Strathallan Spacetime: The Glamourie of Place

Essay
Written By Chris Powici

Half a mile from the pine wood where the red deer hinds had gathered in the shadows, watching me watching them, a few hundred yards from the field where the russet-furred dog fox nosed the pale autumn grass, heedless of my approach until my shoes happened to kick a stone his way and we looked at one another for a long, cold second, I rounded a bend of the Cromlix track and Strathallan lay before me.

The Ochil Hills rose in the east, their rounded summits like green waves slowed to a standstill. Sunlit pinkish-grey cirrus clouds drifted above the heathery tops, farmhouses and barns were dotted here and there on the far slopes. At this distance I couldn't make out their livestock, but on my side of the Allan Water the sharp November wind didn’t seem to bother the sheep and cattle grazing peaceably in the pastures. It would have been so tempting to describe this view as timeless. And so wrong.

It’s all too easy to reach for the word ‘timeless’ when we want to describe something, from art or nature, which seems so perfectly realised it transcends our clock-measured days and years. But these hills were packed with time. The Ochils were formed some 400 million years ago as a result of volcanic eruptions in the early Devonian epoch. Since then, they have been worn down by millennia of glacial ice and, like the rest of Scotland, are, even now ‘rebounding’ after the last ice sheet began to melt twenty thousand years ago. Wind, rain and snow are still at work, sculpting the ridges and glens. They only seem at a standstill.

The Allan Water itself begins life as a slender burn tumbling from the Ochils above the village of Blackford and grows into a river on its way to meet the Forth near Stirling, carving a valley which, apart from its human inhabitants, is home to hundreds of wintering Pink-footed and Greylag geese. They stravaig these big northern skies in swift, spear-shaped skeins and, at dusk, gather in jabbering throngs at Carsebreck and Rhynd Lochs, half a dozen miles north east of Cromlix. In the rough, hillocky farming country either side of the river, pheasants fly up from roadside verges, crows and rooks caw from the fields and, come spring, gulls follow tractors in huge, noisy clouds.

The marks of human history lie in even plainer sight. The dual carriageway of the A9 and the Glasgow-Perth railway line sweep along the valley floor. The hillsides are punctuated with dark smudges of plantation conifers and threaded—or scarred depending on your point of view—by a line of freakishly tall electricity pylons climbing towards Sheriffmuir and beyond, carrying hydro and wind power deep into Scotland’s central belt. At Sheriffmuir, on a patch of tree-fringed moorland, lies the ‘Gathering Stane’, a memorial to the hundreds of men killed when Jacobite and Government forces met in bloody battle in 1715. 

There is certainly a rich history to this landscape—geological, natural and human. But history and time are not the same thing. History is a way of organising the past, of telling stories, so we can make some kind of sense of ourselves and the world we find ourselves in. Time itself is different, mysterious even. I may have had an idea of history at the back of my mind as I looked down on Strathallan—there were things I knew about the landscape—but I also had the feeling that I was sensing time in much the same way that I was sensing the light falling on the grass and pines, the wind prickling the skin of my face and hands. Time felt more like weather than history, a part of the scene itself and not just its context.

Is it possible to feel time, even vaguely, as a kind of sensory intuition and not merely an accretion of seconds, minutes, hours, years? After all, thanks to Albert Einstein, and the rather less celebrated Hermann Minkowski, we know that space and time are not distinct entities but woven into the single fabric of ‘spacetime’. As Minkowski put it, ‘Henceforth space by itself and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality’.[1]

There are no finer guides to the strangeness and majesty of this reality than the books of Carlo Rovelli, a physicist as likely to draw on Ovid or Dante as Newton or Bohr in teasing out the hidden side of nature, but even he concedes that from ‘our perspective’ [his emphasis] we have no choice but to experience the world as ‘flowing in time’[2], no matter what our theories tell us. Spacetime is something to be imagined and thought about, perhaps even calculated, but not sensed.

