After a lengthy hiatus, Tinks finally went on another outing, this time Thor’s Stone in Thurstaston Common. After the debacle at Brough Castle, I decided to give up on filming landmarks, and instead concentrate on publicly accessible landscapes, where the legality of each flight is without question.

Thor’s Stone is a Tor, a bedrock buried under ice during the last Ice Age, and then formed by thousands of years of ice slowly scraping along it, giving it its unique form. Since Thor’s Stone is made of sandstone ― a relatively soft type of rock ― subsequent erosion by wind and rain have further deepened the unique shape created by the ice, more so than would be the case by Tors made from granite, which are the more common type near home in Ireland.

The origin of the name remains a mystery. People have speculated that it was given to the rock by Vikings, who used it for worshipping or even sacrifices in the 9th century AD, in the run up to the Battle of Brunanburh, or just after it. Local legend has it that the red colour is due to the blood that run down the rock from the excessive sacrifices of animals and humans. The location of the battlefield remains unknown, but some historians believe that it was near modern-day Bromborough.

Either way, there is no historic evidence that the Vikings worshipped, or even ever ventured to Thor’s Stone. The colour of the Tor is of course just the natural red colour of sandstone, and no staining of blood would have perceivably survived well over thousand years of exposure to the elements. It is however the kind of place that Vikings are known to have favoured as ‘sacred’ elsewhere, so the legend is not without some merit. After all, it is the only reasonable explanation for the Tor’s name that anyone has come up with so far…

The movie is a result of a single-battery pass, flown with the usual combination of my remote control and this time my new iPhone X. In-flight video transmission was somewhat smoother than with my older iPhone SE, but still far from perfect, suggesting that at least some of my problems are down to range limitation of the relatively small antennas of the Spark’s remote control. This has made me even less inclined to upgrade to the Maverick drone, as the latter uses the same remote control. I think that Tinks will do just fine for the little bit of hobby flying that I do.

Apparently, registration for drone owners comes into effect on 30 November 2019, with registrations opening on 01 October, so this would have been most likely the last unregistered flight of Tinks.

Flight planning was carried out with Airmap, and post editing again with iMovie. I briefly tried Unfold, but it turned out to be less of a video editing tool, but more of a slideshow tool, optimised for mobiles. I did like Unfold a lot, but felt that it was the wrong tool on this occasion.

Annoyingly, I have forgotten the URL of the website I use for royalty-free music and had to find a new one, on this occasion Bensound. The name of the song is Epic, and Bensound does not reveal the artists.