Sundial of St Beuno

my body opened at the knowledge of existence
and of being, confused and diffused
my body trembled and sighed
to a forgotten song
not yet a fugitive of music
I knew the place of time
and the time of place
—Alejandra Pizarnik 

 

Standing next to this 10th century granite slab-type sundial time I wonder... how does time matter, or rather appear? And so, this musing:  time matters. With a gnomon (rod-pointer) extending from the drilled hole, the sun’s shadow would mark the canonical hours as it crossed the linear incisings.

This sundial, a slab-dial with a cross of western Celtic pattern at its head, once marked the monastic daily cycle. The linear incisings, some still visible, marked the canonical hours, the divisions of the day for fixed times of prayers, often the three-hour intervals of religious services appointed by canon law.  Time plays on and on as many come and go.

Located in Clynnog Fawr, North Wales, it is a type also known in Ireland, but thought to be unique in Wales and is a Grade II listed monument. According to Cadw, the Welsh Government’s historic environment service, “probably still standing in its original location on a major religious site.” Perhaps, and No. And yes.

H. Harold Hughes in a 1931 Miscellanea “An Ancient Sun-Dial at Clynnog” notes:  Fenton writes (in Tours in Wales, 1813) that from Clynnog, "In our way to Carnarvon about a mile on our road, observe a long stone of a curious grit, with a cross in a circle on one end which appears to have been a tomb or shaft of a cross.”' Hughes in 1931 learned the stone-slab was used a footbridge and later moved to a farm “to support milk-pails.”  His group helped the Vicar of San Beuno Church relocate the sundial-slab to where they believed it belonged: next to the chapel in the churchyard.

 

With this stone I gaze at the ancient churchyard, populated with inscribed slate stones, some for the ancient monks. Imagining, for a thousand years in place at the corner of the St Beuno Chapel and the 16th century St Beuno Church. And somewhere near a lost 7th century monastery.  

The free-standing sundial is my height. Ambiguously Cadw notes:  “approximately 2m high (reduced by c30cm).”  The “reduced” is not explained. From the rear view the top appears rough. Was there more to the cross?  What does Time not tell?

Hughes, a Bangor architect, doesn’t clarify, but carefully measures the stone and notes:  “The full length of the stone is 9 feet 3 inches, but 2 feet 9 inches is buried below the ground surface.”  Hughes concludes: “The Clynnog dial appears to be unique as far as Wales is concerned. I have little hesitation in assigning its date to a pre-Norman period.” 

NOTES

—Appreciation to Ashley Batten, MA, MCIfA, Regional Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Archaeology North Wales, for his helpful advice after we crossed paths one fine morning in Penmaenmawr.

—Photos May 2025.  Red arrow, left in above photo of St Beuno Church, indicates the Sundial next to the Chapel. (click to enlarge) 
—Alejandra Pizarnik, from Extracting the Stone of Madness (translated by Yvette Siegert, 2016).

—H. Henry Hughes in a 1931 Miscellanea “An Ancient Sun-Dial at Clynnog” in Archaeologia Cambrensis.

—Cadw. Full Report for listed Buildings: Sundial in the churchyard of the Church of St Beuno. https://cadw.gov.wales/
—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clynnog_Fawr

—Speculative binaries:  Marcia Bjornerud, in Timefulness, distinguishes Time as something that simply marches on — chronos — and Time that is defined within a narrative — kairos.  Similarly, Stephen Jay Gould shapes a geologic dynamic as: Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. 

CODA
And, above all, to look on innocently. As if nothing were happening, which is true. —Alejandra Pizarnik

 

Another Tale of Time in Clynnog Fawr

 

Cupped Dolmen in Wales

One begins to understand that rocks are not nouns, but verbs — physical evidence of processes…  —Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness 

Dolmen near the Irish Sea on the Llŷn peninsula  

This cromlech near Clynnog Church in Carnarvonshire has nothing very remarkable about it, except that the upper face of the covering-stone, measuring eight feet by five feet eight inches, is covered with small artificial hollows, apparently placed without any attempt at order.  These markings are of more or less simple character. The most simple, and perhaps the oldest, form are the small cup-shaped hollows placed either in symmetrical order or scattered promiscuously. It may also be considered remarkable that the hollows are on the upper, not the under, side of the covering-slab. 

— E. L. Barnwell, from “Marked Stones in Wales,” Archacologia Cambrensis, April 1867.

Half a mile to the south-west of the village of Clynnog Fawr, stands near the sea a cromlech, consisting of a capstone and four props. This cromlech is described, under date 1772, in the old Rhyl MSS., compiled by the Rev. J. Llwyd, of Caerwys, as having upon its capstone "near a hundred shallow cavities running in oblique but almost parallel lines along, its surface, three much larger than the rest in a triangular position; it is supported by four strong bearers, and in length four cubits, in breadth three, its inclination towards the setting sun." 

—Sir James Y. Simpson, in Archaic Sculpturings of Cups, Circles… (1867) Included the above image, a plate lithograph from a sketch by Dr Hughes of Llanwrst, Wales.

