It was New Years Day, we had no plans and I had a new camera to break in. We opened up google maps and I scrolled around a bit then zoomed in on Northumberland and picked a random village that was in the vague direction I fancied heading in. Alwinton. I didn't realise at the time but Alwinton has one road in, and the same road out. It's a total dead end in the middle of nowhere.
Off we went, stopping whenever we saw something worth photographing, with no timescale in mind. We eventually reached Alwinton and saw that this tiny village in the middle of farmland, woods and hills was absolutely packed. There were cars, people and quad bikes everywhere. At first I thought it must be some kind of quad bike countryside meet up, so we got out the car to explore. I'm always looking for weird events to document and I couldn't believe we'd randomly stumbled upon something happening.
As we got to the centre of the chaos we realised we'd happened upon a hunt. Literally just as they were about to set off. Absolutely amazing timing! We were obviously not meant to be there. Everybody looked like they knew each other and we stuck out like a sore thumb. The fact we'd turned up right on time, and in a hidden little village, everybody must have just assumed we were friends of friends of someone. There was no way we'd found this by chance (which we totally did, I swear I'm psychic).
So, obviously hunting is a controversial topic, but I decided to purely document, not support, nor protest. I'm just showing you what I see.
On a brighter note, this was my first roll through the Nikon FM2N and everything came out great. As soon as I picked it up, it felt right, and it's very rare I get that with a camera. I have a feeling we're going to have a long happy relationship!
