Secrets and lies: the dark side of Jersey
The first sign to greet visitors to Gorey, on the east coast of Jersey, is a bright red plaque with white lettering that says, “Caution: Ducks crossing”. Tripping over a duck is about the most dangerous thing you would expect to happen in this picture-postcard village, where the hotel tourist literature boasts of how safe the streets are.
Visitors are encouraged to explore the warren of backstreets which are pitch-black at night and consist, at this time of year at least, of empty tea rooms and restaurants serving the fresh “catch of the day” to the occasional tourist. High above, on top of the cliffs above the town’s medieval harbour, Mont Orgueil casts its shadow, the 13th-century bastion built to protect the island from the threat of invasion from the French.
But now a much darker shadow looms over this village. Further up the hill, to the east of the castle, stands another historic building, a 19th-century grey stone structure built to house “young people of the lower classes of society and neglected children”, which has become the setting of one of the worst cases of child abuse in the recent history of the British Isles.
The team mounting a painstaking forensic excavation of the Haut de la Garenne former children’s home have pinpointed six more places where they think corpses are buried, in addition to the one set of child’s remains they have already found. The police suspect that hundreds of minors were abused at Haut de la Garenne in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the most disturbing features of the grim tale emerging is the silence and the secrecy that has hung over the building for so long. The guilty had good reason to be quiet, but there are victims who have grown into late middle age on the island without telling what they knew, and political leaders who seemed to be lacking in any curiosity about what went on in that home on the hill.
Tags: castle, gorey
March 16th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
You better start… A lot of work a head of you….
March 16th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
most impressing castles around..
March 16th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Always size up a castle by its zombie repelling abilities. Numbers two and four look like keepers. Water, no gaping entry points.
March 16th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
I don’t have a moat, but does my muddy lawn count?
March 16th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Castles… why dont we live in these any more
March 16th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Slow shutter speed. It’s true that it doesn’t look quite like that to the naked eye, but human perception of moving objects is probably impossible to capture in a static image.
March 16th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Exactly what I was going to say. Now I see why people rave about these HDR photos.
March 16th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
I’ve never seen running water look like that except on cheap calendars.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:16 am
But, it’s soooo sad…
March 17th, 2008 at 1:06 am
Sounds sort of like impressionism — which was itself a reaction to the invention of the camera and the ease with which ‘perfect’ realistic pictures could be taken.
March 17th, 2008 at 1:57 am
Nice explanation. To add, photographers have been using various techniques to accomplish this goal from the beginning by using filters and dodging and burning areas of a print.For example a photographer wants to capture a landscape with a dramatic cloud-filled sky. When he goes to make his print, the correct exposure for the land will leave the sky looking boring and underexposed; not at all like he remembers. So he shields the land portion from the light and just increases the exposure time for the sky portion, which darkens the clouds and reveals the detail that was hidden there in the dense emulsion on the negative.
March 17th, 2008 at 2:47 am
This is especially a problem with digital cameras. Film cameras where a little bit better.Anyways, the whole point is to capture the full range of light and colour that is normally lost in a regular digital photo.Then some retards figured out you could do all sorts of crazy things by overusing this idea. Things went downhill from there.
March 17th, 2008 at 3:38 am
That’s close to the goal of an HDR image — to capture things as you actually perceive them. Our eyes (and brain) are really good at handling a huge range of light intensity. For example, if you have a light with more than one light bulb, try deactivating one or more of them. You’ll see almost as well with one as you will with four. But with a camera, you’d have to work four times as hard to get a good photo (by changing aperture, exposure, sensitivity, etc.) It can easily be the difference of a reasonable indoor shot and hopelessly noisy shadow.Now consider that the difference between high noon and dusk (or, in the photo, between the sun, its reflections, and shadows in the rocks) and can be well over a factor of a hundred or a thousand, and still seem pretty reasonable to human eyes, and you can imagine why conventional single-exposure photography has trouble capturing the scene as you would perceive it in person.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:28 am
And after that castle sank in this water, will the other kings say it was daft to build a castle in a river? And will the king build another one? And will it sink too? If so, will the king build a third? And will it sink? And will the fourth one stay up?
March 17th, 2008 at 5:19 am
Not existing until they were pretty much obsolete may have something to do with it.