Cilan Uchaf from the air

I caught a glimpse of the BBC series Coast on television last week and an aerial scene in it reminded me of this photograph.  I took this shot from a Ryanair flight from Lyon to Dublin as we passed over the Welsh coast and across the Irish Sea.

This was the same flight where I captured a silhouette of my brother-in-law, and later an aerial view of Corballis golf course.  I’ve since identified this particular image as of Cilan Uchaf, which is a Welsh headland that juts into the Irish Sea, and is just about the last point before Ireland at which may flights into Dublin fly over land.

This is off topic, but identifying the location from this photograph and Google Maps reminded me of my Leaving Cert geography exam many years ago.  Back then, and maybe still, the exam had a question which required you to cross-reference an aerial photograph with an ordnance survey map to determine where the photograph was of.

In 1996 there was a bit of controversy as to the correct answer.  To identify it (it was either Lusk or Rush – I can’t remember which) it turned out you were at a distinct advantage if you knew that strawberry-growing was a local industry.  This knowledge together with the the presence of greenhouses in the photograph allowed you to determine the answer, while those not in the know struggled to find any distinguishing features between the right answer and another feasible possibility.  I believe the upshot was that students with either possibility got full credit.

Anyway, back to this photograph.  It’s a so-so aerial shot to be honest, but I like the definition on the coastline around the headland, and the clouds and their shadows further inland.  The thick window that I was shooting through, and the angle at which I was doing so, means the top half of the image gets quite washed out, and indeed in the top right corner the image is fully blown out.  I actually spotted this from the histogram when I shot it and knew I was going to have this white region, but by the time I went to take another shot the headland was out of view and all that was below was water.