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Foliage Chokes The Maw Of Aeons
This is at least my fourth visit to Innerwick Castle. The foliage lies dense on mouldering stone, the entrance into the underground vault that forms the entrance almost hidden. Below, so far below, the burn runs, and on each visit I wonder from where the castle drew its water supply. Did they have a well, all the way up here? Was it fed by a natural spring? Did someone travel down to the water each day to haul up what was required, and if so by what route? Edging along the outside wall the ground drops sharply to the valley below; even allowing for a landscape altered by erosion it's a curiously difficult task to obtain such a basic essential. And if watered from without, then what hope of ever withstanding a siege, such as that which destroyed it in 1548? Nearly 500 years alone in the forest, high on a throne of eroding red sandstone. Beneath it I scramble carefully, supporting my progress by tree trunks and, trustingly, optimistically, an occasional fern, encountering rising surfaces in which it is no longer possible to determine the human hand of block construction from the courses worn through the sandstone by the gentler but relentless hands of water and time.
It is not really possible to capture Innerwick Castle in photographs, especially not with a substandard mobile phone camera, though in my experience all cameras struggle identically with the structure, with its position, the majesty of its situation, the contours and colours and yes, the foliage. The full sweep from castle to stream that can only be understood from below, or from either of the two windows that still look out from the corner of their former tower. The spiral stair climbs, stunted, to nowhere. The rock face is forever retreating, worn down, sandstone returning to sand, the walkway at its base like a miniature beach. No, the sense of the place cannot be captured by any lens.
The Light Of 1,300,000 Candles Across The Seething Deep
It was Dan who spotted the tower on the coastline and as I reflected that I had never been there its name flew into my mind; Barnes Ness. The sea appeared distant and calm, only the land was seething in the form of a full pay and display car park, crowds of people and scatterings of dogs. The tower rises still, its light shielded on the land side still, though no light has shone since 2005. It's a Stevenson lighthouse, two cousins of Robert Louis between 1899 and 1901; manned until 1986. Lighthouse keeper is one of those romantic roles consigned to history, visions of bearded silhouettes calmly sipping from a cup while the tower, ravaged by storm, fights the howling fury of the wind while keeping watch on the crawling chaos of the seething deep. In truth, of course, much of life would be conducted below, in the squat square little boxes of the keepers cottages. The whole site is today available as a holiday let, and I can well imagine the disappointment as romantic visions of watchful towers give way on approach to the right-angled reality of a gloomy land-facing box.
An interesting side note: It is said that the tower's light had 1.3m candlepower.
The Hypnotic Descent Into Geological Time
Beyond the lighthouse lie the fossil beds, a rock field that extends to the far horizon, a vast, bleak plain. But lowering the head you soon find this wasted plain to be a gateway. Beneath your feet you are trampling past ages of the earth, 320 million years, the impossible spans of geological time. I think of J.G. Ballard's 'The Drowned World', of passed down genetic memory of ancestor creatures and other worlds. You may be looking at something or at nothing at all. Ripples of a forgotten watercourse preserved in stone, pieces of former coral, lines that might be traces of worms, worms themselves, or perhaps nothing at all of the sort. Vague shapes in the stone that must be something, though what it is far from clear. The hands of the clock melt away and you wander ever onward towards the sea. It is hard to describe that exact feeling, the feeling of peace and of nothingness as you gaze down the wormhole to impossibly distant forms of life; to know that they were here, lived, on the same spot yet in a world vastly and unrecognisably different; a tropical world of the Carboniferous. Along the coast, they say, trilobites may be found.
