An intriguing box of Victorian half-plate negatives sold on eBay has sparked a detective case for photographer Andy Vaines.

Mr Vaines, from Shipley, bought the box during lockdown in 2020 to find an assortment of 27 images of Victorian churchyards, streets and landscape scenery.

With nothing more than an inkling that each image was of somewhere in the region, he set about on a painstaking task to restore each negative digitally and then identify where it might have been taken.

Mr Vaines has more experience in this area than most, having worked at the University of Leeds to date and place 10,000 plates in their Special Collections Archive.

Andy Vaines who has bought a box of Victorian/Edwardian glass plates from Ebay - all of locations in and around Yorkshire - and is now on a detective hunt to try to identify the locations of each plate photograph.

But this project was true ‘needle in a haystack territory’ he explained - despite hoping his previous experience dating and locating images would help.

Mr Vaines quickly recognised how difficult it was to locate some of the plates based solely on the road layout or a quirky feature of a church - any of which could have changed since the negatives were taken in the late 19th or early 20th century.

One of the church images was easy: it was the exterior of York Minster. Others posed a challenge, but using tools including Google Streetview, Mr Vaines set to work. He said: “I used key phrases to search, such as the details on a church. The first one I found was Wragby Church at Nostell Priory. That came about because I got the image scanned, I zoomed in and saw the names on the gravestones. I Googled the names - and there they were, in the registers.

“They were such unusual names, typical of that area. So I went to the church to do a comparison picture. One of the trees in the old negative you can see has now grown so much that it has eaten into the gravestones.”

Once Mr Vaines had discovered his first location, he was on something of a roll. Before too long, he’d identified another plate as an image of All Saints’ Church in Ledsham, near Castleford.

The original image showed its tall spire, but image searches were proving fruitless - until Mr Vaines came across a website which listed nearly every stained glass window in the UK.

Recognising a window shape as one corresponding to the plate of Ledsham’s church, he went to visit the village to confirm he’d found a match.

“Now, Ledsham, I found fascinating,” said Mr Vaines, “Because to do my recreation picture, you can’t get in the same position as the original photographer now. I’d get run over. I had to listen out for cars.”

Ledsham’s out-of-the-way location also sparked an intriguing theory Mr Vaines has about the origin of the plates.

He believes they may have formed part of the National Photographic Record Association - set up in 1897 - which sent photographers to take images of towns, villages and streets for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

But despite his successes, the hunt still goes on to identify some of the locations.

One, of a pond by a derelict wall, he has virtually - but not quite - given up on identifying.

“The thing is - that could be just anywhere,” he said. “But I think the photographer was from Doncaster. That’s the lowest place of any of the plates I’ve identified, so I’m assuming perhaps he was local.”

Mr Vaines is keen for any other amateur sleuths who wish to help him find the remaining locations to get in touch on his blog, victorianhalfplate.wordpress.com.

Mysterious box of old Yorkshire photographs sets off treasure hunt