Walking on Ancient Stone - A Day on Ingleborough
I recently spent a day on Ingleborough in the company of a geologist, which gave me an entirely new way of looking at a landscape I might otherwise have simply admired for its rugged beauty.
The hills around Ingleborough are underpinned by an extraordinary amount of limestone, formed around 330 million years ago during the Carboniferous period. Vast limestone pavements stretch across the landscape, their slabs broken into patterns of deep cracks and fissures formed over thousands, and in many cases millions, of years.
For someone interested in ceramics, there was something particularly compelling about these surfaces. I found myself looking closely at the edges, fractures and textures in the stone – natural marks created not by a potter's hand, but by time, water, weather and pressure.
The limestone landscape is full of hidden spaces too. Over immense periods of time, water has worked its way through the rock, dissolving and eroding it and creating cavities and caves beneath the surface. We had to take care as we walked, as some of these openings appear quite unexpectedly between the slabs. What looks like solid ground can suddenly give way to a deep hollow in the rock.
I was particularly fascinated by the weathering inside some of these unexpected wells and cavities. The walls of the limestone had developed a beautiful honeycomb texture, the rock gradually eaten away to leave a surface of hollows and projections. It was a reminder that erosion isn't simply destruction – it can create forms and textures of remarkable beauty.
As always on my walks, I found myself looking closely at the plant life as well. The grasses were wonderfully hardy and persistent, holding their own against the ever-changing weather and exposed conditions. The hardy vegetation softened the hard geometry of the limestone, while the hawthorn trees, heavy with berries, provided flashes of red among the greens and greys of the landscape.
What stayed with me most was the extraordinary slowness of this landscape changing over time. For millions of years the limestone has been slowly cracking, weathering and shifting, while generation after generation of people have walked across these same pavements. I found myself wondering how many others, separated from me by centuries or even thousands of years, have stood in exactly the same place and felt something similar – a sense of wonder, perhaps, at the ancient landscape beneath their feet. We will never meet, or share the same moment in time, yet the landscape connects us. It has witnessed generations come and go, while continuing its own slow cycle of change. There is something about that continuity and repetition that resonates deeply with my own work.
Comments