Tucked away between the buttresses of the harbour breakwater at Stonehaven, is a relic from the past when hundreds of fishing boats filled the harbour. Its main purpose to give a secure anchor point for some of those boats.
History requires both information and imagination. Over the 200 years since Robert Stevenson designed this phase of an already ancient harbour, and later generations expanded and strengthened it, it has provided a safe place for so many lives and livelihoods. This bollard has its own stories to tell. Imagine storms just as violent as recent weather patterns, and dozens of fishing boats heading out taking with them many of the men of the town as skippers and crew, and the risks that were a way of life.
It could do with another coat of paint, though part of me has always acknowledged the appearance of rust as a natural reminder of the transience of things. That goes back to childhood days on the farms, and memories of old sheets of corrugated iron, obsolete implements lying in corners, 40 gallon drums once used for watering the animals, all of them marked by the encroachments of time, slowly rusting away.
As a solid, rusting, but defiant reminder of former time, this old anchor pointit also reminds me of the elegiac realism of Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes 3 and his famous poem about time. He adds this reflection, which was somewhere in the back of my mind as I took this photo of an all but forgotten and hidden anchor point for generations before us.
"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.
Whatever is has already been,
and what will be has been before;
and God will call the past to account."
Ecclesiastes 3.11-15
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