The Landscapes That Made Me.
I'm standing at the edge of Ullswater, on that bit of footpath between Howtown and Glenridding where the rocks jut out. Hills stretching for miles. The Ullswater steamer passing in the distance, trailing a thin line of white across the grey. I've been asked more than once where I'd want a memorial bench if I had one. Some people find that question morbid. I don't. I have an answer that's never changed. Right here. This exact spot.
Not because it's the most dramatic landscape I've ever seen, though it's certainly up there. But because I sat here once with my family, watching the world go by, and something settled in me. A recognition. This is what home feels like, even when you're hours from the house you grew up in.
The Lake District made me. Not metaphorically. Actually made me into the person standing here today, camera in hand, mud on my boots, entirely certain this is where I'm supposed to be. And here's what took me years to understand. The landscapes you return to don't just give you nice memories. They show you who you're becoming.
The Work Behind the View
I was shaped by returning. By spending two weeks every summer in the same cottage on a working farm. By cows across the road and tractors at all hours. By sitting on the kitchen step every evening giving cuddles to a cat I called Mr Puddycat, who had the air of a animal who waits his entire life for someone to arrive and give him the attention he demanded. I'm still absolutely fascinated by tractors all these years later, which tells you how deep some patterns run.
But here's what I didn't fully understand as a child. Those landscapes didn't exist naturally. They were maintained. Kept thriving by people who'd dedicated their lives to the land. The animals I loved seeing were there because someone was caring for them, often in brutal conditions, often for far less money than the work deserves. I understood the beauty long before I understood the labour that produced it. The light falling across a well-kept field is partly the light and partly the person who got up before it arrived. When I photograph a farm, I'm not just photographing a landscape. I'm photographing evidence of care. Of someone who shows up every day for something larger than themselves, mostly without anyone watching.
The Constant That Measures Change
Here's what returning to the same place does. It gives you something constant to measure your own change against. I remember the 199 steps in Whitby, climbing from the harbour up to the abbey. I still count them every single time. There were years I ran up them. Years I stopped halfway. Years I climbed them slowly on purpose, not because I needed to but because I wanted to be there for longer. Young me playing hide and seek in the abbey ruins, barely noticing what I was inside. Then years later standing still for the first time, actually looking at the stonework. Then understanding the history. Then eventually standing there thinking about how these repeated returns had quietly accumulated into something I could only see in retrospect.
The landscape stays roughly the same. I'm what changes. One year you're photographing because it's fun. The next because you're learning technique. Eventually because you understand something about light and patience and authenticity that you couldn't have articulated five years earlier. That recognition only comes from repetition.
The Engineering Lesson
The North York Moors showed me something different. Everyone notices the variety; mountains to coast, moorland that changes colour with the season. But what caught my attention was the engineering. The North Yorkshire Moors Railway. A steam engine working its way through that landscape, the smoke catching the light, the sound arriving before the engine does.
Here's something most country photographers would find strange. I'm as drawn to the human-made structures in a landscape as I am to the natural formations. The viaducts carrying trains across valleys. The stone walls dividing fields that have stood for centuries, built by people whose names nobody remembers. A Victorian viaduct is a record of someone standing in a valley and asking: how do we cross this without filling it in? The answer wasn't to force the landscape into submission. It was architecture that works with what's there. That eventually becomes part of what's there. That people can no longer imagine the view without. These aren't scars on a landscape. They're the landscape's memory of being thought about carefully.
Testing What Doesn't Fit
I tried living in a small coastal village once. Beautiful. Quiet. The kind of place people retire to when they want life to slow down. It sounded ideal on paper. I felt trapped almost immediately. Reliant on public transport, which meant I couldn't take a shoot booking an hour away without consulting a timetable, couldn't drive out into countryside when I wanted to, couldn't work at four in the morning when the light was right. Freedom, it turns out, is not a personality quirk for me. It's how I work. Living somewhere beautiful wasn't enough. It had to be somewhere that supported the life I was trying to build. I lasted a couple of years before I accepted it wasn't working. Environment isn't just about beauty. It's about function. About whether a place lets you do your best work or constantly works against you. Once I stopped apologising for that, everything got clearer.
How This Shapes the Work
I didn't choose to become a countryside photographer through careful career planning. This was inevitable. Established years before I picked up a camera professionally. By repetition. By return. By having these landscapes sink in deep enough that they became part of how I see everything else.
When I photograph a horse, I'm not just capturing an animal. I'm capturing a relationship with landscape. With the people who work it. With a way of life that shaped me before I could articulate why it mattered. I'll spend hours lying in a muddy field waiting for a horse to relax, and I don't experience that as patience. I experience it as being back somewhere I understand. The same quality of attention I brought to that window seat as a child, watching the light go down over fields I didn't own but felt at home in, is the same quality I bring to a shoot.
It doesn't feel like discipline. It feels like returning somewhere. If I'd stayed in that coastal village, I'd have had a beautiful view and no way to reach it at four in the morning. If I'd never been taken to that farm as a child, I'd have no idea what I was looking for when I finally started looking.
The landscapes that made you aren't just nice memories. They're instructions. And somewhere in them is an answer to the question of what you're actually building, and why it has to look the way it does. I know where my bench would go. That tells me everything I need to know about the rest.
Listen to Episode Eight: The Landscapes That Made Me →
The full story, told properly. Including the parts that don't make me look good.
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