John Knox's Pulpit, Lomond Hills

By Fiona M Jones:

It was a long uphill walk to listen to a man talking, but maybe I would have gone there too. For this was centuries ago, long before information came to the fingertips and still before most of us could have read for ourselves, although the machine had been invented that would change all that by filling the world with books. 

More than one place on the map of Scotland bears the name John Knox’s Pulpit, for Knox preached often outdoors—subversive to received dogma, avoiding the authorities who welcomed no second channel of religious thought to unsettle their status quo. This Pulpit is a spectacular sandstone outcrop, eroded into Golgothic formations of caving strata high above a hillside stream and the amphitheatric curve of it opposite bank. 

In the age of microphones one wonders how a single voice could ever have addressed a crowd, outdoors in wind by water. Then one encounters a place like this, where the landscape itself conspires with the speaker, focusing and carrying his voice like the words of an epiphany. The world changed and changed again, picking up speed, momentum, noise. 

If you go there today, you take the long uphill path for quietness, to gain distance between yourself and the multiple channels of information that pursue your fragmented attention. If you stand below John Knox’s Pulpit, and watch and listen, silence answers. 

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Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.