This is a Pedestrian Project about marking time. It took place between 27th October and 4th November 2024 (inc. images from 5th November).
I’m no creature of habit. Left to myself, I struggle to do the anything every day at the same time; I rarely eat at regular mealtimes, and having been self-employed for my adult life, I’ve never worked an on-going 9-5 (am-pm) day. Not since school.
Photos Taken 15 minutes Before Sunrise (or thereabouts)
This may explain why Sunrise Walks are an interesting concept to me. Instead of following my own inner, wonky routine, I have decided to set my alarm and be there, on my doorstep at the correct time, every day between the clock chaging in the UK and in the US, as prompted by Blake Morris. The brief was to take a photo (or somehow to document) the moments that were 15 minutes before, at, and 15 minutes after, sunrise.
Except …
Sunrise changes by 2+ minutes every day so it isn’t actually ‘the same’. I made a chart in advance:
Times and Twilight
I took the sunrise times from the Time and Date website and missed the 3 minute difference between 28th and 29th October. Instead, I saw that there were 2 minutes between 27th and 28th, 30th and 31st etc and followed that pattern for all of the start and end times (I’d be no good in a lab or at setting train timetables) meaning that from day 3, I was snapping my photos at the wrong times.
In writing this blog, I have discovered that this anomaly is because …
The Earth’s orbit around the Sun is elliptical, rather than circular, and the Earth’s axis of rotation is not perpendicular to the plane of the orbit. This non-circularity of the orbit and the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation both contribute to the uneven changes in the times of sunrise and sunset.
Jeff Mangum on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory
As an aside: I really like the idea of ‘civil twilight’ (above). That’s exactly how it was. It related to me as an ordinary person (not a military woman nor an ecclesiastical one) and was both a courteous and a polite time of day. I always thought twilight was before the dark finally settled down to sleep, but it means, “the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon, caused by the reflection of the sun’s rays from the atmosphere.” (Oxford dictionary), so it can apply to sunrise AND sunset.
Civil twilight “Begins in the morning, or ends in the evening, when the geometric center of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon. Therefore morning civil twilight begins when the geometric center of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon, and ends at sunrise.”
If you are interested in that, you’ll probably like this too: Guardian article, The three phases of twilight, explained
The Route
Anyway, I chose to walk the same route every day. Starting at the view near my front door 15 minutes before, walking to the highest point of Granton Crescent Park for sunrise, then down and through The Wasteland (to check whether my banner was still there and if the bulbs that we planted on the community walk had come up), and along to Wardie Bay for 15 minutes after. I didn’t make it on time to the beach every day as I got distracted by yellow cones at low tide and all manner of other things.
Traffic cones at low tide (left). That must have been a fine game for someone – really? They matched all sorts of other yellows which presented themselves: a sherbet-yellow yacht in the harbour, wild ragwort, chamomile (middle, like fried eggs with frayed edges), and spears of ageing sea buckthorn leaves (right). A flock of pigeons wheeled silently overhead, a single oyster catcher peeped piercingly, and a young gull lifted his feet higher than usual, one by one, to clear the wet grass fronds.
What happened?
- The devil was watching just as I set off on the first day, and I dropped and completely broke my phone (the one with a decent camera). I reverted to my daughter’s very old one for the rest of the project hence the grainy quality of the images. That made me choose when and whether to take photos at all. I sketched and took careful mental notes so that I would remember, and spent time afterwards writing them down
- I did this walk at the times on my chart until I got to Friday (day 6) when I realised it would clash with something I actually do every week at the same time, which is to go to my meditation group, so that day’s photos were not taken at the correct times
- I thought Sunday was the final day (I’d put it in my diary wrong – don’t ever rely on me to be reliable) and on Monday I was doing this really long walk in Fife (the final day of The St Margaret’s Way) which meant that I had to be on an early bus and couldnlt walk the usual route
- Thank godness art doesn’t have to be a precise science
Photos Taken at Sunrise (pretty much)
Notes on photo gallery above: Sunrise Photos. Day 1 was taken 2 minutes early because of the phone debacle. Day 6 was not taken at the right time either which you can see by the sky colour, though it is a rather nice, pinky purple). The 9th picture above was taken in Anstruther. It wasn’t a Sunrise Walk day, but I needed 9 images to make the photo grid work and found that I had taken a photo at exactly the right time.
What did I discover?
A long, thin black feather and a small slim, silver-blue fish, both on the strand – a grounded agent of flight and a beached swimmer. A series of sandcastles with upright feathers stuck in them like sentinels of the dawn. Border lines: Fife and Inchkeith Island on the horizon; the Eastern breakwater dissecting the sea, along which silouettes walked; the dividing line between the light and dark skin on my arm where the nettle stung me and left a tingling sensation for the remainder of the day. Fallen white poplar leaves and a camp in the little woods with silver tinsel looped over a branch.
Day 5, A Windy Film
I learned that even when I get up at almost exactly the same time every day and walk almost the same route, the world is always different. It’s never the same. My thoughts are not the same, nor are my actions (even if I try) and neither is the sky / moon / sea / trees / rubbish (though the s-shaped hook was there impacted into the pavement every day). I liked the way the lichen pattern nearby and the shape of the crescent moon above seemed to be related to the curtain hook.
These solo walks were also social occassions. I knew that I was walking with other psychogeographers all over the world. We all shared on Intsagram and sent messages to each other, building up relationships over this 8-day period and, in some cases I knew some from previous Sunrise Walks or in-person meetings – I could picture Jackie in Dublin after walking with her in Canterbury, England, Carol near Philadelphia in the US after we First Friday Walked together along the Thames in London last month, and Kel who I’ve before met in Greece and Gloucestershire. Many, if not all, are part of the Walking Artists Network, and Carol, Kel and I are members of Walking the Land Artist Collective.
The last word(s)
I’m awake every day now. At dawn. Is that what it takes?
Compare what happened to day 7! It turned from dull to golden.
Photos Taken 15 Minutes After Sunrise (but not always)
See also: Lia Leendertz’s New Almanac
My 52 Walks with Blake Morris
Link to instagram page where, if you scroll down, there are other Sunrise Walks images I’ve done it before!
Walking without a donkey 