Glamis Dam

Just half a mile from the famous Glamis Castle in Angus where the Queen Mother spent her childhood is a small dam that was built to provide power to the village that gives the castle it's name. It's an unprepossessing affair, just a simple stone-built dam holding back the Glen Ogilvie Burn.

For our family, however, it was a regular haunt, a popular destination for a drive in the countryside and an excuse for a picnic and for the annual egg-rolling tradition at Easter. My mum and dad used to cycle to the dam in their teens and early 20s, a not-too-taxing distance of around 14 miles, often accompanied by a group of friends also on their bikes. It must have been a bit like cycling scenes from those films from the 1940s and '50s - Kenneth More in The 39 Steps springs to mind.

My father, aged about 25, at Glamis Dam after he’d moved on from cycling to his motor bike. The gap in the fence just over his left shoulder is the weir. The pic dates back to about 1948 and was taken by his life-long pal, Jim "I've forgotten to focus again" Patterson.

It was natural enough for my parents to take me and my brother out to the same spot so I grew up knowing the dam and the surrounding area like the back of my hand. In my childhood days, it was heavily wooded with lovely old deciduous trees but a new estate owner in the 1990s decided to fell many of them and put up a deer fence, giving the distinct impression that the place was out of bounds. I hadn't been back since around that time but, thinking about a location for a photo trip with Phil, I thought it might be good to see how it had changed.

Well, some of the new planting has started filling out the denuded north-facing slopes but the dam itself had deteriorated a fair bit since I last saw it. It's always been a place fraught with danger for young families with a drop from the weir onto rocks below that would leave you in hospital for a few weeks - or worse.

Incredibly, my mum and dad used to walk barefoot across the weir with their bikes on their shoulders and it was like wet marble in those days. Me and Phil decided that sort of tomfoolery was best left to more reckless types - or perhaps someone half our age - so we made our excuses and left before our usual devil-may-care bravado got the better of us.

Looking straight up the face of the dam into the light. It was a bit of a torture test for the Zeiss 28mm but it did OK.

The foot of the dam is reached via a well worn path down a steep slope. At the bottom it was quite dark, courtesy of the heavy tree canopy, but not too noisy, the water flowing over the weir landing on a jumble of rocks that made it more akin to a smallish waterfall than a raging torrent.

The lush vegetation and humidity endowed it with more of a tropical feel than we’re normally used to in Scotland. I said to Phil that I wouldn’t have been too surprised to have seen Arnold Schwarzenegger leaping off the opposite bank into the water closely pursued by The Predator.

My camera of choice for the trip was a Contax 137MA with 28mm, 50mm and 100mm Zeiss lenses. I was using some Pan F that was a little out of date to see how it performed with Rodinal 1:50. I rated the film at 32 ISO with the intention of bracketing a stop above and below.

Light was striking the door leaning against a wall so I tried to make a feature of it. The wind-blown shrubs make a nice frame.

As luck would have it, the Contax decided to play up, developing a reluctance to fire when instructed by the self timer. It would take three or four goes, sometimes more, to trigger the shutter. I abandoned the bracketing plan and just shot everything at 32 ISO on auto exposure. Given that the film was out of date and I was using it for the first time with Rodinal, I didn’t think it made much point in being too fussy. As it was, the negatives turned out OK but maybe a bit over-developed. I think from memory I gave them 12 mins when probably 10 would have done.

This is an old shot of the dam that I took on the Mamiya Press about 35 years ago. Optimistically, I half expected to find the tree branches still in place.

The Glamis visit was followed by another detour to admire one of the ruined former mansions that punctuate the countryside around here. The Contax continued to act up but, again, the negs turned out fine.

There was one neg in particular - that’s it below - that had a beautiful appearance to it. I noticed it when it was sitting on the light box and again in the scan. The highlights seemed to come from within the neg. Phil and I have discussed particular “looks” in negatives and prints often enough that we now call their subjective nature and the fact that nobody seems able to demonstrate what they think they’re seeing to other people, “unsubstantiated bollocks” or UB. Well, there was no UB about this neg as Phil picked up on it straight away when I sent him some scans. I hadn’t mentioned it as I didn’t want to influence him.

I speculated, as is the wont of self-delusional photographers, that it might have been a combination of the Zeiss lenses, Pan F and Rodinal. Some people claim that Rodinal does strange things to highlights, imparting them with a “glow”. (Oh, no, he went there!) Of course, the far more likely reason for this attractive look was that it was a combination of all these factors, but most importantly the light.

Only a side-by-side comparison done at the time with different lenses, film and developer could have proved the point but that didn’t happen so we’re left to speculate over yet another out-of-the-ordinary but, ultimately, UB look that can be added to the long list of “glow” candidates.