
This photograph was made early one morning in April, looking up from Labour In Vain Hill near Cherhill in Wiltshire. I was travelling to Oxford that day and could not resist stopping and trying to capture the hazy morning light that seemed to foretell the summer.
Why the hill is called Labour In Vain I cannot say – but what a beautiful name.
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It is called Labour in Vain hill as at the top of the brow used to be an inn called the Labour in Vain Inn and the sign was a white woman scrubbing a black baby in a bath tub. The reason I know this is that I had a petrol station on the site where the Inn use to lie. The inn keepers wife went missing in the late 1700′s and remains of a young woman was later found at the bottom of a well in the back garden in the early 1800′s.