down to see that a rogue spark had set fire to the rest of our stash, and frantically stamped it out to save the rest of the evening. We tried three different ruins and had some fun with it when we called it a night and went to relocate the car.

Wet and muddy though we were, the way we had arrived was ruled out as potentially disastrous and instead we headed towards the distant lights of a main road. It looked easy enough but we didn’t bank on the quarry that was in the way and demanded another long detour, before we finally found the road and eventually the car. Even then the calamity wasn’t over as the confusing M6/M65 intersection resulted in us taking a tour of Preston by night that added a good half hour to the journey time and almost incubated a couple of cases of trench foot.

It had all seemed so simple in the planning and the resulting pictures looked okay, but having skirted round a reservoir, stumbled through a bog, got lost and contoured a quarry in the dark, I think it’s fair to say we missed the ‘disabled friendly path’ that the map suggested…