1699

Jim ReadJim Read

A photographic A photographic essay essay

Preface

The initials W.E.H and the date 1699 carved into a lintel stone, now part of a garden wall. It was quarried from the nearby rock strata.

The initials of the quarrymen who worked by hand to extract the stone are not recorded.

Nature has been reclaiming this scarred landscape ever since.

After finding the quarry and making a few photographs and I like to think that the light in this next one enters from the top left and exits through the bottom right towards the rest of the images.

Some weeks had past and one day whilst sitting in the quarry having a break and eating an Apple, it occurred to me that the quarrymen whom I thought led short and brutal lives were actually highly skilled. They worked to a sequence upon which their lives depended.

The Yew trees in the next two images have been left. They must have been no more than saplings three hundred years ago and yet they quarried around them.

Beliefs that go back thousands of years prevail.

Later I thought, occasionally when they stopped to straighten rest and look outwards the artist within would see something pleasing.

We are shadows in transit through time.

Plants grow, rock was quarried, it contains one hundred million year old fossils, and was once an equatorial seabed.

It will soon be covered, hidden by the advancing vegetation as though it never was a quarry, merely a dip in the landscape.