MaraTime: Time as Layers

This article is part of ‘Time and Tide’, a series of essays by Tasneem Khan. This is the third of the collection. Click here to read the other articles in the series.

Memory. Pressure. Warping.

Sediment. Silence. Metamorphosis.

Within landscapes that straddle the land-water boundary, time is not linear but a stack of stories, a vertical library of change, a cross section of its past-present-future.

Standing on the exposed limestone at the Hook Head in County Wexford, the world beneath my feet feels less like solid earth and more like a living archive etched in ancient seabeds, re-written by tides, and inscribed by human presence. Above me stands one of the oldest operational lighthouses in Europe built 800 years ago, initially lit by St Dubhán and the monks to guide mariners through fog and reef in the fifth century. But the rock below has witnessed far more: entire oceans come and go, tropical lagoons turned to stone, glaciers advancing and retreating, long before fire met lens in an ancient lighthouse.  

The first time I walked out on the Hook Head at low tide, it took me a while to realise that everything before me was part of this three dimensional timeline. This South-Eastern shard of Ireland is a dramatic limestone headland and gets its name from the Old Norse ‘huk’, meaning a projecting piece of land. It juts into the Celtic Sea like a stone sentinel, battered by centuries of swell, encountered by mariners, poets, and scientists with equal wonder, a precipice of time where land, light, and language break against one another like waves. Carboniferous coral limestones—rich with fossilised crinoids, brachiopods, and even ancient fragments of fossil wood—rise above the sea in sweeping, rugged steps, each one caked with the patterned imprints of ancient life. A structural story written over 350 million years. In a single panoramic view, I sensed the rhythms of deep time: thriving seas turned to bedrock, buried beneath shale, then uplifted and sculpted by millennia of storm and swell. I am reminded of Robert McFarlane’s exploration of deep time and layered landscapes. In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), Macfarlane frequently speaks of paths, rocks, and coastlines as repositories of memory and narrative.

On India’s west coast, at the mouth of the Mandovi River in Goa, layers of story converge in one brackish tide, spread across tidal flats. A moving, living body of water, she cascades down ridges and gorges carrying silt, pollen, and the memories of the Vanarmare and other indigenous communities who inhabit these lands, their migrations, and other-than-human movements that have long shaped these verdant slopes. The Mandovi winds westward through the belly of Goa, fed by forested ridges of the Western Ghats and empties into the Arabian Sea. It is both artery and archive as it carves its way through basalt and laterite, past temples, tidepools, ferry slips, and mangrove-rooted memory. Here, time moves in layers: monsoon-fed torrents, tidal breath, with centuries of silt and ceremony flowing through every bend.

Finally, the sediment-laden flow meets saline currents from the Arabian Sea, stirring a cultural confluence: Portuguese forts cling to riverbanks; Hindu temples honor lord Shiva, considered the god of destruction, transformation, and rebirth; and intertidal boatyards host an assortment of small and large vessels hauled ashore at low tide. The vessels themselves tell a story of transformation—from plank-extended dugouts and historic Ramponchem Vode, icons of subsistence fishing, to fiber-reinforced and semi-mechanized trawlers—tracing layered shifts in technology and livelihood. Each southwest swell gnaws at the embankments and beaches of the Konkan coast revealing older strata and unearthing pot-shards from centuries of spice trade. Human-built sea walls, hastily erected to curb erosion, now catalyse undercutting and trap sand that would otherwise replenish mangrove fringes—an interference in the natural dance of accretion and erosion.

I am exploring, connecting, observing, wandering, into the river islands that protrude like twin green lungs into the final stretch of the Mandovi, just before it merges with the sea. Divar and Chorao are well connected to either bank, yet each ferry crossing feels like time travel. The ferry pushes off with a shudder and a splash. Behind it, the banks slip into stillness—fields misted in early light, egrets balancing on half-submerged posts. On the far shore, Divar rises like a memory, green and low-slung. Time softens here. Red-oxide paths, dynastic remains of the Kadamba era, and the delicious scent of wet earth. The river laps gently at the slipway, as if in greeting, and the island receives you not with spectacle, but with a breath—an invitation to listen, and to remember.

On Chorao, the ancient khazan lands—ingeniously engineered coastal saline fields—tell stories of sustainable living. These lands, reclaimed over centuries using embankments and sluice gates, showcase a unique blend of traditional knowledge and ecological management. These islands are more than just landforms; they are a slow library of place showcasing Goa’s rich cultural and ecological heritage.

Beneath the surface of another coastline, about 600 nautical miles south south-west of this estuary, coral reefs pulse quietly with their own rhythm of time. Living limestone empires, they rise millimetre by millimetre through centuries, their skeletons encoding the signatures of every change they’ve endured. In the branching, delicate arms of Acropora, like miniature forests frozen mid-bloom; in the hexagonal lattice of massive Favia and Porites corals, dense and furrowed; in the slow, rhythmic sway of gorgonian sea fans, resilient and flexible, lie evidence of centuries of warming, bleaching, regrowth, and collapse. Each a living sculpture of seasonal change, each polyp a witness, each reef a breath held in minerals, bleaching, recovery, and collapse. Each season of survival is etched in calcium carbonate. To swim across a reef is to drift over the biological tree of life—an index of light, temperature, stress, evolution and grace.

Even the tiniest shells tell time. Isotopic signatures in mollusk shells and seabed sediments hold clues to past monsoons, glacial cycles, and ancient oceanic realities. The chemistry of time is stored in the quietest places. The ocean, like a meticulous scribe, remembers what the sky forgets.

And so we return to the edge—to land that crumbles into water, to water that whispers of time.

What does your shoreline remember? What might it have looked like a thousand years ago? Who stood here then, and why? What happened here just last season? What changed, what stayed?

And if the land could speak of the future, what would it prepare you to notice?

Time is not only measured. It is noticed. It is layered. It is lived. 

Step in.