The British Isles are tolerably well-stocked with grand old ruined buildings , and I've been fascinated by them for most of my life. Even in ruins, the fact that these places have been present through hundreds of years of history is remarkable to me. Whether sacred or secular, I love to ponder the human stories that have played out in and around them.

These old places are also a challenge to me. In their heyday, they must have seemed like they would last forever. The castles that dominated the towns of medieval England represented the power of a feudal system within which everyone knew there place and from which few were permitted to deviate. But permanence was an illusion. The stones of the castles have been scattered and the system they represented is all but gone.

The monks that inhabited the magnificent monasteries that we now admire as romantic ruins cannot have foreseen their demise. The end, when it came, was not their responsibility. The world changed around them, and they were swept away by the tide of history. The great monastic ruins can still be places of prayer, but the modern visitor is more likely to be looking for coffee and cake than confession and compline.

A photograph captures a brief moment of time, a moment which is inevitably gone forever, unrepeatable and irretrievable. The image can help us bring that moment to mind, but the moment itself will always be out of reach. Photographs remind us that the world we see is not the world as it always will be. We may shake our fists at change: history laughs at the futility of the gesture and rolls on. But if the past is gone, the future is not yet set. The brief moments of 'now' add up to lifetimes, generations, epochs. The way we choose to use each moment will shape what is yet to be.

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This article was originally printed in my zine, 'Has anyone seen my mojo'