“Let’s go to Wittenham Clumps,” suggested Mark.
He was right. If you are going to watch the most significant solar eclipse visible from Britain for more than 25 years, there can be few better places than one of Oxfordshire’s most familiar landmarks, looking out across the county from a hilltop that people have been climbing for several thousand years. The eclipse was going to cover more than 90% of the sun here, and the forecast promised us a clear evening.
We were not, it turned out, the only people to have had the idea.
By the time we arrived, perhaps 200 cars were parked around the Earth Trust and a steady procession of people was making its way up the hill. At the top, nearly a thousand people were spread across the scorched grass.It was a wonderfully Oxfordshire gathering. Families, couples and people on their own. Lots of picnics. Lots of camping chairs. Lots of National Trust rugs. Plenty of special eclipse-viewing glasses and, it has to be said, plenty of glasses with wine in them as well.
And then we waited.
The early evening sunshine was still surprisingly strong. Gradually, the light changed, but not nearly as dramatically as we had expected. I had imagined something rather more apocalyptic: an eerie gloom, birds falling silent, perhaps a collective intake of breath from the assembled multitude.
Nothing of the sort.
Instead, Wittenham Clumps remained a polite but busy family space, accompanied by the chatter of hundreds of people and quite a lot of small children who clearly couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.
To be fair, for a while neither could I.
“Is this it?”
We had come equipped with a colander, having read that its holes would act as dozens of tiny pinhole cameras and project little crescent suns onto the ground. Scientifically sound, undoubtedly. In practice, ours produced something which required rather more imagination than I possessed.
And then someone lent us a pair of proper eclipse glasses.
Suddenly, everything changed.
There it was. The sun reduced to the most extraordinary brilliant crescent, the moon sitting across it as a great black disc. What had been an interesting change in the evening light became, through those glasses, something completely different. A truly heavenly sight.
And perhaps that was the surprise of the evening. With more than 90% of the sun obscured, there was still enough of it left to make an August evening feel remarkably normal. No darkness. No eerie silence. No sudden chill that I noticed. Just hundreds of people sitting together on a hill in Oxfordshire, drinking wine, eating picnics, wrangling children and occasionally putting on a pair of funny cardboard glasses.
But look through those glasses and you were suddenly reminded that something absolutely enormous was happening above us.The Moon, the Sun and the Earth had lined up. We happened to be standing in the right place at the right time to see it.
For a few moments, the chatter around us seemed less important. You looked upwards and saw something both utterly explicable and completely astonishing. The colander really didn’t cut it. But the eclipse?
Wow.
