Last updated 05:38, Friday, 08 August 2008

Graham Uney is passionate about the River Eden. It is “a mighty river” that “takes a long and tumultuous journey to the sea”.

• View more pictures...

The mighty river: Graham Uney captures the Eden as it flows majestically through Warwick on Eden

Portrait of the Eden Valley by Graham Uney. Halsgrove. £14.99

The “infant Eden” “flounders” and “splutters and stutters” in its upland courses, “and then merrily throws itself off a brief cliff at Hell Gill bridge”.

“Then, in its final stages it mumbles along at a quite deceptive rate, by Wetheral and Warwick-on-Eden before plunging into the heart of Carlisle. Not far to go now, the river grinds over The Swifts as it gallops through Rickerby Park.”

Graham’s River Eden is an animated creature. One picture captures a swimming otter beautifully. Its sleek head, its sharp eyes, its black nose just breasting the water and its rippling coat textured like the river itself.

Elsewhere, an adder waits, alertly coiled in the autumnal grass on a Pennine hillside. Far less alert is the sleeping dog in a Hayton farmyard.

A dark Quarry Beck flows through sunlit woodland and at Hellgill Force the River Eden cascades over the rock sill in a watery gauze.

But it is not the life and movement that draws Graham Uney’s camera. His lens is trained on the stillness of stone, the rocks of The Eden Valley, the ancient stones and the buildings weathered by the ages.

His camera sees an antique land that stretches from the bald slopes of Mallerstang to the wet rippled sands of the Solway.

The slowly crumbling stones of Pendragon Castle appear to have grown out of the ground itself and the small cottages of Nateby are grey and featureless, redeemed only by the bright sunlight on the slate roofs beyond.

The limestone outcrop on Asby Scar is weathered and ridged. The white dome of the radar station on Great Dun Fell presides over a snow-speckled mountain above fields of winter wheat that roll like a tumultuous sea.

A lonely stone, Carrick, raises a warning finger against the elements above the stone fields on Cross Fell summit.

A solitary shepherd’s cottage, whitewashed, just a door and two windows, lies half-submerged in the waves of browning grass on Hartside.

At Acorn Bank a regiment of windows gazes out from the red sandstone wall.

The stalwart ruins of Brougham Castle are windowless, looking out on a wintery River Eamont.

Long Meg raises an admonishing finger to the circle of her heavy, indolent daughters who lie about on the frosty turf.

At Armathwaite, stone faces stare wide-eyed from the rock, their noses squashed, their eyes distorted, their expressive features strangely mute.

Further north, the underbelly of the Abbey Bridge casts a dark arch across the River Irthing.

The Bishop’s Palace at Rose Castle nestles beneath its comforting woodland and, in a misty Rickerby Park that strange octagonal tower remains as enigmatic as ever.

The cold cursing stone in Tullie House is lit fluorescently and the Global Warming sculpture by Anthont Turner at Rockliffe is like a gigantic rusting explosive fungus – a warning that Eden may not last for ever.

The final picture in the book shows a flight of barnacle geese in the blue skies above the Solway.

Graham Uney, for long a resident of the North Pennines, reveals a very personal understanding of a landscape he has known over many years.

Portrait of the Eden Valley is available from Bookends, 56 Castle Street, Carlisle, and 66 Main Street, Keswick, and from www.bookscumbria.co.