On the way to March Stone 55 ABD. The Five Roads and Ashgrove

Regular readers will know that we’ve been tracing the line of Aberdeen’s ancient boundaries. Skip the first few paragraphs if you’re already familiar with the background...

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Confirmed in his Great Charter of 1319 (an ancient document which founded the real-estate and political power regime which prevails over the polity in Aberdeen to this day), in 1315 Robert the Bruce endowed the Burgesses of Aberdeen with a huge estate of land - known as “The Freedom Lands”. The medieval burgesses were a powerful group of men: police and army and lawmaking body and local authority all rolled into one, With a royal mandate behind them, their monopoly on force enabled them to enforce a monopoly on trade. They were the burgh. How our concept of freedom has changed.

The extent of this "gift" of land from Bruce (which required an annual rent to be paid to the crown - heh, some gift!) can be seen around Aberdeen today. Often mistaken for milestones, the engraved numbered stelae which lie hidden in plain view around Aberdeen mark the boundary between the gifted estate and the hinterland beyond - Kincardine to the south, Mar to the west and Buchan to the North. Bruce had occupied Aberdeen in 1307 and 1308 while he laid waste to a large part of that hinterland.




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http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/01/march-stones-37-to-39-abd.html 

The Harrying of Buchan was a devastating event for this area, characterised by its (surprisingly modern) ruthlessly systematic nature. This was a policy, managed and executed with businesslike efficiency; entire towns like Ellon were completely eradicated, livestock and crops were burned in the fields, infrastructure was dismantled and dissipated. Some historians say that so complete was the destruction that the innate and potential wealth of Buchan was damaged for centuries after. A terrible and exceptional act of vengeful spite, unparalleled in these islands before or since. 

Small wonder the Aberdonians cowered and offered Bruce whatever he wanted. The fearful and pusillanimous capitulation of Aberdeen's burghers (who had been loyal to the English crown until the pogrom in the hinterland) no doubt, in time, pricked Bruces' conscience and lead to his eventual largesse. According to the Aberdeen City and Shire website, the ordinary people of Aberdeen also "furnished" Bruce with "large supplies" of cash, food and other goods. Under what levels of terror and sword-edge compulsion was this "furnishing" obliged? In this context, the "gift" of the Freedom Lands more than a decade later might be seen as a form of belated conscience-stricken compensation from Bruce to Aberdeen's craven burghers.

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Quarry-spoil heritage
on Rosehill Drive

These numbered stelae boundary markers which show the edges of the Freedom Lands are known as March Stones ("march" being the Old Scots word for "boundary”. Between March Stones 52 and 54 we traversed a psychogeography replete with history and prehistory; redolent of stories known and unknown; stories in the process of being forgotten: strongmen and poets, industrialists and the ordinary-folk workers who made them their fortunes. This time, on our way to March Stone 55 we descend from the prominence of Rosehill, down first Rosehill Drive, then down the curiously-named Back Hilton Road following the one-time line of the Powis Burn with leafy Ashgrove to our right (south) and formidable (some say) Cattofield to our left (north) on its route from the quarry-ridge granite heights to the sand-flat estuarine lands of the seaside links.

The boundary line, from where we last left it at Rosehill’s March Stone 54 all the way to its end with the “Omega Stone” close to the mouth of the River Don, largely marks the route of this ancient watercourse, its tributaries and distributaries. Sloping down along Rosehill Drive and Back Hilton Road, it was long-since tamed into rod-straight ditches. And then, more recently - just outwith living memory - it was subsumed beneath flagstone, then concrete and tarmac. Once an important, prominent and known boundary between the jurisdiction of one burgh and the next, between one thing and something else, where the rights and obligations of one gave way to the rights and obligations of another; in this area, the boundary has long also been a thoroughfare. It’s almost as if the power of those rights and obligations was apt to be discharged latitudinally via the path-of-least resistance desire-lines represented by the boundaries and marked by boundary features; a surface effect - an edge phenomenon; like lightning striking water. This psychogeographical power of edges is remarkable in its longevity - for instance, the medieval western boundary of the Burgh of Aberdeen - the western edge of Bruce’s Freedom Lands; the estates marked by all these “March Stones” - remains the boundary of the modern entity City of Aberdeen to this day. And (if and when it is ever built) the proposed Aberdeen bypass motorway will, between its crossing of the River Dee to its circumnavigation of Kingswells, follow the arbitrary line of this ancient edge.

