Whispers: Racton Monument Star Trails

January 3rd, 2025, took me to one of West Sussex's most atmospheric ruins—Racton Monument, a crumbling folly shrouded in local legend and mystery. The January night was bone-chillingly cold, perfect for clear skies but challenging for standing still through nearly three hours of photography. The title Whispers captures both the local folklore about this eerie ruin and the sense that history whispers through these broken walls beneath the stars.

Racton Monument, also known as Racton Ruin or Racton Tower, was built around 1772 as a folly by the 2nd Earl of Halifax. Some say it was a hunting tower, others claim it commemorated something now forgotten. By 1820 it was already partially ruined, and today only fragments of walls and empty window openings remain. Local folklore speaks of ghosts, abandoned plans, and mystery surrounding the ruin. It sits on Racton Common near Chichester, a lonely monument to forgotten purposes.

The conditions that January night were perfect but frigid. Crystal-clear skies meant the stars would be brilliant, but temperatures dropped well below freezing. The ruins have this haunting quality at night—the empty windows seem to glow faintly from ambient light, as if the spirits of the past still reside within. I positioned myself to capture the ruins silhouetted against the star trails, with those distinctive window openings framing portions of the wheeling cosmos.

Using my RF 15-35mm lens at 20mm and f/2.8, I captured 407 frames of 25 seconds each over 176 minutes at ISO 800—just under three hours standing in the January cold beside these mysterious ruins. The camera clicked away every 25 seconds while I stamped my feet to keep warm, watching the stars slowly arc across the sky above the broken walls.

Stacking 407 exposures revealed these star trails swirling above Racton Monument like a celestial vortex pulling the ruins into the fabric of the universe. The empty windows glow subtly, the crumbling walls reach skyward, and the stars wheel overhead as they have since long before this folly was built, and will continue long after its last stone has fallen.

There's something profoundly moving about photographing ruins under star trails—the monument that was built with purpose 250 years ago now stands purposeless, yet the stars continue their rotation unchanged. The whispers of history meet the eternal motion of the cosmos.

When you look at this photograph, I want you to feel that mystery—standing beside Racton Monument on a January night, watching 176 minutes of Earth's rotation traced in star trails above the 1772 ruins, where local legends whisper through empty windows and broken walls beneath the wheeling stars of the West Sussex countryside.