Nonetheless, something had ‘happened’ to me as I walked. I’d felt, touched, a word once used commonly (including, I seem to recall, by my mother) for people who behave in a benignly odd way, as if they have been ‘touched’ by some whim or fancy or, more profoundly, by the holy ghost. Perhaps the intensity of the moment had less to do with physics and rather more to do with the Christian idea of grace, which the novelist and theologian Marilynne Robinson has described as ‘the intimation of a great reality of another order which pervades human experience, even manifests itself in human actions and relations, yet is always purely itself.’[3]  In this sense, grace releases us from the grip of the quotidian, the everyday. But is it really an escape from time itself? Instead, could the touch of grace throw us deeper into space and time, even if we only get to experience this ‘great reality’ in glimpses, fleeting moments of apprehension, when the sheer, implacable presence of a world beyond the self—deer, fox, river, sky—is so intense that that our commonplace assumptions about the world fall away? 

William Wordsworth may have had something like this in mind when, in Book 12 of The Prelude, he brought the temporal and the spatial together with the superb phrase ‘spots of time’, those small, memorable moments, often experienced in nature, when ‘our minds...are nourished and invisibly repaired’.[4] You can’t get the measure of these sorts of moment with clocks. Nor did clocks seem important to T.S Eliot. Four Quartets begins

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.[5]

The clarity and boldness of his declaration still has the power to arrest and intrigue, though I prefer Elizabeth Bishop’s more homely and intimate take on clock-defying time when, in her poem ‘The Moose’, she describes the hypnotic lilt of conversations at the back of a bus, journeying through a forest at night, as ‘grandparents’ voices uninterruptedly talking into eternity’.[6]

Or maybe the truth of what had happened on the way down the Cromlix track was altogether more folksy. My little epiphany had been an ‘enchantment’—a short-lived surrender to a spell cast by light and weather: the serenely incandescent clouds, the distant glint of the river. I had, in effect, become entranced or, to use that wonderfully antique and resonant word, glamoured. These days the term tends to be reserved for the worlds of entertainment and fashion, but its usage reaches beyond Hollywood movies and Paris catwalks, and crosses the border into myth and folklore. To fall victim—happily or unhappily—to a magical spell cast by a witch or fairy was to enter into a state of glamourie, a period of enchantment that removes you from everyday life. In folk tales this can be especially perilous as the eponymous hero of the border ballad Tam Lin discovered to his cost. In Robert Burns’ version, the Queen of the Fairies holds him captive for years before Tam is rescued by the soon-to-be mother of his child, ‘fair Jenny in her green mantle.’[7] 

There was no sign of a green-mantled maiden, let alone a troublesome fairy queen, on that cold Perthshire morning, but what if there’s a kind of glamour that instead of taking us out of the world, pitches us deeper in? When I gazed down on Strathallan, my attention was captured by nature itself, by the slow dazzle of earth and sky, a stir of wind in the grass. This momentary state of rapture may have looked strange to an onlooker, but I felt in my right mind. I hadn’t ‘taken leave’ of my senses; I had rediscovered them, or they had rediscovered me… for a little while at least. The body knows more than the mind supposes. And sometimes the body talks directly to the soul. Or sings to it. 

And it can converse with the rational mind as well. When Albert Einstein wrote of the scientist’s ‘rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law’[8], he may have had in mind the nature of light and time, of how and why planets and stars seem to move in relation to one another, but he was speaking as surely of a sense of entrancement as if he’d watched a skein of Pink-footed geese flow across the brilliant blue depths of an autumn sky. And you don’t have to be a scientist, saint or poet to succumb to glamour. Anyone, if chance is on their side, can fall under the spell of the earth for a few moments of chill November daylight, and feel the sudden, astonishing awareness of being alive in the midst of so much other life. In the midst of time.

Of course, none of these reflections occurred to me as I stood at a bend in the Cromlix track taking in the view and feeling the wind on my face. For all I knew, the watchful hinds felt the nature of space and time more keenly than me. They certainly seemed glamourous – so elegant, so queenly. Even the fox had a touch of rough magic about him when he vanished into a thicket at the field’s edge. I was just a man going about his business, which on that particular late autumn morning happened to be nothing more than watching clouds float lazily over some greenish-brown, not-quite-at-a-standstill hills. The Allan Water flowed serenely south along the floor of the strath and a Scotrail train sped north towards Perth. Presumably on time.

 
 
Chris Powici
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