At 1,700 metres in the Rotondo Massif, on the edge of the GR20 trail, there’s a plateau that doesn’t look like anything from the ground. Walk through it and you’ll find soft, waterlogged grass, a maze of small pools, a few grazing horses. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that explains why I’d spend three hours hiking up there with a drone case on my back.
Then you send a camera up fifty metres, and the ground turns into something else entirely.
What the Pozzines actually are
The name comes from the Corsican word for “small wells.” Thousands of years ago, this was a proper lake, carved out when the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated from the granite of the Rotondo Massif. Water filled the hollow. Then, slowly, the lake began to silt up from its edges inward, layer after layer of peat building across centuries until open water gave way to this strange, spongy meadow.
What’s left is a living surface. Snowmelt cuts narrow channels through the peat. The holes fill each spring and shrink back by late summer. Horses and cattle graze the plateau, compacting the ground where they come to drink, and over generations that traffic has carved its own pattern into the land. None of it is planned. All of it is written by water, ice, and hooves, one season at a time.
You can walk across it and barely register the design. It only resolves into something legible (branching, organic, almost cartographic) once you’re looking straight down.
I was there in July, which meant the approach was dry underfoot but not much easier: the hike in runs close to three hours, climbing steadily before the plateau opens up around Lac de Nino. It’s not a technical trail, but it’s a long one to do carrying drone gear rather than just a daypack.
The bigger challenge came once I was actually flying. At that altitude and that exposed, wind is close to a constant, and the kind of low, slow, steady passes you need to resolve the fine detail in the peat channels don’t leave much room for error when gusts are pushing the drone around. Getting clean, sharp frames of the patterns meant working in short windows between gusts, and going back for multiple passes until the light and the air lined up at the same time.
It’s a reminder of something true of most aerial work: the interesting image and the difficult conditions tend to show up together. The patterns that make the Pozzines worth photographing are invisible from eye level. They only exist as a photograph once you’re high enough to read them as a whole. There was no version of this series shot any other way.
The Series
Pozzines is a set of six images, each isolating a different section of the plateau’s surface: the channels, the pooling water, the boundary where grazed ground meets untouched peat. Together they read less like a place and more like abstract studies: texture, line, and tone standing in for a specific mountain in Corsica most people will never see from above.
That’s the appeal of aerial work at this scale. It sits somewhere between landscape and pure abstraction, and it rewards a print size where the fine detail, those channels, the gradations in the peat, actually has room to breathe.
The full Pozzines series is available as signed limited editions and as more accessible open edition prints, both printed on Hahnemühle fine art paper, acrylic glass, or aluminum dibond. For editorial, commercial, or interior projects, the images are also available for licensing.