The Black Notch of Alligin and the trees in the corrie.

The notch formed several thousand years ago when a huge chunk of the mountain tumbled down into the corrie. For at least the last 150 years, the resulting scree has been covered with a scrubby forest of birch, rowan, holly and pine growing among huge, unstable boulders.

First I went over the hill, west to east. The three Horns of Alligin are fun scrambles, and the path goes right by the notch – it’s suddenly right there, a yawning gap with a view to a distant horizon and a long drop.

Delta 400 should’ve been good for this – relatively high ISO for the evening, good detail for the landscape. But apparently T-grain films like Delta don’t really respond well to development in Rodinal, which was all I had.

So the photos from the first day are grainier than I’d like. I could have waited until I had some D76, or maybe used something more specific, or I could have stand-developed in weak Rodinal solution for an hour.

The next day I shot a roll of FP4+ in the corrie. This worked a lot better with the Rodinal – still a bit grainy but much smoother than the Delta 400, with much better tone and contrast.