Knowlton Rings

As the light failed towards the end of a bright Boxing Day afternoon we managed to get to Knowlton Rings, another of my favourite Dorset places, on the way back home from my mum's birthday. It's a site that invariably appears in any book or account of numinous ancient places in Britain, a Norman church strangely set in a henge monument many centuries older, the pared landscape of Cranborne Chase around it scattered with bowl barrows. Some will talk rashly of ley lines and earth energies, but what the thinking of the builders of St Michael's Knowlton truly was is anyone's guess. 

These places seem timeless, and across the years my photographs of them barely differ apart from the varying moods of weather and light: I have one from 2010 taken from almost the same angle as the above shot, with my dad just leaving the ruin. I was looking after him for a few days when my mum was in hospital, trying to find things to do that would distract and not distress his fragmenting, dementia-disfigured mind. Time does, nevertheless, affect these ancient sites, biting the walls and sprouting encroaching plants, but much more slowly than it does us, so we can imagine that they stand changeless, compass points of who we really are.

'I hope you don't mind me bringing you here', I said to Ms Formerly Aldgate. 'It's peaceful', she said, which of course it is.