Like Alice through the looking glass, I was first mesmerised by the steps that lead to the Chapter House at Wells Cathedral through another photographers’ lens.

Frederick H. Evans took a defining photograph of this place in 1903. It was to be a hundred years later that I stood in the same space, my lens like a divining rod, seeking out the runnels of his mind: his perspective, his viewpoint.

It was Evans who first called this place a sea of steps. In England's cathedrals, he sought out beauty rather than the past, and he called them 'poems in stone'

I don't think I've come across another place that captures so evocatively the memory of the past within the fabric. Here the past is persistent. It hides within the fabric and then, when you least expect it, presses its grubby nose right up against the present, illuminated by the presence of absence, lingering in the hollow of a step.

This is a liminal place where boundaries dissolve between the sharpness of the present and the blur of the past. This is a place of transience and yet permanence, a space of solidity that invokes fluidity. It is a 'new world within the known world.'*

Nothing better communicates the flow of time than a place that has faithfully carried the passage of people for centuries. And nothing evokes the temporal as when the participant is passing through time themselves, progressing up the steps that dissolve into metaphor: stepping from the depths to the heights, moving into a place of prospect and refuge, a portal to the heavens - ascension.

For a moment, the silence here is broken by a group of visitors. They walk through the threshold and catch my eye. There is a correspondence of awe and wonder; intangible, inexplicable, unmeasurable.

The people ascending these steps awaken me to the notion that this place has a voice. It is an auditory realm that echoes the footsteps that have weathered these stones. I close my eyes and the stairs start to speak: they tell of the people that pass - the sporadic patter of children juxtaposed with the deliberate pace of their parents; and in between, the intermittent pauses marking the steady ascent of an elderly gentleman.

Evans taught me to capture a record of emotion, but also, through his lens, I discovered the power of place.

*Alan McGlashlan, The Savage and Beautiful Country

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