Old workshop by the roadside on Brimscombe Hill

I had a slow start after the tiring nature of the last few days and the early starts. By lunchtime I'd printed an A4 image for a client, mounted it and then delivered it to Thrupp, about two miles up the valley. In stead of going straight home I wandered further up the valley to Brimscombe where a B road ascends the side valley to the head of the combe and up beyond it onto the top of Minchinhampton Common.

I'd contemplated looking for skylarks but when I arrived  and parked on the grassland at my usual sighting point near Tom Long's Post, there were no skylarks to be heard or seen. Many people were milling about and even the cows seemed to have vacated the open spaces while humanity was at their Sunday play. A few kites were in the sky, the ice cream van had a long queue and families were gathered in seated groups or else walking across the common.

I didn't stay long as I prefer that space when it is relatively empty. I retraced my steps back towards Brimscombe and halfway down the hill I parked in a lay-by to try and catch some landscape views of the steep sided Brimscombe valley and the Golden Valley looking westward towards Stroud.

Earlier on the Common I'd been having problems with Error messages on my main Canon camera, which was annoying. I feared that some of the personal settings had been altered as I kept seeing rather oddly coloured exposures. I thought perhaps a preset had been engaged. I also found the focus was very poor on most of the shots, which is unusual for my favourite 70-200mm lens.

I did take some more pictures with that lens of the wide views along the valley, and although the focus improved the exposures were still not as I anticipated. I'll have to have thoroughly check the whole menu system for wrong settings, and clean the contacts.

So I also used my delightful Fujifilm which never puts a foot wrong. I managed to get some landscapes, which I can use as a reference for a proper and timely shoot when the light is better. As I walked back up the hill, along what is almost certainly an ancient track's route, I noticed several old buildings from when there was an active hamlet on that hillside. There was a lovely old shopfront, a former pub and this building all built of Cotswold stone. In fact the area  just a hundred metres beyond this spot is called Walls Quaryy, and there is an obvious 'cliff' face where the stone was cut straight out of the exposed rock for all the local houses and stone walls, none of which techniques or materials are now generally used except when making repairs.

I imagine this building, which lies a few yards downhill from a larger house, was a type of workshop come barn for a small holding. The valley sides are very steep and most of the spaces for building were used for weavers' cottages. A couple of small farms are found down in the valley bottoms though horses are more commonly kept there for recreation now, rather than sheep and cows grazing the valley sides. Sheep were the life blood of the Cotswolds from the twelfth century until late Victorian times, and the water power from the local streams enabled the wool industry to be become world famous for a time.

If you look closely you can see the last flakes of blue paint on the wooden doors, which probably opened for a cart to be stored, and small door as an entrance to the workshop. The roof has been lost to corrugated asbestos, rather than the special local roofing stone it would originally have been covered with. But I noticed that there are cacti in the upper window which suggests the barn is occupied. they would have wonderful views down the Golden Valley for many miles, exactly what I'd wanted to capture.