Botany Bay Beach

At the end of the Botany Bay road is the plantation. Through the plantation grounds and across a boardwalk is one of the most amazing beaches I've ever seen.

On a sunny day, the colours were a bleached palette of sky and bone. The beach is shallow, but strewn across it are the skeletons of ancient coastal trees, like a dinosaur graveyard. The storms of the last few years have shifted and destroyed some of these - I'd seen some amazing older images of branches reaching up from the water against the sunrise - but it's still very atmospheric.

I'd planned this as a location for my good friend Silas Fretwell, and the noble J obliged in his modelling duties, as pelicans wheeled overhead, fluffy white clouds floated southwards and the sun beat down with beautiful cruelty.

The road to Botany Bay

This was one of the most atmospheric places we visited in South Carolina.

If you live in Northern Ireland or you're a Game of Thrones fan, you might be put in mind of the Dark Hedges, near Armoy in County Antrim. This is the road to Botany Bay Plantation, near Edisto Beach, 3798 miles away.

It's the same idea - an avenue of trees lending grandeur to the approach to a stately house. But these are southern live oaks rather than beeches. And the road is surfaced with sand. And only two other people passed by in the half hour that we spent there.

The quiet, the quality of the late afternoon southern light, and the sense of history all around made travelling the road a special, almost spiritual experience. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have imagined stories and films rising from every bend in the road.

In a place like this, stories start romantic, but it doesn't take long before painful historical facts intrude and you see the reality of the lovingly tended plantation grounds. It's a landscape built up to grandeur on slavery, fading into decline ever since, but still beautiful.

When you come from Ireland, you're used to finding that your history has a traumatic flip side and beauty is troubled. Maybe that's always the way.

(Looking backwards from the more elegant angle of the shoot...)

Low Country squares

A holiday within a holiday - at the end of July, we spent a few days staying in a lovely house belonging to generous friends in Green Pond, South Carolina.

Relaxation-wise, it was fabulous: a morning spent strolling round Beaufort; buying shrimp directly from Elijah at his trawler at Bennett's Point (turned out a pound of shrimp apiece was really quite a lot, but we ate it all no problem); driving the sandy roads overhung with live oak and Spanish moss; walking in the grounds of the derelict Old Sheldon Church at Yemassee; visiting the beautiful Wildlife Management Areas nearby; getting very sandy in the lively waves at Edisto Beach and, best of all, spending a day amongst the skeleton trees of Botany Bay Beach. 

Photography-wise, it was a gift too. The colours of the landscapes, distinctly southern, and the quality of the light, especially after a rainstorm, were inspiring. And since Silas Fretwell was driving me about in his Jeep, he made an appearance in a couple of shoots - more from those later, perhaps.

Really, we only scratched the surface of what this beautiful Low Country area has to offer. I left full of ideas for future work and so thankful for the kindness of the friends who enabled us to visit so easily and happily.