The fleeting pleasure of a palimpsest exposed

I am very partial to remnants. A remnant is not exactly a ruin. A ruin, such as the tragic abandoned Catholic seminary,St Peter’s Cardross, will continue to evoke its past and, inevitably from now on, something of the failed and valiant hopes for its future. The passage of time – not much time – and the marks of its use – not much use, either – are all written on to the ghostly segments of structure, a great concrete leviathan in the undergrowth. It is a kind of Glaswegian Mayan ruin.

Remnants are more particular, suggestions of something known or unknown. They are frequently transitory: the stripping back of an ordinary house, laid bare to all eyes for a week or two, before the works goes on, to demolish or obscure the detail or the structure in question.

In my teens I remember catching sight of a sequence of exquisite iron fire baskets, temporarily exposed on a flank wall on the west side of Portman Square, their chequered arrangement indicating the journey of a dense collection of Georgian flues within that wall. The next time I passed, all was gone; a crass hotel on the site. Those houses were probably unprotected, too early for conservation area status, maybe unlisted and their demolition unrecorded.

With phones and tablets to hand, almost nothing now goes unrecorded. Ghost signs of vanished businesses and defunct enterprises populate innumerable Instagram accounts and generate avalanches of retweets, gaining value as they become ever more widely known.

But my own preference is for that quick last airing of a domestic interior, baring its wallpapers, fireplaces and the residue of unknown lives, a serendipitous exhibit for no more than a moment; there yesterday, gone today.

Where a building and its site have had complex histories, the remnants take on their own identity, offering those invaluable clues to rebuilding, the traces of ingenuity or simply the practicality of people at the time.

沃尔瑟姆修道院是一个安静的埃塞克斯奇迹，就在M25公路旁，俯瞰着广阔的修道院花园。宏伟的建筑背景中穿插着早期建筑的遗迹，从利亚河边的一扇半毁的修道院大门，到用各种材料建造的长长的墙壁，其长度和面积是现有教堂的许多倍。在一段墙内用砖砌了一个石窗，或者在其他地方随意砌出的石墙上，随机点缀着普贝克(Purbeck)石柱的切片，这些石柱取自修道院的一些早期变体，现在和其他东西一样，镶嵌在粗糙的灰浆中。在教堂的东侧，甚至还有一小块撒克逊人的鲱鱼骨砖石。

This site, on which no fewer than five churches have stood, ranging from a modest timber structure from the 7th century to something approaching the scale of Canterbury Cathedral in the 13th century, and where King Harold is thought to have been brought for burial after the Battle of Hastings, is there to be read, item by item, but rarely with any degree of certainty.

But for me it is that relative randomness that adds to the pleasure. The current church, itself a remnant of everything that went before it, fell a victim to the Dissolution and subsequent demolitions and is now presiding over a jigsaw puzzle of a site. Discreetly presented, the evidence is there for anyone with an iota of curiosity and open eyes.