Aerial photos of Hadrian\'s Wall

[mcbishop]

You have now had the chance to inspect the detailed photographs of various components of Hadrian's Wall, as well as examine the possibilities of what can be done with the existing vertical aerial coverage of the area. However, what is lacking is oblique aerial photography that is available with a Creative Commons licence that can, like the photos from the ground, be used for educational or non-commercial purposes. If you want to see how good oblique aerial photography of the Wall can be, look at what this chap achieves from his autogyro.

Now I have a proposal. I have the opportunity to use a two-seat high-wing monoplane in April to fly the length of the Wall and back and take digital photos of the whole thing, as well as details of important components like the forts and surviving milecastles and turrets. If all goes well, it may even be possible to do the outward trip along the Wall and the return part along the Stanegate. The aircraft is one of the tugs at my gliding club and, as a member, I get the use of it at an extremely preferential rate. However, it still costs £105 per hour and the flight from one end of the Wall to the other and back is about two hours so I need to raise at least £210 to cover the cost of the flight.

This is where RAT members come in. I am looking for sponsorship to cover the cost (even $10/£10/€10 can help) and have already had some offers (and one £10 note!). The resulting photos will initially be placed on Flickr with a CC Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-and-Share-Alike licence which means they can be used for the purposes outlined above, whilst any requests for commercial use (admittedly unlikely with my photographic skills, although my snaps have been known to adorn Osprey volumes) will be directed to Jasper, who can have the proceeds for the commercial rights towards RAT funds. The licence also permits RAC to copy the images, so long after my Flickr account has gone, the pictures could still be available through RAC. So, a community effort with tangible community benefits.

The flight is scheduled for April (when the tug has to be down at Carlisle for a flying week) and will take some careful planning as it involves passing through the controlled airspace of Newcastle airport (fortunately my pilot is a former air traffic controller and we will be going down to see them beforehand).

If you want to help, make a pledge here, or if you would rather it remained anonymous, contact Jasper or me directly. If this is successful who knows what next: the Antonine Wall, the outpost forts? Perhaps other members of RAT could do something similar on other frontiers; the possibilities are intriguing.

Mike Bishop

[Salvianus]

Great idea. I've p.m. ed you.

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

Hopefully I may be good for an asse or two? Forgive th spelling to go with the bad pun!

Regards

[MARCvSVIBIvSMAvRINvS]

Mike i would love to help you out but alass at the mo i dont have the dosh...

maybe in afew months when i have found a new filmjob.......

do you have Paypal?

best wishes,

M.VIB.M.

[Luca]

That's right, Mike do you have paypal?
Is the only way to get money easily and with not so many additional expenses.
Jasper could arrange a "donate" button on a fresh new web page for this.

[mcbishop]

That's right, Mike do you have paypal?
Is the only way to get money easily and with not so many additional expenses.

Okay, I've set up a PayPal 'donate' button on a separate page which summarises the project once more, as well as giving links to the various atlases and photos. Never done one of these before so let's hope it does what it says on the tin.

Mike Bishop

[Praefectusclassis]

I think this is in an excellent idea and if noone objects, I'll pass some of the generous donations to RAT on to Mike.

[Robert Vermaat]

Good idea.

[Arahne]

Mr. Bishop, what kind of photo equipment do You plan to use. Do You have any experience in aero photography?

[mcbishop]

Mr. Bishop, what kind of photo equipment do You plan to use.

A Kodak Z740 and a Canon Eos. Might take my old Pentax SLR too, but these days I prefer digital.

Do You have any experience in aero photography?

Yup (see attached). This is a view of Milfield airfield (with the Northumberland coastline in the distance) which was taken whilst flying the aircraft, maintaining a lookout pattern, and with one eye on the instruments and the other on the string (so you don't look at the camera, you point the aircraft at 90 degrees to what you want to photograph). Some pilots are far better at it than me. That is why I will have a good pilot to do the flying while I concentrate on the photography. (For those who feel the need for a Roman component, the Devil's Causeway, the road from the Portgate on Hadrian's Wall to Tweedmouth, runs across the centre of the picture, just in front of the ridge in the middle distance; and no, I can't see it either). My supervisor was an expert on aerial photography and I was also fortunate enough to know Derrick Riley (a WW2 Mosquito pilot who went on to be one of the leading amateur aerial photographers in the Midlands... and he both did the flying and took the photos! Awful driver, though...).

Mike Bishop

[Caballo]

Count me in!

Cheers

[mcbishop]

Thanks to those who have contributed so far. We have enough to get the plane off the ground, up to 2000ft, and on its way to Bowness. Now we need a bit more to get to Wallsend and back ;-)

Mike Bishop

[Crispvs]

I am in too. Proud to support a very worthy project.

Crispvs

[mcbishop]

Thanks to those who have contributed so far. We have enough to get the plane off the ground, up to 2000ft, and on its way to Bowness. Now we need a bit more to get to Wallsend and back ;-)

In terms of money received and funds promised, I should now have enough to complete the flight plus add in South Shields and the Cumbrian Coast down as far as Maryport (but I need to clear the additions with my pilot). The flight will be at the end of April (which precise day depends upon the weather) but I will put an account of it on the web along with the resulting photos.

In the meantime, for those who wish to indulge in a little vicarious mural aviation, take a look at this.

Whilst we all know and love Google Earth, the coverage of most of the Hadrian's Wall area is, to quote a very good friend of mine, 'a bit pants', whilst Micro$oft's Virtual Earth (aka maps.live.com or local.live.com) uses the hires GetMapping coverage... but is rather clunky. Enter NASA with World Wind, another virtual globe (although this one only runs on windoze), but one for which a plugin is available that lets you use the Virtual Earth/Getmapping coverage mapped to a 3D terrain (as above, an image of Carrawburgh fort, with the mithraeum to the south-west of the fort, from an approximate altitude of 300 ft; Coventina's well is in the brown boggy bit to the right). Here's a low-level oblique view of Housesteads:

If you decide to experiment with the Worldwind/Virtual Earth combination, be warned: the ground 'wobbles' in a blubbery sort of way when loading some of the tiles (hence 'the fat of the land'? No, perhaps not...).

You can of course use the Virtual Earth 3D plugin for Internet Exploder, but it won't work for Firefox or any mozilloid browser (so, by definition, is a bit pants) and, again, only works for windoze. Non-windoze users may care to note that the next version of World Wind will be in java and will therefore be cross-platform.

Thanks again to all contributors and pledgees. First reports on the flight will appear here late April/early May. At least the ground doesn't wobble when you're in an aeroplane...

Mike Bishop