Time

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable

TS Eliot: Burnt Norton, from Four Quartets,
published in Collected Poems
1909-1962 (Faber and Faber)

Time is more eternally present on the Isle of Coll than in most places in modem Britain. Sitting amid the swaying grass and bright flowers beside a Totronald standing stone and gazing across a scene of rough pasture, rocky coast, little islands and expansive ocean, all under the vast blueness of infinity, one is struck by how little that scene has changed since our early ancestors erected their simple altar 6000 years ago - the single relict of their fleeting earthly presence and monument to their mortality. And to ours too. Let the altar-builder return and he will recognise so many elements in the view before him: the grass and the flowers on which his animals grazed; the nearby extrusions of Lewisian gneiss on which he rested in the same summer sunshine; the summit of Ben Hogh with, just out of sight, its perched block dominating the skyline, both far, far older than he; and that offshore island which, millennia later, would be named after an item of headwear of which he could have had no conception. True there would be, new since his day, a building here, a wall there, a telegraph pole and a road elsewhere, but these would be inconsequential intrusions on an essentiallly unchanged landscape - unchanged, perhaps apart from tree cover for it is difficult to imagine his existence without wood.

The dry stone wall - often lichenous, overgrown and collapsing - is another element in the eternal presence of time on Coll, and it is its very decay which gives it that aura of permanence. How different the effect of patched and polished ancient abbeys and castles, taken out of time by modem conservators seeking to give them an eternal presence by reversing their natural decline into decay and eternity. By comparison with the venerable wall how transient its successor, the ubiquitous barbed-wire fence. Long gone the wall-builders may be but they still have a presence through their memorials. For how long will the fence be a memorial to the fencer? The Derelict White House, standing in conspicuous isolation by the sea at Grishipoll, and the equally forsaken neighbouring school, both of which would have been demolished or polished elsewhere, are further instances of the eternal presence of time. The initials inscribed in the plasterwork of the house keep alive the presence of those who lived there over a century ago and one can feel the ghosts of Johnson and Boswell more than a century before that still sitting round a blazing fire while the wind, which blows yet, beat upon the windows, and the sea, which pounds yet, pounded the shore. Gone, too, may be the barefooted children who attended that little seat of learning, but not the ever present reminder of that past age. And what of the aircraft wheel washed ashore in Grishipoll Bay during the second Armageddon of the 20th Century or the bones of the wooden barque, the Harmonie, resembling the skeleton of some great leviathan picked bare of its flesh, buried for ever in the sandy shore of Loch Gortan?

I remember one still summer's evening fishing at a moorland loch. Before long my interest in fish reflected theirs in me, and I found diversion in the full moon, its cold, silvery light tracing its course through the darkening heavens. For aeons its silent freckled face had gazed down on that unchanging scene: for aeons more it would continue - continue, perhaps, until the Earth's redemption. IT.