ROADSIDE RELICS

There’s been a proliferation of ‘barn find’ and ‘junkyard relic’ type books hitting the market over the last 10 years or so. Writer Tom Cotter has been a major culprit with titles like Barn Find Road Trip, The Cobra in the Barn, Route 66 — Barn Find Road Trip, and many others. In the same vein are Lost Muscle Cars and a swathe by Jerry Heasley, such as Jerry Heasley’s Rare Finds: Mustangs and Fords. They are almost exclusively American titles.

It got me thinking of all the road trips I’d charted around this country over 40-plus years hunting out and photographing what I thought of as roadside jewels — diamonds in the rough if you like, captured in all their glory, ensnared by time and weeds out in the back blocks. Interestingly, most of those cars have disappeared with the passage of yet more time.

Mulling on this point prompted me to go through scenes that had captivated me over 45 years on the road, an epitaph of sorts of earlier times,