Each Friday I post out a digest recording my discoveries in my time-travelling camper van. Subscribe for free.
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Photographs by Andy Marshall
As I walk around the space I can sense how the room would have looked several hundred years ago. Our modern selves would paint within boundaries, negate the windows and ceiling, but here, every surface is covered in render and paint.
I don’t want you to be put off by the industrial tag associated with the chimney and the other remnants that survive here. They have given rise to a secluded and singular landscape that makes the soul sing.
It was at that instant that the sharp easterly dropped and beyond the forest of Rothiemurchus, the snow bones of Creag Dhubh tousled the clouds into thin wisps of galloping guilloche.
Two monoliths lean towards one another, their great positive masses made meaningful by the sliver of negative space between. Pass through and the body completes the design.
I lift the bag from its hook and – as if from nowhere – the shopkeeper appears.
The columns themselves are remarkable – spiralled, as if frozen mid-turn, glowing faintly in the half-light.
When the shadows lengthened, I set about the golden section: lining up the stiff-leaf capitals and intersecting doors.
What is so appealing about timber framed buildings is the honesty of their construction - not a morsel wasted - everything is structural, has a purpose - and out of that is extruded a kind of sinuous beauty.
For this glass, this work of art, is not just for the believer, the in-crowd, the participant - but it’s also for ordinary people like me.
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