Sunday 4 December 2011

Time and Place

It’s some time since I wrote a blog. More time than I realised. Family, projects, day to day administration, they all take time. Funny thing, time, you seem to have lots of it but just when you’re distracted or look the other way, it slips away.

Time passes, sometimes it flies, sometimes it drags, it has even been said to stand still, but only in romantic fiction. Time heals, is money, can be against you or on your side and along with the tide, waits for no man. In photography, it lapses

For Einstein it was the fourth dimension.

St Augustine said of time, “If no-one asks me,I know but if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not”.

At CERN, it seems that, because some people think that neutrinos appear to travel faster than the speed of light, then, theoretically, time travel is possible. I don’t pretend to understand the physics and guess it’s only possible for subatomic particles not humans.

With time on my hands, and a sunny cold December day, I went off to see if any of our usual winter visitors had taken up local residence, it being that time of year. Two deep deans, inaccessible to sheep, provide a sheltered sanctuary for any arrivals. Full of hawthorn, hazel, blackthorn, whin and brambles they are as miniature remnants of the wildwood of millennia ago

The dean

As well as the usual suspects, fieldfares and redwings, there were a few white fronted geese gleaning in the stubble fields above the deans.


The streams, eventually merging before reaching the sea, have cut deep down, exposing the layers laid down over aeons of time. Down through the glacial deposits from the Ice Ages that make up the farmland of today, down through the Old Red Sandstone of the Devonian era, down to the harder Silurian greywracke laid down in the bed of ancient seas and the porphyric rocks pushed out as molten lava when ancient continents collidided.


Sandstone erosion




Stream bed, porphyric rock and greywracke


Four hundred million years in one walk

Anyone can travel in time if you have a mind to.

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