Killing time

I drove back from the north cross-country yesterday as usual, avoiding the motorway rush hour and revelling in the landscape. About half past eight the roads were pretty awful as I approached the end of the hills. I had taken a wrong turn and thought, ‘Oh well’… it was as good a road as any other. I’m not really sure there is more than one road… just many tributaries like a river, all flowing into one. So I carried on.
As the traffic built I had a choice… sit in a queue of metal boxes… or investigate that little brown rad sign that said ‘Roman Site’…. No contest really. I’m a sucker for little brown heritage signs….
So I turn the car right and find myself on a section of Watling Street… one of the old Roman Roads that still criss-cross the country. I live on the course of another of them… where Akeman Street once ran.
A small crossroads and a section of unmistakable Roman masonry in a farm wall….salvaged from the ruins in the far distant past. I had no idea what to expect… no idea what was supposed to be there… no idea, even, if at that time of morning the site would be manned, open, accessible... or worth visiting at all.
I drove through the tiny village named, appropriately enough, Wall, and found a little carpark next to the village library. I approve of this library… it is spectacular. And tiny. The old red telephone box has been shelved and left open for anyone to borrow books from its confines. Opening the door felt quite surreal… as if Terry Pratchett’s L-space ought to be in full manifestation within its miniature halls.
Walking through the silent, mist shrouded village I found the remains of the Roman baths of Letocetum in a sheltered field of impossibly green grass. The early morning mist lent a strange, unearthly feel to the place and it was easy to slip beyond time and see the walls high and colourful, crowded with people, children running and laughing in the sunshine…
The first Roman camp here dates back around two thousand years, though the town… one of the most important in the land, it seems, grew up much later… and the land had been settled before. These quiet moments stretch the tapestry of human history at our feet and invite us to walk through its rich colour and imagery, seeing ourselves reflected both backward and forward in time as if time no longer holds sway.
Above the baths stands a tiny church on a site where it is thought a temple to Minerva may once have stood. It was a perfect vantage point to see the whole site and the landscape around, so of course I wandered up there, scattering partridges with my intrusion. The church was open, early though it was, and revealed some beautiful stained glass windows… only a couple of hundred years old… mere babes in that greater tapestry... yet telling stories that reach back even further, beyond recorded history.
I had stopped to ‘kill time’ as the saying goes, and it felt rather like that was true… as if our concept of time were some imaginary monster that could be slain with the point of attention… yet nebulous and fragile…moulding itself to our need to measure our journey through it, yet ceasing to exist the moment we look at it directly…a ghostly shadow vanishing under scrutiny.
These moments outside of time are a beautiful antidote to the incessant ticking of the clock and the mirror that dances with our wrinkles to its rhythm.