Telecoms network infrastructure at
the Five Roads

Walking the two long straight segments of the line down from March Stone 54 to March Stone 55 takes us on a dog-leg angled procession first down Rosehill Drive with its mid-20th century bungalow-boulevard suburb townscape; pleasant and mannered sitting in the sun on its south-facing slope, this suburb was suburban not for long before being encircled and obsolesced by the major social housing scheme developments beyond. Then we come upon the “Five Roads” roundabout knuckle, a confusing interchange. Confusing - firstly because the junction accommodates motor traffic flow from six roads, not five. Secondly, because approaching the nexus on foot presents the pedestrian with a Gordian Knot of you-can’t-get-there-from-here choices, as he or she may well be able to see the desired destination but is thwarted by seemingly arbitrary labyrinthine barriers and is inconveniently and frustratingly directed here and there against the desire-line flow: Make the right choice in the first instance or be diverted farther ever farther from where you want to walk to.  A handful of shops somehow survives at one of the junction’s apexes, despite the surrounding car-dominated environment which is unpleasant; polluted, noisy, smelly and fraught.

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He’s trying to organise the bags, trying to get the shopping sorted out and into the rucksack that he brought. But the dog’s playing up, barking and growling at strangers, pacing about and getting her chain tangled in her legs and just getting in the effing way. And the kid’s wailing, wanting that bloody toy.  He tries and he tries to organise the bags of shopping into some sort of order and he just doesn’t have enough hands. He can’t control the dog cos the traffic’s too loud to make himself heard - to shout down her barks - and he can’t comfort the kid ’cos he’s shouting at the dog. And every time he shouts at the dog the kid gets more upset and the more upset the kid is the more agitated the dog and the more agitated the dog the louder he has to shout and the pavement’s just so narrow here there’s just not the room and the noise ohmygod the noise and he just doesn’t have enough hands.


God! The bloody noise! He sooooo doesn’t like it when the staffie starts playing up - things get a bit, em, unpredictable. Gotta get the dog out of here. Gotta get across the road, and then follow the barriers and another pelican crossing across another road. ’At’s it, now he’s getting somewhere: he’s got the kid on his hip - the toddler’s sticky face - tears and toffee - smirching his tracktop. Nevermind - it’ll go in the machine at the missus’s and, while he waits in his vest, it’ll dripdry quickly - it’ll have to. He’s got the plastic carriers and the dog’s chain and the kid’s toy (a nasty cheap plastic trike on a long handle for pushalong - oh my god how the kid had insisted - grat and peenged and grat until he got his way) he’s got the long bright plastic handle of the toy in his other, his right hand, dragging it behind him like the carcass of some rigoured animal. So, no hand free to push the button for the pedestrian crossing. Fuck. A gap in the traffic, sightlines are poor - risk it? No don’t be daft. Someone else, a middle-aged couple, at the crossing now, one of them pressed the Push Button for Crossing Signal Opposite thank god, he gives a smile and a nod of thanks. "WAIT", says the lit up box. WAIT... WAIT... Beepabeepbeepabeepbeepabeep. Swiftly across in front of the couple. And follow the pavement behind the barriers down a bit more. Good, quieter here - the pavement a bit wider here, good. A yank a damned good hard yank on the staffie’s chain and that - to know that there’s a big boss at the other end of the lead - calms her down a bit. Calms her down a good bit. She immediately flollops herself down, almost comically, ungainly, like a very powerful and muscular sack of tatties, on the pavement and starts licking at her bits. Nice. But it’s OK, though - she’s not going to cause any trouble while she’s at that. Now for the shopping. Squatting on haunches, eye-level talking quietly and soothingly to the kid, one carrier bag goes inside another, both into the rucksack. OK, the words to the kid have worked, and the kid rubs his eyes and sniffs up the snotters, swallowing and, literally looking up - chin out resolute, the upset is forgotten. Now to get the kid and his toy together...

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Diametrically opposite the terminus of Rosehill Drive at the Five Roads roundabout is Ashgrove Court, which we are told was Aberdeen’s first residential tower block or “’scraper”, as local usage would have it. The elision of “skyscraper” to “’scraper” is a telling piece of nominative determinism - nominative pre-determinism, in fact. The very word “’scraper”: something which “scrapes”, with its connotations of harsh friction, erosion, damage, injury, striation, denudation. Or is it the other meaning - the way that, if you were to live there, you might “just scrape by”; manage to live only with difficulty; scrimping and scraping; scraping a meagre living? In either case, our local word for residential tower blocks has determined that none should regard them as desirable places to live. Give a dog a bad name...

Un-underpass. Nonederpass. 

