Last weekend I took a winter walk on the “Tolkien Trail“, a 10km circular route starting in the Lancashire village of Hurst Green. Apparently this part of the world helped inspire J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of Middle Earth, so I was excited to see what interesting landscapes would stretch out before me.

Accompanying me on my journey was my Pentax ME-F with the 50mm f/1.7 Pentax-M lens, loaded with Kodak ColorPlus 200.

The picturesque and pleasant plod was pretty muddy, as you might expect at this time of year, but overall relatively easy going with not too many steep slopes, a variety of landscapes through fields, wooded areas, and a long flat river section towards the end. There were direction signs through most of the walk, though the map and location finder on the website helped keep us on track.

Whilst the walk was lovely, the Tolkien aspect is probably more marketing than reality, I was disappointed there were no areas along the trail which were highlighted as specific sites of interest to the Tolkien himself, perhaps I really just wanted to see a statue of a Hobbit along the route.

The Pentax performed brilliantly as usual, though with the lens wide open in the fading winter light, I missed focus a couple of times. I dropped the film off at Come Through Lab on the Sunday and I had the scans by Monday afternoon, so excellent service again there. Great looking scans and colour choices, I left most of them unedited with only minor tweaks to the ones I did fix.

Altogether a good day out and some pleasing pictures to go with it.