On Place and Time

By Ian Grosz:

‘What am I doing here?’ I asked myself, emerging from the trees as the lady from the house whose grounds I was rummaging around in, politely pointed out that while under Scottish laws of trespass I’d every right to be there, I had parked on her lawn. She raised an accusing finger toward my camper van left on a patch of grass clear of what I took to be the entrance to her property and the narrow lane leading up to it. 

I had left the van beyond a large stone wall and gateway that looked to me like an obvious boundary. It’s true I had crossed that boundary on foot to gain access to a ruined mausoleum that lay in the trees just on the other side, and adjacent to the property, but I hadn’t thought the property extended to the mausoleum or the access road leading up to it. I apologised and told her as much by way of inadequate explanation, telling her I’d move the van. She nodded gruffly, turned, and began her long and dignified walk back to her large steel-framed house just visible beyond the trees. 

This was in the tiny farming hamlet of Bethelnie where I’d come to look for the visible traces of lost and half-forgotten histories, a pattern I was beginning to repeat at various places all over Aberdeenshire. Bethelnie, according to the Banffshire courier of December 1893, comes from the word bethnathalan, meaning house of Nathalan because of a church Saint Nathalan is supposed to have established here, after which, the parish of my home turf was once named. The mausoleum still extant houses the medieval remains of the Seton, Urquhart and Meldrum family lines, dynasties that once gave the area its identity and can still be found in its place names. 

All trace of Saint Nathalan’s church has long-since vanished, but his legacy is retained in local folk memory. In the village where I live, there was a public holiday dedicated to him celebrated until the late 19th Century. An ash tree marks the spot where Saint Nathalan is said to have collapsed and died, having become exhausted through ridding the area of a plague by making a circuit of the district’s bounds on his knees, praying to God to spare its inhabitants. Where his staff of ash went into the ground as he fell, a holy spring came forth and an ash tree grew. The tree is known as the Parcock Tree, the current tree planted in the 1990s and replacing a much older tree that was said to have stood for over three-hundred years in the same spot, itself arising from a lineage of trees going back to the time of Nathalan in the Seventh Century. 

The holy spring at the site of the Parcock tree is long-gone, with only the trickling outflow of a drainage pipe that carries the run-off from a small hill nearby in its place. This far from holy water passes under the modern bypass that borders the site of Nathalan’s alleged demise, unlikely to be of any assistance in the modern pandemic that is playing itself out across the world. But up until the mid-twentieth century, local children would go there to play, drawn, perhaps, by the tales of Saint Nathalan and the spring’s legendary healing power. 

Outside the ruined mausoleum, possibly built on the site of Nathalan’s church, erratic gravestones span the 12th through 19th Centuries: layers of time and burial, records of forgotten people with only a long-ago placed stone and a fading inscription to tell us they were once here. Among them is the sad and simple inscription for Isabella Gordon-Hunter who died at the age of three, joined by her parents many years later; the three children of Arthur Sangster and his wife Elizabeth Smith: George aged eighteen, Ann aged eleven and Robert aged just seven years, all dying in the year 1837, perhaps due to the influenza outbreak of that year. The earliest stones, stretching back into the 12th Century, are barely readable. 

Stood amongst the trees and the graves, I felt I was intruding on not only the privacy of the property owners, but on the silent, layered gathering of the dead. Their witness to time’s unstoppable cruelty felt pressing. How many lives have passed and never been known? How many absences are there in our histories? What is so compelling about these absences? Why is it that what is not there, what is not known, is more compelling than what is? Is it simply mystery: our innate curiosity that always seeks out a puzzle? Or is it something else? 

Perhaps it is simply the knowledge that something was but is no longer. Through living inside of time – constrained by it – comes a need to try to reach the past, to somehow gain a tangible sense of a larger and continual process of collective loss from the landscape. But what is it I hope to gain by visiting the ghost-sites of these places? Is there some secret message to be found in picking up on their atmosphere, their mood, their sense of place, as though the air or the ground, the trees, the crumbling walls, the grave stones, might be encoded with a form of language that, if not difficult to discern, is like the sighting of a ghost itself: quite probably just a figment of imagination? Is there some additional information available that cannot be gleaned from a map and google? 

Presence in absence - knowledge of what was - however that’s communicated, imbues the landscape through a combination of imagination and literal sense. But what is it that we sense? We sense the air, feel the breeze on our faces, see the same contours in the hills and fields that others now absent once did, and this connects us through imagination. We begin to sense that the past is somehow more present, as though almost coexisting alongside our own time. It is like standing on the far side of a precipice that we wish to cross, and find there is a half-standing bridge that, while it doesn’t allow us to cross fully to the other side, closes some of the gap, brings the two sides of the divide closer together. 

In the book Senses of Place, the philosopher Edward Casey tells us that ‘space and time come together in place,’ by which he means that places are defined by event. They are simultaneously the where and when of things, and in this way they draw space and time into them. Experiencing them brings us closer to those who went before. We see their absence, but we feel their presence. We begin to hear their voices across the precipice of their time and ours. Perhaps it is time itself that I am grappling with, finding its most poignant expression in place, the unstoppable forward motion through which we perceive the world leaving me with a feeling of wanting to hold on to time, to pause and to dwell outside of its relentless march. 

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Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and as well as previously featuring on Elsewhere, is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.