Touchstones Plate 29: Calanais Standing Stones Site I, Lewis, Western Isles

This final musing on TOUCHSTONES is the end of a journey, one both spiritual and physical. I, like you, look for guideposts in life, seeking a polestar, a source of reassurance that I am on the right track. Were the many standing stones in Scotland Neolithic guideposts, pointing the questing individuals towards a particular location? Were they boundary markers for tribes or clans?

This book presents some of the small, often over-looked glances at places and things I found interesting in Scotland. It also has images from locations I set out with great deliberation to find because of their uniqueness. In earlier writings about Calanais (Site I) I wrote about the location, type of stones, and the particular layout in which they are found. It is a good physical and technical description of the place and the stones themselves but the images in TOUCHSTONES are about more than physical locations. As I write each Musing, I return to the book and reexamine it, looking at the image with new eyes. Each time I sit down to write I am in a different place emotionally and spiritually. I am continually finding new meaning, new reasons for each image.

When I first put these images together I was reacting with one level of consciousness. Using the logic of sequence and tonality, composition and design, I was trying to organize this experience in a way that made sense to others. Now after two and a half years of reviewing, renewing and writing about these images I often see them completely different from my earlier impressions. The images continue to speak to me in different ways each time I sit down to write about them and I almost always learn or see something new.

When first laying out the book, I interpreted Plate 29 as representing a time at sunset. The sun is still well about the horizon, but the sky is much brighter than the foreground. The ground at the base of the stones is visible but not easily seen. Each stone breaks the horizon line puncturing the light gray of the skyline. As a sunset, the end of the metaphorical day, this image made sense coming at the end of the book. It is not the last image (the last image returns us to the beginning point) but the next-to-last image indicating that the day is dying and it is time to return to the safety of home. Yet now as I look at this image I realize that it may also be interpreted as a rising sun – a sun that promises to bring light, a new day, and perhaps a new journey or adventure.

I will never forget the woman in a red shirt that so reverently approached these stones one of the days I was photographing. Her behavior gave me the impression that she was on a pilgrimage to this specific site. They held a power and meaning for her that I can only begin to guess at. What took me by surprise was that she was only at the site for a few minutes. Only for a very brief moment was she in touch with her destination. I hope her experience was everything she dreamed of. More importantly, I hope she got what she needed from her journey. Was she so focused on her destination that she forgot the beauty in her journey? Maybe that is what this last image and TOUCHSTONES is all about for me, the importance of the journey and not the destination.

Perhaps Plate 29 is a rising sun, inviting me to continue my quest for self-understanding. I am going to continue this quest and I encourage you to do the same. Listen to your own quiet inner voice and go wherever it leads. As we go on this quest looking for powerful places we should be mindful not to overlook the small and unexpected places. Beauty and power can be found wherever we are ready to receive it. Turn around and go back to a bend in the road, try to find what is speaking to you. Step outside the place you intended to see, sit on the ground and watch the light cascade down a set of steps, and recognize the beauty of stone wall running up a hillside to a row of trees as every bit as wonderful as a 5000 year-old ring of standing stones.

Touchstones Plate 28: Near Dornoch Firth, Easter, Ross

Some photographs are easy to make, others are difficult, the latter taking years of planning, hours of hiking, and an exactness of technique to make the perfect print. We have all heard the photo equal of “I walked seven miles up hill through the snow both ways to make this photograph”. This image isn’t one of those. The truth is that this was a very easy photograph to make.

It is located near Dornoch Firth on the A9 just south before you cross the Dornoch Firth Bridge between Inverness and Thurso. I have driven across this bridge many times on my way from Inverness to the ferry out to Orkney. Traveling north it is hard to see this ridge and trees because the road turns right into a roundabout immediately before the bridge. However, traveling south from Thurso, the ridge and trees are in view just as you cross the bridge.

Richard Barnett and I were returning from Orkney, on our way to Oban and the Highlands on a beautiful day in May when I really took notice of these trees. I had passed them several times over the years and I guess I wasn’t ready to make the photograph until this particular moment. I had already begun the layout out for TOUCHSTONES and on this trip I was looking for some specific images. I knew I wanted something to parallel an image from Calanais. After seeing the trees standing like stones on the ridge I knew this was the image I was looking for. The road was too narrow to pull off so I continued south for about half a mile and turned around in the Glenmorangie Distillery parking lot and returned to find a safe place to pull off the road and began to work.

Back at home I had a strong photograph of the standing stones at Calanais outlined across a hill against the sky. I felt the trees on this ridge would be a companion to this image and set out to create a parallel image. I shot the scene in many different ways: horizon line high, low and in the middle of the frame. I shot versions with wide angle, normal and long lenses. I even shot several vertical images with the wall as a leading line running up the center or off to the side. It was a beautiful day, the light was great, and as a result the exposure and development was easy. Every negative I shot that day is easy to print. The clouds are different in each image, but I ended up with a number of images to choose from for the book.

I chose this image because the ridgeline was high in the frame and played off nicely with the low horizon line in the Calanais image. Paying attention to horizon lines while sequencing the book helped the flow from image to image. It is one of the few images in the book that I knew was going to be in the book when I made the image. It was an easy image to procure and for that I am very grateful. There are too many images where I have to walk seven miles in the snow up hill both ways to make. So I am thankful for the easy ones.

