Andy Marshall's Genius Loci Digest: 7 Nov 2025

Compact Edition

Coming Soon - the remarkable Romanesque crypt at Lastingham

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Observations

Sacred.

I’m up at 5am and start to head east towards Rudston in Yorkshire. My drive is expected to take two hours and, as I move through the twilight, the road ahead is first lit by tungsten and then by a fragile gloaming from the horizon. As I get into the thick of it - into the lampless heft of the East Riding landscape - I become aware of the immediate space around me - a bubble of amber, dials and switches casting their glow over my hands. Behind me, in the rear-view mirror, heavy rain clouds scud across the hills; ahead, beyond the refracted interior, a letterbox horizon unravels into a faint glimmer, foreshadowing the storm.

I arrive at Rudston on the cusp of sunrise. I drive the van onto an embankment and, as I switch the key to off, the clocks and dials sink into the dash and the world outside presses in. I first see the monolith from the van window and through the bony branches of a tree. It is bathed in a light so thinned out that it looks ghostly, silver.

Perched within the van, I feel extracted and isolated from it all - caught between two worlds: interior and exterior, ancient and modern. I’m also between two weather systems: to the east is a faint promise of light, to the west a dark reminder of what is to come - but above me are the last wisps of the playful and capricious cirrus.

I’ve gone through decades of honing my responses to moments like this, moving into a kind of flow state - working seamlessly and organically with my tripod and camera - but on this day I step out of the van and slip heavily on the tarmac. It’s an awkward start and I feel stupid, unprofessional, bruised and angry. With only moments to sunrise and the clouds thickening - I need to gather myself, start again and honour this place with grace.

I walk over to the monolith - eyeing a spot for the best shot whilst at the same time opening up the camera bag and feeling the dials on the tilt-shift lens - making sure that it is set in the right position. I’m bristling with equipment - and as I negotiate the ledgers, my bag clinks and clatters. It feels like a rude intercession into what must be one of the most sacred spaces in the country.

The standing stone before me has occupied this spot for around 4,500 years. It weighs forty tonnes and rises to nearly eight metres (and almost the same length beneath the ground). Across the surrounding fields lies a ritual landscape: the traces of four cursus monuments - long, parallel earthworks that once framed processions or gatherings. All of them converge here, at the monolith.

The Romanesque church came much later, raised on the same ground, its tower now keeping company with the monolith. What began as a place of ritual has been adapted again and again - each generation leaving its mark, yet keeping faith with a singular aspect of human nature: the need to acknowledge something beyond ourselves.

Breathless, I make it to the sweet spot and turn to face the monument. Before I can fix the camera to the tripod, the scene before me stops me completely. I’ve reached the monument not only at the edge of sunrise, but on the brink of the metaphysical - as if I am the final piece in a vast jigsaw; I, myself, a conduit that draws together time, space, history, light, and landscape. In their coalescing, for the briefest of moments, I glimpse the sacred and gain a sense of how profound and fundamental these ancient lines are, and how urgently they speak to the shallowness of the present.

This ground is pregnant with the record of how human beings have tried to interpret the great question of their own spirituality: the ethereal, the in-between, the ghosts and the thin places. Each layer adds to the last - a continuity of seeking. The latest is the church, rising from the sacred landscape, expressing what its forebears once did: reaching towards the unseen, giving form to that which cannot be named, keeping faith with our enduring search for the divine. In doing so, we return to the miraculous things of our own nature: to live beyond mere existence, to imagine, to create, to seek and offer sanctuary — to shape, out of earth and stone, an image of our own need for meaning.

I think of the size of the ritual landscape here - how it runs beneath the village, across fields, hills and valleys. The mind travels outward to other places like this: to Huggate Dykes nearby, to Castlerigg and Moel Tŷ Uchaf, to the standing stones at Callanish. Each one part of a greater conversation carried across the centuries.

I walk towards the monolith and think of the granite itself - the unimaginable timescales involved in its creation. They say the base of the stone bears the imprint of a dinosaur’s foot, and that the shallow lines and grooves across the monolith’s face map the stars.

Whether the base truly holds a dinosaur’s footprint or the surface maps the stars, we’ll never know. The mystery is part of its meaning. Yet I can’t help but think that, if the creature did step here, the light now touching the stone had only just left the sun - beginning its long journey across time to meet me in this moment, and in a few moments more, to be gathered within the frame of my lens.

Between those distances - between the step and the shutter, the light and its arrival - lies everything that connects us: the reach of time, the will to create, the unending desire to understand what it means to be here at all. Within that realisation lies a truth that steadies even the most anxious, fallen, and awkward self - the knowledge that, no matter how stupid or ragged I am, I belong to something both unseen and profoundly immeasurable.