Ashgrove Court is, despite the nominative determinism, looking good on its age (which we guess to be perhaps approaching fifty years) standing proud and commanding a view south east to the town centre over first the former farm which was Ashgrove, where mental-asylum inmates toiled their captive days away, herded to the farm for their labours through a now bricked-up underpass beneath Ashgrove Road. Beyond Ashgrove Road, the view from the ’scraper encompasses the grounds of that lunatic asylum to which that underpass connected at Cornhill and then the vista widens to Rosemount and the town centre beyond and below. Those former fields of Ashgrove farm - though today forming a housing estate with mid-century council-house tenements, vacant shop units and the (almost obligatory) recently-closed and boarded-up disused primary school - retain the old farm’s boundary wall which somehow seems to lend the estate an identity of its own, curiously separate from the rest of Aberdeen.

Ashgrove Farmhouse
Occupied until quite recently.

That boundary wall forms the south side of Back Hilton Road which we walk down from the Five Roads roundabout. If you know where it is and what you’re looking for, and if you have sharp eyes, its possible to gaze down the entire length of Back Hilton Road from the roundabout and discern March Stone 55 ABD at the end. It’s just a tiny pixel-speck at that half kilometer distance, but it is visible.

March Stone 55 ABD

And as we approach the stone we hear a scrapey rumbling behind us, across the road - and a gurgling laugh, then a dog-bark - and another. More laughter as the rumbling gets louder. Turning round, we see again the track-suited buzz-cut young man accompanied by his status dog and toddler son. He’s got the toddler - feet splayed out sitting down - on a sort-of plastic tricycle which has a four-foot pole extending from the rear axle ending in a handle which would come to about the young man’s waist height. With his left hand holding the dog’s chain, his right hand is pushing down on the trike-pole so that the trike is wheelie-ing along - its front wheel up 20 centimeters from the ground. And he jogs gently, loping controlled and steady down the concrete pavement slope of Back Hilton Road pushing the plastic trike with his son on board in front of him. The toddler on the trike - being pushed far far faster (but safe, level and steady) than ever such a toy plastic tricycle was supposed to go - has his head thrown back laughing uncontrolled loudly in sheer delight and ecstasy. The pure glee on the pre-school boy's face is as bright as sunshine - looking up and back over his shoulder he can look into his dad's eyes, leaning over and laughing right back with him. WahayYayhay-aha-ahahahaha! And the Staffordshire Bull Terrier on her chain, in the young dad's left hand, appears anthropomorphically on her furry face to have a similar laughing grin, the same as her master's and his son's. Muscularly she trots, matching the man’s loping strides with her own elbow-out sideways-ish lollop, her front legs seeming to manage to travel far far faster than those at the back. Barkbarkbark. For joy. Man, boy, dog - an ancient family unit subset on an outing, getting in a bit of fun while getting in the shopping. Getting a thrill along with the necessary provisions - laying down a bonding substrate of happy time memory. A memory template which is held in common by men and boys and dogs since first men and boys and dogs went out together and came back with food; game for the table, serious play for the hunting unit. And now this family has a memory-bond which ties them not only together in shared experience today but which will also last them all their days together or apart - solid, pure, innocent - a tie which binds. Archaic and primordial, contemporary and eternal. Universal and personal. A timeless moment, that morning on Back Hilton Road, close to March Stone 55 ABD.

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March Stones 52 to 54 ABD. Woodside and Hilton

Confirmed in his Great Charter of 1319 (an ancient document which founded the real-estate and political power regime which prevails over the polity in Aberdeen to this day), in 1315 Robert the Bruce endowed the Burgesses of Aberdeen with a huge estate of land - The Freedom Lands. The medieval burgesses were a powerful group of men: police and army and lawmaking body and local authority all rolled into one, With a royal mandate behind them, their monopoly on force enabled them to enforce a monopoly on trade. They were the burgh. How our concept of freedom has changed.

The extent of this "gift" of land (which required an annual rent to be paid to the crown) can be seen around Aberdeen today. Often mistaken for milestones, the engraved numbered stelae which lie hidden in plain view around Aberdeen mark the boundary between the gifted estate and the hinterland beyond - Kincardine to the south, Mar to the west and Buchan to the North. Bruce had occupied Aberdeen in 1307 and 1308 while he laid waste to a large part of that hinterland.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/01/march-stones-37-to-39-abd.html

The Harrying of Buchan was a devastating event for this area, characterised by its (surprisingly modern) ruthlessly systematic nature. This was a policy, managed and executed with businesslike efficency; entire towns like Ellon were completely eradicated, livestock and crops were burned in the fields, infrastructure was dismantled and dissipated. Some historians say that so complete was the destruction that the innate and potential wealth of Buchan was damaged for centuries after. A terrible and exceptional act of vengeful spite, unparalleled in these islands before or since.

