Rock sundial

The story behind the photo

At Roc la Tour in the Ardennes, two ancient rock towers stand just far enough apart to leave a narrow gap between them, and at the right time of year the setting sun lines up through that gap for only a few minutes, throwing a brief starburst of light across the stone. For those few minutes each year, this place tells the time, which is where the title comes from.

I found the alignment by walking the slab until the sun’s disc appeared in the slot, then set up the tripod and waited. Stopped well down, the sun becomes a clean star wedged between two masses of stone, with a thin lit edge on either side of it. These rocks had been telling the time here long before I arrived with a camera.

Local legend claims these ruins are what remains of a castle built in a single night through a pact with the devil, a bargain undone at the last second by a rooster’s premature crow, its walls collapsing down to the Semoy river below. Whatever the truth of it, the place feels like something that was built, then deliberately unbuilt.