Looking SE from the dolmen: left, Gyrn Goch and Gyrn Ddu, Right in the distance, the striking trio of hills known in English as the 'Rivals'. At 564 m, the central, Garn Ganol is the highest in the Llŷn peninsula; to the north-west, Garn Fôr (444 m), to the south-east, Tre'i Ceiri — with its extensive hillfort — at 485 m.

Bachwen Cromlech with Bard, watercolor, by 18th c. Welsh artist Moses Griffith (National Library of Wales). Click to enlarge.

This cromlech (the Welsh word for dolmen aka burial tomb) is well-known as the Bachwen Dolmen, an easy walk from Clynnog Fawr, on the western edge of Llŷn peninsula. The Neolithic dolmen is unique in Wales for its capstone with the numerous (promiscuous!) carved cupules. Pictures, comments and documentation can be found via the internet. 
Color photos: Douglas Beauchamp, May 2025.

 

FELDSPAR :: EARTH DAY

The earth as it has always been
is saying it's goodbyes. Another world
will overrun the emptiness,
but I love this one.
— Chase Twichell

Time collapses. This basalt is different. Harder. Darkly brown. Rounded water-smoothed boulders thick with feldspar crystals sparkling in the desert air.  Petroglyphs emerge ghost-like, yearning, dissolve as the light shifts, from 3000 ybp +/- 2500 years.

Coarse-grained, plagioclase porphyritic basalt, boulders rounded from millennia under the lake's Pleistocene high-stands, a southwest edge the multi-layered Columbia River Flood Basalt Province.

Along US Highway 395 north to Canada south to California 19th century geographic imaginings. Margins alive. Lichen cattle shrimp avocets bighorn. Saltcrusts fences bones placed stones. Wave cut road cut clay bed tar bed.

Lake Abert. Pleistocene Lake Chewaican remnant, a very near blurred future-time collides toward this place. Too soon geo-logically: a stark dry slope, a dusty valley. Asphalt road bed black cracking tilting sliding into white salt. Trace chemicals congeal and bind the changing times. Patina darkens petroglyphs rock circles stacked walls. Wind carries the sparklings the longing crystals on through the curve of time.

NOTES
—  Earth Day.  Consider: Plagioclase is also a major constituent of rock in the highlands of the Earth's moon. Analysis of thermal emission spectra from the surface of Mars suggests that plagioclase is the most abundant mineral in the crust of Mars.
— Plagioclase: from the Greek plagios - "oblique" and klao - "I cleave" in allusion to the obtuse cleavage angles of the good cleavages.
— Chase Twichell, from her poem Touch-me-not in The Ghost of Eden (1995)

CODA
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025):   I chose rabbits as an art icon because there is a cultural universality to them throughout the world. Standing rabbits not only appear in petroglyphs in the Americas, but in petrogylphs around the world as well. In educational institutions in this country, reference is often made to the age of America as being two hundred years or five hundred years, but because we still live under the aegis of colonial thinking, its never taken into consideration that some of the world's greatest cultures and cities were here in the Americas for thousands of years—and are still here. (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2002)
Artwork:  The Long Shadow (2013), woodcut

BASALT::High Lakes

Three following photos, details of above

Below, detail of above

Below, detail of above

Photos: Selections of petroglyphs carved-abraded-pecked-incised on an east-facing rim of fractured basalt located in what-is-now Lake County, Oregon — high lakes country east of Warner Basin. These petroglyphs, as with the thousand of others in this region, placed-made during seasonal rounds, crossing boundaries over incalculable centuries.

Looking is not seeing; seeing not knowing. Time elides moments; layers confound time. Present in parallel universes — who are you?

TUFF :: Tule Lake

Time thins.   Memory serves the mirage.

A cliff wall of tuff. Volcanic cone erupted underwater 250,000 or so years ago under the ancient endorheic basin now known as Tule Lake. Terminus of the expansive watershed nourishing Lost River. In turn, nourishing the Modocs in their ancestral territories for thousands of years.

This tumultuous country now sliced by an unwavering geopolitical line, the Oregon-California boundary. In the 19th century this line demarcated a transgressive often violent zone of difference. The Modoc peoples subjugated, displaced, often killed. Gold-seekers, militia, US Army, Wasco scouts hired from Warm Springs reservation, and would be railroaders-turned-ranchers-turned judge and boss.

How do these thousands of rock cut markings gazed at by the modern drive-up viewer align with colonial claiming and naming?  What can we ask that comes close to empathy and release?  

Petroglyphs carved through several millennia now easily accessed and viewed in a protected section of the Lava Beds National Monument:  Petroglyph Point.

 

CODA
… Forgotten now forgetting, no
more the absent-minded in full preoccupation
with the ten thousand things, each separate,
each needing its own space and unique memory.
Years seem to have gone by in this forgetting.
Do thousand lives have to be wasted now
to sharpen this one life? But all the lives
return again into the picture as sun wills me
to wither down to a last flare of love.
—Nathanial Tarn from the poem Recollection of Being