A Populated Place

Looney (West of New Castle), Virginia

Driving southwest from New Castle I stopped to photograph this little complex of buildings at the edge of extensive farm fields. Before leaving I checked the GPS and it said I was in Looney, VA. Later, I couldn't turn that up as a valid town name, but when I zoomed in enough with the Apple Map app and definitely found the cluster of buildings, there was a town ID of New Castle, but also the word "Looney" in a different typeface. Doing a search turned up a new identifier I haven't encountered before—Looney is officially a "populated place." Not very populated, though.

Hinton, West Virginia

For some reason there's a visual echo or resonance between this in-town outbuilding and the rural building in the first shot. That made me wonder how far apart they are (I'd gotten from one to the other by a very roundabout route over two days of driving and shooting) and the answer was almost, you can't get there from here:

The shortest road routes are about 80 miles through the hills and ridges, but it looks as though the distance as the crow flies is about half that.