TUILYIES
To stand at Tuilyies is to feel the rip-current of time. Here, in a green wedge of land beside the A985, the present rushes past as a torrent of steel and rubber. Lorries shudder by, their slipstream a sudden gust of wind, their sound a low roar that never quite fades. And in the middle of it all, four stones stand sentinel. They are a quiet refusal in a loud world, a lithic interruption to the asphalt's flow. I have come to see them not with my eyes alone, but through a lens that peels back the visible, a camera converted to the strange gloaming of the infrared spectrum.
Up close, the stones are a world. Their surfaces are maps of lichen, cartographies of slow time written in shades of ochre and grey. They are rough-hewn, shouldered out of the earth by hands whose purposes we can only guess at. A cist, a grave, a box of stone for the honoured dead, lies between them, its capstone long vanished. To touch the dolerite is to feel a coldness that is not of this day's weather, but of the deep time locked within the rock. You place a palm on the stone and you feel the immense, silent weight of the four and a half millennia they have kept their watch, while the road beside them shouts its brief, urgent story.
I raise the camera. Through its dark-glass eye, the world shifts. The familiar green of the grass bleaches to a spectral white, each blade radiating a light our senses cannot register. The sky, a mild blue to the naked eye, deepens in the viewfinder to a dramatic, near-black canopy. The stones themselves change, their textures heightened, their inner coolness rendered as a dark, dense presence against the ghostly luminescence of the living world around them. The camera sees heat and its absence; it translates the unseen energies of the place into a new visual language. It is a kind of haunting, a way of photographing the ghost in the machine of the world.
The traffic continues its frantic pilgrimage to Dunfermline or Kincardine. In the long exposures needed for this kind of light-gathering, the cars and trucks dissolve into streaks, into faint blurs of motion that pass through the solid forms of the stones without leaving a mark. They are phantoms, and the stones are the reality. The sound is a constant abrasion, yet the feeling here is one of profound stillness. The stones hold their ground, their silence older and deeper than any noise the combustion engine can conjure. They are anchors dropped into the bedrock of history, holding this small patch of land fast against the raging river of the now.
Leaving, you carry the dissonance with you: the ancient quiet and the modern clamour. The photograph I take away is not a true record, but an interpretation, a glimpse of a reality that runs parallel to our own. It shows a world of strange light and deep shadow, which feels right for this place. The Tuilyies stones do not give up their secrets easily. They ask us to stop, to listen beneath the noise, and to see in more ways than one. They are a question asked of the landscape, a question that still hangs in the air, long after the hands that raised them have turned to dust.