Carnlough Harbour - a travel hub!

Carnlough village is on the Antrim Coast Road (the A2) about 20km North of Larne. It is at the mouth of Glen Cloy - the second of the Glens of Antrim. Glen Cloy is also known as the "Glen of the Hedges". On a clear day The Mull of Kintyre, in Scotland, is visible from the harbour wall.

The harbour became a travel hub in the 1850s when the railway bridge was built. The bridge, which can be seen between the cream and blue buildings across the harbour, carried a railway line from Gortin limestone quarry on the hillside behind the village to ships waiting in the harbour. From here the limestone was transported to a chemical plant in Glasgow, where it would be processed for use in the steel, textile and farming industries.

The bridge still dominates the village with the main street (the A2) passing under it. The track on top of the bridge is now a cycle and foot path used by tourists. It passes at roof height between a hotel and the building that was once the town hall, which is now the local library.

The Harbour was known as Hurry Head from the name given to the gravity driven rail system that brought the limestone down and the empty trucks back up. The railway from the quarry operated for over a 100 years.

For several decades at the start of the twentieth century there was also a locomotive called "The Otter" that operated on a line along the coast from Tullydaughter Quarry 4km South of Hurry Head harbour.

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Europe / UK-Northern Ireland

Lat: 54° 59' 36.63" N
Long: 6° 60' 19.58" W

Elevation: 0

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Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

The source images were taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mk II, Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens.

The camera was mounted on a Kaiden Kiwi panorama adapter on a Manfrotto 190XDB tripod.

A sky shot, a ground shot and six horizontal shots, were taken. The horizontal shots were at 60° intervals. Each "shot" consisted of three bracketed exposures from +2 to -2 stops. (The exposures were at shutter speeds: 1/500, 1/320, 1/200, 1/125, 1/80, 1/50, 1/30 all at an aperture of f/16.)

A total of 24 separate images were combined using Hugin (which in turn invokes Nona, Enfuse and Enblend) in order to achieve this High Dynamic Range type result.