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I was fortunate to visit Cornwall, thanks to my sister,
in August 1999 to witness the total eclipse of the Sun. This is the piece
I wrote immediately afterwards.
Wednesday, August 11, 1999.
We all got up at eightish and piled into the car after breakfast. Seven of
us filled a Ford Escort; quite illegal too. Travelling from Liskeard to
the moors wasn't far but traffic was already becoming heavy. Steph turned
the car around when it came to a stop, and by parking further down the
road where there was a space, left us with a mile to walk.
The Hurlers are a pair of stone circles on Bodmin Moor, a plateau of grass
and gorse where sheep have trod wide paths that now let us bypass the
lines of stuck cars. These circles, which connect us through three and a
half thousand years of human history, were the focus of the lines of
people walking towards a common goal and a shared experience; one of many
coalescing clumps of expectant watchers across Cornwall, some visible to
us on nearby hills. Within the circle, New Age performers banged their
drums and sounded horns as the first bite was taken from the Sun. I
wondered about the connection these people made to the celestial event we
were all about to witness. Could their pagan forebears have predicted an
eclipse? To me, the fact that vast numbers of the human animal could
gather along a narrow strip of the planet, knowing consciously that
something was going to occur, is a triumph of mathematics and science,
another one chalked up for rational thinking.
I set up a telescope on a tripod in the unlikely hope that the partially
eclipsed Sun would become bright enough to require protection by
projection. The high clouds were thick enough to provide ideal viewing for
a partial eclipse and as each cloud gap revealed the ever decreasing solar
crescent, a whoop passed across the thousand or so people gathered here
for the event.
Imperceptibly, the light from the overcast sky dims and we begin to feel
cooler in the dearth of solar energy. If I stop and think about it, I can
sense the impending twilight. We drink beer and orange juice, eat fruit
and cheese rolls and watch the Moon appear to eat the Sun. My excitement
rises as the final minutes come around. The western horizon is darkening
now and I become aware of the approaching shadow. As the last sliver of
light disappears behind the next thick lump of high cloud, I telephone
Anne who is with friends and having a glass of wine in Glasgow. As I talk,
I describe to her the sense I have of the approach of darkness. I am not
going to see the corona but I have become aware of something arriving from
the west. I am talking fast now as I feel the advance of an enveloping
dark. Around me, like my white paper and telescope, the sky and its clouds
have become a giant screen for the projection of this grand cosmic shadow.
In a glorious moment of onrush, the shadow came and wrapped itself around
us little people there on the moor. I had to look around me to appreciate
the scale of this thing, spinning this way and that and narrating like a
blithering idiot down the phone about how incredible this was. For a
while, I was unaware that Anne had passed the phone on to our neighbour as
I babbled about the caress of this amazing shadow.
Events were happening faster than my mind could take them in as I entered
the 'omigod' zone, whirring around to take in the spectacle of the
transition and yakking incessantly into the mobile. Goodness knows what
they thought in Glasgow as the sound of my descriptions were mixed with
the whoops and hollers of the gathered together, as we allowed the cone of
the Moon's umbra to sweep over and around us. Scanning the horizon, I
could sense the shape of the spot cast on the Earth.
All at once the trailing edge of the shadow passed like a great wave of
light crashing over us. Not once had we been able to view the total
eclipse, yet it didn't seem to matter. With a bottle of lager in one hand
and the opportunity to link with Anne in the other, I didn't care about,
or bother trying to photograph what could never have been captured in a
picture anyway. For this was not just a spectacle. It was a feeling of
onrush of a greater presence, a cosmic imperative of colossal scale. I was
so elated at this enveloping experience of almost orgasmic crescendo, I
couldn't begin to imagine what seeing the coronal ring could be like in a
clear sky.
Daylight had returned, the phone call was over and Steph and I hugged long
and hard. I had been so carried away by something I had not expected, the
emotional after-effects were kicking in. I edged away from the group as
unexplained euphoria welled up, bringing tears to my eyes and leaving me
staggered by what had happened. With my soul, rather than my rational
mind, I had felt the Moon's shadow pass over me.
Harland's Eclipse.
My good friend David Harland did one better by going on a cross channel
ferry. the ship was able to find a break in the cloud and David took this
photograph before spending the next two minutes gawping!
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