Touchstones Plate 17: Between Aberfoyle and Stronachlachar, The Trossachs

I love signs posts. They are scattered throughout Scotland and when you get off the motorways and onto the smaller roads the styles become unique to an area. The first time I taught at Inversnaid Photography Center I noticed these particularly unusual two-faced signs along the road from Aberfoyle heading west towards Inversnaid and Loch Katrine. They intrigued me because they were such substantial structures found along a pretty insubstantial one-lane (and sometimes two) road. When I inquired about them no one could explain their presence or solid design. Each time I visited Inversnaid I stopped and photographed them, always trying to find a new way to see them.

The markers themselves are made of cast iron with the name of the village you are heading towards and the village you just left lettered on brass plates on the side. As you can see they are angled so both sides can be seen at the same time. The remaining signs are spread at irregular intervals along the B829 from Aberfoyle to Stronachlachar. This one rests eight miles from Aberfoyle and Stronachlachar in the Queen Elizabeth Forest.

At one point I was told that these signs had been made for Queen Victoria’s planned visit in 1859. She was to come to the area to officially open the new Lake Katrine Water Project. In 1856 the House of Parliament has approved the building of this project to supply Glasgow, a city of 80,000, with fresh water. It was considered an engineering marvel of its day and the Queen’s visit a testament to its importance. It is believed that the markers were put in place to allow her majesty to know precisely where she was during the journey to the site. Rumor has it that the Queen never made the trip down this road but the markers continue to guide travelers today.

Touchstones Plate 26: Queen Elizabeth Forest, Aberfoyle, The Trossachs

Beyond this stretch of markers the B829 runs through the Queen Elizabeth Forest, a part of the Trossachs, Scotland’s newest National Park. What is now the B829 was once a road built by the British army. The English garrisoned troops in this area after the uprising of 1745. The fort was built near Loch Lomond and this road built as an improvement over the trails that lead through the woods. Much of the land around the tree had been clear-cut but for some reason this behemoth had been left alone. It had a presence that required I make its portrait. I love the moss-covered base that seems to create a lap, holding a delicate covering of shamrocks. Like the stones I had photographed around Scotland this tree had a presence of history. In the editing and sequencing of TOUCHSTONES, it kept appearing in the “keep” pile. It made a nice compositional companion to Plate 27, a water passage from a Viking era gristmill. The tree is up front and center with the surrounding forest as background players. In the Click Mill image, the stonework and grass lead the eye back to the black hole of the waterway. Together they speak of an earlier time and of history moving past.

Touchstones Plate 20: Jedburgh Abbey, Jedburgh, Scottish Borders

The Borders area of Scotland is filled with the ruins of abbeys, monasteries, and cathedrals. At one time grand and imposing structures meant to demonstrate the power and wealth of Scotland as well as its Godliness, they bore the brunt of the conflicts with England. Though badly damaged multiple times, they were rebuilt over and again until the Protestant Reformation ended the dominance of the Catholic Church and obliterated, with few exceptions, its symbols, the abbeys and monasteries, from Scotland.

The site of Jedburgh Abbey is believed to have been used for a church long before King David I founded an Augustinian priory there in 1138. A beautifully carved fragment of a shrine found at the site suggests consecration as a Christian church occurred as early as 700 CE. By 1154 the priory had been elevated to an abbey though it wasn’t until 1285 that the structure was completed. Within a few years the town and abbey came under attack and the period of sack and ruin and rebuilding continued until 1560, the beginning of the Reformation,

Today, though only the walls and a part of the tower remain, it still remains an imposing structure. As I walked up from the visitor’s center I was impressed by the view of the walls and arches standing against the sky. It was a skeleton with open archways and windows set against the sky. As I walked around Jedburgh Abbey I kept looking for a rhythm and pattern that would allow me to describe the power I found in this shell of the Abbey. Walking back to the car to get my camera I turned and saw a way to explain the feeling. I quickly grabbed my gear and started looking for the vantage point that would allow me to make the photograph I now had in my head.

My camera bag usually has about 6 different lenses, ranging from a very wide angle to a lens as long as my camera will carry. I wanted to find a spot where I could look up at the church and see only the sky through the windows. I found it on the garden path leading up to the ruins. After changing lenses several times I made this image with the longest lens I had in my bag at the time. I continued to work the site and made many other images that day.

When laying out TOUCHSTONES, I had the St. Magnus Cathedral image (Plate 21), an image of interlocking stone arches. It is a solid wall and the arches are purely decorative with the space between the arches and the arches themselves carved out of the stone. I started pairing other images with it but this image of Jedburgh Abbey gave the strongest contrast. It was an appropriate pairing. One from an abbey ruin, the other from one of two surviving cathedrals. The one from about as far north as it is possible to venture in Scotland and the other from about as far south as is possible. One image of solid stone, the other an imposing skeletal outline. These still work together for me as a pair of images. The detail and the over-all, the ruin and the surviving, and two very different styles of arch holding the patterns together.