The caves of Cheddar Gorge

Clichés like ‘timeless’ and ‘time stands still’ are often used to describe places. The caves of Cheddar Gorge defy such triteness. Their near ethereal splendour can’t be measured in temporal units. They are today and yesterday and tomorrow. If you ignore their physical geology, you will experience the true essence of Time.

The internals of the caves are carved into extraordinary shapes by the seeping water. They look like some post-modern sculpture, every nook and cranny uniquely formed and contoured, imbued with brilliant russet and pink and green. Time has neither stood still nor negated itself. It is everywhere, the dripping water of now, the stalagmites and stalactites of the past and present – a chain of events separated only by microseconds but strung together in millennia, and a future perhaps no different from the past – unpredictable, but with a trajectory well established. Time dilates and contracts at the same time, like some abstruse concept in quantum physics. An illusion of reality manifests in front of you, within your grasp one moment, and slipping out the next.

You leave the caves of Cheddar Gorge, with a mind that is frantic in its effort to find its place in this vast continuum. You wonder if Time itself is the elusive God we argue about, the omnipresent and omnipotent, the everlasting, the merciful and the merciless.