MOUNTAIN LIGHT
Several years ago, during a holiday that included a few days in Wales and the borders, I saw and managed to photograph something unusual. Somewhere in the eastern edge of the Black Mountains, by open land in the distance, there appeared a ball-shaped swirl of coloured light. As perceived, the apparent sphere was permanently changing. A range of colours flickered and intermingled within its boundary. The sphere was stationary but extraordinarily active in its fluctuating display of what seemed like all the colours of the rainbow.
And that, presumably, is what it was. There are various other well known and interesting natural light effects but they all differ significantly from the Black Hills light. It is not a halo, which forms around the sun or moon when their light is refracted by ice crystals. Neither is it a corona, produced with the presence of water droplets, again around the moon or sun. A third light phenomenon, iridescence, is seen as coloured patches or blobs within a cloud and simply does not resemble a sphere. The splendidly named “sun dog” “or mock sun” - though sometimes multicoloured - appears alongside the sun, sometimes on both sides. In addition it assumes a blotchy rather than spherical shape. All these candidates can be dismissed.
So what was it in the Black Hills sky? The light not only contained the colours of the rainbow. It also appeared in the classic rainbow context of interacting rain droplets and sunshine. But what about scale and shape? Rainbows vary in perceived size, depending how the viewer relates them to other features in the surroundings. So in expansive visual fields they appear both more distant and, therefore, larger than in, say, a high rise urban frame. But whatever their apparent size, rainbows remain rainbows, with a perceived length of varying curvature. In scientific explanation since Isaac Newton, as well as in everyday life, that a rainbow has length is simply assumed. The rainbow is curved, but this is not the curvature-in-all-directions of a sphere.
The spread of colours across the rainbow is understood as manifesting different wavelengths of visible light as refracted or bent at different angles through the droplets. But as long as the rainbow lasts the structure of differentiated light is stable or at least changes slowly, by gradual degree. The Black Hills light was different. Far from displaying stability over time the colours were profoundly dynamic, ceaselessly shifting in relation to each other. This multi-coloured flame effect is not conveyed on a still image. But as the photo shows, both rain and sunshine were present and it seems reasonable to assume that this was a rainbow-related phenomenon, albeit of a strange type. Within a few minutes of this photo being taken a more conventional rainbow appeared in the same area, though unfortunately I did not see the actual "stretch".
The experience of observing this unusual and unexpected lightshow was other-worldly. Initially I noticed it from the corner of my eye but the spectacle immediately turned me round for a direct view. It was captivating and gripping, utterly unlike any light effect I had seen before. The colours were those of a rainbow but their churning was unearthly and, by deep contrast with a rainbow, disturbing. In terms of probably very partial parallels, it resembled my uninformed imaginings of how a nuclear reaction might look at close quarters. It could well have been a sci. fi. movie representation of a wormhole entrance, so different was it from everyday perceptions.
Presumably others have witnessed this phenomenon and shared that sense of being in the presence of the RADICALLY OTHER. Allowing my thoughts to explore the experience a little later that day, there came the notion that this seemingly living rainbow globe could easily be interpreted as a sign or even manifestation of a god or goddess. Perhaps such visions - unusually verifiable by separate observers - helped identification of at least some prehistoric sacred sites?
Certainly our predecessors walked, settled and lived in this area. Investigations at the Symond’s Yat limestone caves in south Herefordshire suggest human activity there over some 25.000 years. By around 6,000 years ago farmers had settled at the Causeway Farm site where the city of Hereford now stands. During excavations in the late 1960’s another settlement near Dorstone in the nearby Golden Valley of west Herefordshire yielded the usual Neolithic paraphernalia of flint axe and arrowhead fragments. The community that left those traces was almost certainly linked with Arthur’s Stone, a Neolithic gem on Merbach Hill, just eight kilometers east of the book-lover’s paradise Hay-on-Wye. Long stripped of its original earth mound covering, this 5,500 year old tomb and temple stands 280 metres above sea level beside an ancient way now known as Arthur’s Stone Lane. It is one of several such structures to be found in the Golden Valley. Archaeologists identify it as an example of the Cotswold-Severn Group of chambered tombs that also includes the remarkable Belas Knap long barrow in north Gloucestershire.
Arthur’s Stone is magnificently located in a glacially sculpted landscape dominated to the west by the Old Red Sandstone enormity of the Black Mountains and, behind them, the Brecon Beacons mountain range. It sits among modern large arable fields in a liminal space where the valleys and uplands of the borders begin to give way to the wilder high Welsh reaches. When constructed it announced a new human relationship with a ridge on which Mesolithic precursors had already left their mark in the form of flint fragments.
The lost covering mound may well have been oval, perhaps 18 metres long and half as wide. Today old and new intermingle around its stony skeleton. Twenty first century agribusiness shares a landscape with rich parkland developed from the ancient wildwood by early inhabitants. Their at first tentative, partial clearances modified the primary wood that had grown following the end of the last great glaciation around 17,000 years ago. In the process they set in motion the sequence of environmental changes that eventually gave rise to today’s mixed landscape.
It is conceivable that the creators of Arthur’s Stone, as of other sites, were inspired by the appearance of a rainbow globe. Why, after all, should people have selected THAT particular place as a site of special spiritual significance? For the same reason, perhaps, that I chose to photograph a nearby location on a more recent day of rain and sun. It is almost impossible to envisage means of verifying of such a linkage. Even so, it is entirely consistent with the fact that globally rainbows figure prominently in religious, mythical and legendary accounts of cosmological order including the creation of the world. The pervasiveness of the rainbow within such fundamental forms of story telling surely derives in part from its haunting quality and capacity to astonish. More analytically, it exemplifies the fact that apparently transcendental perceptions experienced as visions can, exceptionally, be generated by rare configurations of mundane elements of nature and their processing within the brain and associated cultural elaboration. On this occasion the camera registered a trace of the core event.
In practical terms the Black Hills light challenges taken-for-granted conceptions of the seemingly tamed, even sedate British countryside. There, as with life generally, the marvelous may erupt at any moment and, quite properly, dent the limiting notion that one square metre (or hour) must equal another in the human apprehension and construction of the world.
Select bibliography
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David Binns
November 2004