It came for me at the Hellstone!

Tonight  decided to go somewhere new and, in so doing, decided to go somewhere I'd been before but a place I'd not been to for about a decade. It's a little out of the way, towards Portland but I've been meaning to make the journey ever since the first day I successfully shot the Milkyway. A place known, typically, as The Hellstone.

Due to the volume of images and an animation please click the jump to continue reading.

The rock formation pictured above is the Hellstone and it is in fact a Dolmen. Dolmen are table-like structures made from large rocks that would, originally have bee buried in a barrow. They are believed to be the reinforcing structure of burial chambers that the earth has since weathered away from over the past few thousand years.

I have a couple of photographs from my previous visit when I was using my first ever Digital Camera. The Fuji Finepix S5000. The following images were taken from back then.

The first one has been used as stock by several artists a few dozen times on Deviant Art.

The second shows The Hardy Monument from inside the formation which shows where it is in relation to the Hellstone. I also included The Hardy Monument in this trip which I will post separately. (link)

The following photos are from this evenings shoot.

That orange glow on the horizon sadly is not a sunset or the moon rising but the light pollution from Weymouth that lies to the south of the Hellstone.

I tried to capture a shot of the moon between the stones before it set below the horizon.

The Milkyway over the Hellstone.

Dolmen are also known as Portal Tombs or Portal Graves. I'm not sure as to why, I assume it refers to either the Dolmen forming the doorway into the Burial Chamber or that the Dolmen serves as a portal through to the "afterlife".

It doesn't really matter if either is true. The Milkyway tearing through the sky from the Hellstone however does give a nice aesthetic connection from the heavens to the Heaven... of sorts.

At this point during my photography session the podcast I was listening to stopped suddenly for no reason. Sometimes this happens to me because the in-line remote in my earphones is a bit spontaneous.
Anyway, i was going about rectifying the situation and starting the podcast playing again when I turned my back and saw something... coming towards me...

... I decided I should illustrate the scenario!

Somewhat terrified by the ninja-assassin-badger encounter I decided it was a sign I should move on to the next location and took a mental note to research how aggressive badgers can be once I got home. (Not much it appears)

A didn't stay long before moving onto the next location(link) but I stayed long enough to get a few seconds of time-lapse as seen in the gif above.
One sequence shows the moon setting but it's not very clear in the wide-field angle that is 16mm.

Next up, I drove up the hill a bit to get some shots of The Hardy Monument, a starry night staple for Dorset residents I feel.