Go to this location: What3Words ///peanut.debit.slope
Whether we are in the city or countryside, the land upon which all life lives is just a thin skin of soil and stone that covers an immense mantle of molten rock on this giant sphere we call earth. In centuries past our relationship with the land was much closer than it is today. We oriented our lives around the rising and setting of the sun, the cycles of the seasons and the shifting weather patterns. Although most of us don’t rely on the land so closely nowadays, we still have some awareness of how the sun moves across the sky every day because we know which room in our house gets the morning sun, and which gets the hottest in the summer months. There’s an old local saying “as red as the rising sun at Bromford” possibly coined by people living on the high ground to the west of Birmingham as they looked east towards Bromford every morning.
As you travel clockwise along Bromford Lane from Erdington and cross the A38 Tyburn Road, The Fort is off to the east. If you could keep going directly east for 150 miles (much longer by road or rail), you’d eventually reach Lowestoft on the English coast.
The blurred artefact is an aerial photograph of Fort Dunlop before the M6, Castle Vale or the JLR factory were built. What is now a dense urban and industrial was, at the time the photo was taken in the early 20th century, just beginning to shift from farmland to factory.