This location has been the subject of a previous post, here, a location I don’t personally know, but I trust someone reading this knows well. The image below was first used in September 2024.

It seems the image below, a new one, was taken of the nearer opposite shore with the hotel behind the photographer’s left shoulder, and the edge of a building along the right margin here, that ‘s the barn you see above to the left side of the image. The photo above and the two versions of the one below may even have been taken the same day.

As is true for so many images I post here, images that show faces clearly enough to be identifiable, I just wish I knew more detail, the people here, and the relationships between them, the photographer, the camera, the occasion, the date, and I could go on. These are the ancestors of people somewhere, maybe even within a few miles radius of this very location. I’d love it if someone wrote in to say something like this: “the man in the foreground to the left is my great-grandfather, he was 56 years old at the time, he worked on the ferry as __, the two men to the right and not on the boat did not live locally but were there to __, the photographer’s name was __,” and I could go on again.

Meanwhile, I’d like to request that you pass the URL for this blog onto three people or more this weekend, that is if you enjoy looking at nthese photos yourself. A conversation with a friend and fellow canal enthusiast the other day reveal how much I must be living and working in my own bubble, my own silo, because although i knew of his work, he was not familiar with Dispatches.