As a family, we came to Sydenham Wood for years, to let the kids stomp its mirey tracks. They usually came back to the car, muddied - and sometimes bloodied.

Now that they've grown and left us, we now come back on Sundays to smell its ancient earthiness and traipse its paths, smiling at young parents and their own mischievous whippersnappers.

In the late-summer of 2020, it seemed very likely that I'd be exploring a b&w book about healthcare and landscape in another part of the country altogether. And so, with weeks before journeying to find new places in a wooded valley, I came back to Sydenham to dicover its footfall once again after a decades-long obsession with colour photography.

In these twenty pictures are the early RAW file conversion experiments that I made on repeated trips into the wood plus, because I'm being drawn back to this land, more recent visits.

Sydenham Hill Wood forms part of the largest remaining tract of the old Great North Wood, a vast area of worked coppices and wooded commons that once stretched from Deptford to Selhurst. The wood is home to more than 200 species of trees and plants as well as rare fungi, insects, birds and woodland mammals. It is owned by the Woodland Trust.

Exactly two years after I first switched my camera - and my eyes - into the monochrome view, the book that became 'A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor's Story' by Polly Morland and which contained my photography, was published and being viewed by many: https://bit.ly/3zw9FG9