Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA (National Park Service): photo © Mick Sharp

During the three centuries leading up to AD1200, Native American Anasazi - ‘the Ancient Ones’ - constructed a D-shaped settlement of multi-storeyed houses on the floor of Chaco Wash in the San Juan Basin. At its peak, the ‘pueblo’ covered over three acres and had some 600 rooms spread over four storeys. It was also supplied with a ‘plaza’ and 40 underground chambers or ‘kivas’ used for religious ceremonies. Astronomy and the marking of time played important parts in the everyday farming lives and ritual practice of the Anasazi here in Chaco Canyon and elsewhere across the Southwest: the present-day ‘Four Corners’ region of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona. This corner window was so arranged that the rays of the midwinter solstice rising sun would strike the opposite bottom corner of the room, just as the rising or setting of the midwinter or midsummer sun would illuminate the chambers of megalithic tombs in the British Isles.

Una Vida Pueblo & Fajada Butte, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA (NPS): photo © Mick Sharp

Many ancient peoples used observations of the heavens, and a mixture of constructed monuments and natural features, to record and predict cyclical events. Pueblo astronomers observed sun, moon, stars and constellations to determine when to plant their crops and enact their seasonal ceremonies. Begun around AD900, Una Vida is one of the oldest pueblos in Chaco Canyon; it had at least five kivas, and 150-200 rooms arranged over one to three storeys. Beyond the remains of its tabular sandstone masonry rises the distinctive mass of Fajada Butte, famous for its ‘sun dagger’ used to establish the four quarters of the solar year. Three large sandstone slabs leaning against the cliff deflect sunlight on to its face at certain times of the day, and as the year progresses the light forms different shapes and configurations. Two spirals carved on the rock face combine with single or double light slivers to mark the spring and autumn equinoxes and the winter and summer solstices. On 21 June a single dagger of sunlight cuts through the heart of the larger spiral: the Sun God has reached his summer home, it is time for the people of his clan to perform the appropriate ceremonies.

St Endelienta’s Church, Endellion, Cornwall (Church of England): photo © Jean Williamson

The length, direction and intensity of shadows created by sunlight can give a rough idea of the time of day and year. As the sun rises in the east long shadows are flung westwards, they shorten to midday and then lengthen again eastwards as the sun descends in the west. At midday on the Equator the sun is at its highest point directly overhead and our shadows are full-stops. In the northern hemisphere at midday (twelve noon GMT, 1pm BST) our stubby shadows point north. At midsummer the sun rises at its furthest NE and sets at its furthest NW, at midwinter it rises in the SE, sets in the SW and is very low in the sky compared to summer. These simple rules have always aided the observant traveller, allowed fixed objects such as trees, standing stones or posts to be used as simple clocks, and led to the construction of sundials in which the shadow of a metal or wooden gnomon passes over calibrations as the day progresses. The earliest ‘scratch dials’ on the outside of churches would very roughly indicate midday and the time of morning Mass. This handsome slate sundial above the south porch, indicates the hours from 6am (top left) to 6pm (top right). It bears the date 1826 and the names of churchwardens Jonathan George and Digory Gray. Carved with Roman Ionic columns and a cheerful sun symbol, the dial’s inscription warns us that ‘Time Passes Swift Away.’

Old Light, Lundy Island, Devon (National Trust/Landmark Trust): photo © Mick Sharp

Built of granite blocks on the highest part of the island, the lighthouse is 96ft (29m) tall with its lantern, first lit on 21 February 1820, at 567ft (173m) above sea level. On a sunny days, the lighthouse keepers climbing up and down the winding stairway would see the progress of time mapped out by the changing light and shadows coming from the windows.

Arnol Croft House, Isle of Lewis, Western Isles (Historic Scotland): photo © Jean Williamson

Across the road from the traditional blackhouse (tigh dubh) at 42 Arnol, is this 1920’s ‘brown’ or ‘white’ house (tigh geal). Instead of an interconnecting, single-storeyed house and byre, with a double skin of drystone or clay-mortared walling and a roof of bere-straw without chimneys, this croft house has two storeys built of a single thickness of lime-mortared stone harled on its outer face. There is a stone chimney in each gable, the roof is covered by tarred felt. Instead of tiny roof lights and one small glazed window which does not open, this ‘modern-style’ house has manufactured sash-windows to let in light and air. From as early as the 1830s, landlords such as Lord Seaforth had been telling their tenants that ‘more light should be admitted into the dark recesses of their habitations’, but such improvements went ‘sorely against the wishes of the people’. For those housebound without watches, the rays of the sun make fingers of time on a clock face of domestic surfaces.

Goat’s-beard, Elstead, Surrey: photo © Jean Williamson

The flowers of goat’s-beard, or ‘Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon’, open in the early morn and close around midday. Like the dandelion, its seeds form a spherical ‘clock’ used by children of all ages to tell the time. Blow hard at the downy head of seeds known as a ‘chimney-sweeper’: the number of puffs required to empty the ‘clock’ gives you the hour. Shakespeare refers to them in the elegy in ‘Cymbeline’: ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/ As chimney-sweepers come to dust.’

