It’s the end of another year when we turn our minds to the past and the future. As a photographer I have always been fascinated by how to interpret time in a single image.
A photograph can be captured at 1/250 of a second. How do we suggest the passing of time in that instant?
Recently I explored somewhere in the Hertfordshire countryside where I was very aware of the sense of time and I wanted to capture it in my photography. I discovered one place where time covered all. Elsewhere I came upon a human construct of time sliced through the landscape.
Sometimes the best way to see the countryside is in the depths of winter when it is at its simplest. All the leaves are fallen and the trees are bare, the flowers along the path are long gone and leave nothing but dried seed heads. The fields are empty as the crops have been harvested and the livestock brought inside. And overhead the sky hangs low, so low that a mist drifts across my path.
Time covers all
All that remains of the church is the tower in the background.
The first place I visited was in some woodland just outside the village of Thundridge near Ware in Hertfordshire. Here a solitary church tower stands alone save for a few gravestones; villagers staying close to their place of worship through the centuries.
A church may have stood in this space since Saxon times. All that remains is the tower built in the 15th Century.
In the middle of the 19th century the church was in a state of decay. The bells of the tower were moved to a new church closer to the village, and the chancel and nave were demolished leaving just the tower behind. For a while some services were continued including burials (some of the parishioners wanted to be closer to their family members after death) but the tower now stands alone in a woodland clearing.
It is a listed building but unfortunately listing does not necessarily lead to protection as the tower is in a dire state and needs substantial funds to restore it. Despite the best efforts of a small but dedicated group of volunteers the tower is slowly being reclaimed by time.
I took numerous images of the tower and the graveyard and I think this one sums up the feeling I had for the place, showing it succumbing to time and the land, along with the parishioners resting in their graves around the tower.
Timelines
Close to the tree, where the track turns, runs the line of the Greenwich Meridian.
After visiting the church tower I headed south, skirting around the edge of Ware. Here my route crisscrossed the a human construction of time – the Greenwich Meridian line.
It is a line of longitude that has been set at zero degrees, zero minutes and zero seconds and runs from the North to the South Pole, dividing the world into eastern and western hemispheres. The Greenwich Meridian line was just one of many lines that were arbitrarily created over the centuries to aid navigation. Most of them would run through the country that had set it up. In 1851 the Greenwich Meridian became the international standard. It has since been superseded by the IERS Reference Meridian which runs a little to the east of it.
From the line of longitude time spreads out east and westward. In these days of universal time we barely notice it but once there would have been minor changes in time even across short distances. Clocks in villages and towns across Britain would have been set to their own local times. Now we have a standard time across the country but as I stood where the meridian line crossed the track I was walking along I could not only see a landscape stretching out in both directions, but a timescape too.
My journey into the Hertfordshire countryside took me through time and space. I hope that these photographs have captured that sense of time that ran through the landscape.
If you would like to view more of the photographs I took on this visit go to my Clickasnap profile to see them.
More information and references
- You can find out more information on the church tower here.
- If you would like to donate to the charity seeking to restore the tower they have a gofundme page as well. I have no connection to the organisation.
- For more on the Greenwich Meridian Line check out the Wikipedia page
- If you would like to explore the route I took check it out on Komoot
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