St Nevet’s Churchyard, Lanivet, Cornwall (Church of England): photo © Jean Williamson

Two golden girls of James and Mary Thomas came to dust in the February and March of 1782. Joan was ten years old, Elizabeth just two; they lie side by side, watched over by angels on a double headstone. “The third of February, both were alive together;/ The 12th of March, they lay here by eachother:/ Hard was the Fate! Parents & them to sever;/ But still we rest in Hope they’re blest forever. Tempus currat! Mors veniat!” A crowned and grinning skull, whose skeletal arms hold an hourglass and arrow, bleakly illustrates the Latin maxim: Time runs, Death comes.

Abandoned Bicycle, Elstead, Surrey: photo © Jean Williamson

This heated greenhouse was once part of a walled garden complex producing fruit, vegetables and flowers for a small country house. Those privileged days are gone and the glasshouses are decaying. The bicycle, covered in goosegrass and home to a robin’s nest, is a relic of more recent times. When Jean was a teenager coming to terms with the new decimal money, she worked in the village Spar. Her mother’s trusty bike carried her safely along two miles of quiet country road. Time passed, circumstances changed: as the abandoned bike gradually became unroadworthy, the road turned into a commuter rat-run unfriendly to cyclists. Time brings perpetual change, but the same ideas keep coming around: wartime waste-not-want-not has returned, and the bike has been recycled.

Swarkestone Pavilion, Derbyshire (Landmark Trust): photo © Mick Sharp

Boyhood cycle rides often included the derelict ‘Banqueting Hall’ and its rectangular enclosure or ‘Cuttle’ near the River Trent. I loved ruins, and the local talk of jousting, bear-baiting, bull-baiting, deer hunts and kills within the enclosure kept up my interest. It also appealed to the Rolling Stones who used the Pavilion as one of the photo shoot locations for their ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ album. Once part of the demolished Swarkestone Hall, it was built in 1631-2 as a ‘bowle alley house’: a place for elaborate banquets giving good views of the formal gardens and bowling green within the Cuttle. Beautifully restored by the Landmark Trust, it is available for holiday lets. It’s large, clear-glass leaded windows let the sunshine stream in, and the artificial light pour out.

Corpus Christi Church, Tremeirchion, Denbighshire (Church in Wales): photo © Mick Sharp

At a time when the majority of churchgoers would have lived in small, cramped, dark dwellings lit by narrow louvres or glassless and shuttered windows, to come to a spacious church flooded with the multicoloured light from large stained-glass windows would have been glorious indeed. Light has ever been used as a symbol and metaphor for spirit, and the stained-glass windows were used as the pages of an illuminated book, to the glory of God and the Church. Just as a largely illiterate population were taught by the Bible characters and stories carved on preaching crosses, so were they awed and instructed by the magic pictures floating on the dark walls of church and cathedral. These two panels in the vestry of Corpus Christi have been assembled from fragments of 15th-century stained glass, but even in its jumbled state the glass retains that bright spark of spirit.

All Saints Church, Llangar, Denbighshire (Cadw): photo © Mick Sharp

Moral and biblical scenes were also painted onto church walls along with the Creed, Ten Commandments and Psalms etc. Many of them warned of the fleetness of time and the inevitability of death. This grim figure beside the musicians’ gallery dates from around 1748. The gravedigger Death carries the hourglass of passing time and an arrow which can also be used as a symbol of time - Tempus fugit/Time flies - or the sting of death.

Arrow of Time, Kingston Russell, Dorset: photo © Jean Williamson

In our world, as we are currently able to perceive it, time is the fourth dimension, but ‘string theory’ suggests there may be as many as eleven dimensions in ‘empty’ space made up of grains ‘a trillion trillion times smaller than atoms’ (Lord Rees). If this is true, we could be amidst other multi-dimensional universes and all time - past, present and future - may exist simultaneously. The British astronomer Arthur Eddington first used the term ‘arrow of time’ in 1927 to distinguish the direction of time on a four-dimensional map of the world. At a macroscopic level there does appear to be an obvious direction or flow of time, but at the microscopic scale of atoms things are not so clear cut, and there are serious contradictions between quantum theory and general relativity. The second law of thermodynamics suggests that the ‘entropy’ or disorder of a system will increase with time, which does suggest progression. From a cosmological point of view, time’s arrow points in the direction of the expansion of our universe towards a ‘Big Chill’ or heat death when all the available energy has been used up: some theories suggest time will then reverse. Is time ‘real’ or just an illusion created by our underachieving brain cells? For us the past is things we can remember, be told about or know; the future is those things which, to our knowledge, have not yet happened: perhaps we have experienced the future(s) but cannot remember it or them. Is the future ‘out there’ or is it already here?