Small wonder the Aberdonians cowered and offered Bruce whatever he wanted. The fearful and pusillanimous capitulation of Aberdeen's burghers (who had been loyal to the English crown until the pogrom in the hinterland) no doubt, in time, pricked Bruces' conscience and lead to his eventual largesse. According to the Aberdeen City and Shire website, the ordinary people of Aberdeen also "furnished" Bruce with "large supplies" of cash, food and other goods. Under what levels of terror and sword-edge compulsion was this "furnishing" obliged?

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Pylon

Stela

The boundary markers are know as March Stones ("march" being the Old Scots word for "boundary"). Between March Stones 49 and 51 we traversed a psychogeography of loss: a loss of social justice; a loss of workers' lives and dignity; the loss of industry and the loss of the independent burgh of Woodside. This time we climb Rosehill, following the line of the boundary between the present-day areas of Woodside and Hilton. The housing in this part of Hilton is partly characterised by doorways resembling ancient Egyptian temple pylons.

The boundary stone marked "52 ABD" is tucked up against a wall and fence at the back of the pavement on the north side of Smithfield Road, just up the hill from its junction with Clifton Road. As we walk up the steep hill, we notice that the boundary describes a narrowish tongue of land descending to the river Don at Scatterburn, then sharp back uphill, leaving Woodside outwith the boundary.

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http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/19997/details/aberdeen+hilton+lang+stane/

A free-standing block of granite, c.9 to 10 feet in height, which Dr Simpson believes to be a Bronze Age standing stone. It now stands in the grounds of Hilton School and may have been moved when the school was built (Anon 1949), but if so it was replaced in its original position (information from Dr W Douglas Simpson, Librarian, Aberdeen University). Anon 1949.

Visited by OS (JLD) 10 September 1952.

This standing stone is situated on a gentle ENE-facing slope at an altitude of about 80m OD. It stands within a school playground at adjacent to the gates onto Hilton Drive.

(Newspaper reference cited).

NMRS, MS/712/83, visited 11 January 1991.

This large granite standing stone, which until recently stood within the grounds of Hilton School, now forms a landscape feature in a new housing development. It measures about 1.5m in breadth by 0.9m in thickness at ground-level and 2.95m in height, and its broad face is aligned WNW and ESE. A scar on its SSW corner suggests that the top of the stone has been broken off.

The stone, which is enclosed by narrow iron railings set on a circular plinth, is depicted on both the 1st and 2nd editions of the OS 6-inch map (Aberdeenshire, 1869, sheet lxxv; 1902, lxxv.NW).

Visited by RCAHMS (JRS), 19 June 2002.

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Across the curiously quiet Hilton Drive from the Lang Sane, boundary stone 53 ABD is integrated into the pavement outside a corner shop. It has an Ordnance Survey benchmark rivet embedded in its face. The views down Hilton Road towards the mouth of the River Don and the North Sea have made the ascent so far up from the river worthwhile. But there's a good bit more climbing still to come.

Half-a-kilometer away we can hear the continual traffic rumble and swish of Anderson Drive, all the more audible since the removal last year of the verge-side shrubbery which had acoustically shielded residential areas from the carriageways since the 1960's. The line of the March Stone boundary draws us up Hilton Road between the the three hectares of open space at Stewart Park and the abandoned Rosehill Quarry which mirrors it opposite. Again, the area is curiously quiet. No-one plays the all-weather tennis courts, no-cricketers in the Victorian pavilion by the oval. No children kick footballs on the grassy extents of the park; a philantrhopic gift from the widow of a Woodside merchant. Other than us, only those handful walking their dogs give themselves the permission to be out in the air, walking in the neat park and wild overgrown abandoned quarry.

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Presented to the park by the Captain
of the Arctic whaler "Benbow" in 1903

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/03/21/100828/-Brain-Dead-Molybdenum-and-Whale-Oil-tell-our-sorry-tale

In order to obtain historical evidence for price trends, one needs to examine a case where a non-recyclable resource went through a complete Hubbert cycle worldwide. There are no previous examples of a mineral resource that has done so. In fact, crude oil may turn out to be the first, which incidentally may be one of the reasons why the concept of "peak oil" is so difficult for many people to grasp.

A resource does not need to be a mineral one to show a Hubbert curve. A biological resource which is produced (or "extracted") much faster than it is replaced may also follow a bell-curve. Historically, there have been several cases of terminally depleted biological resources. The whaling industry of the 19th Century is a good example, as already noted by Coleman (Non Renewable Resources, Oxford University Press, 4(1995) 273).

(...)

From the figure [above], it is evident that the production of whale oil followed a bell-curve according to Hubbert's theory, modelled with a simple Gaussian curve, albeit showing strong oscillations. These data are in excellent agreement with the report on Right Whale abundance by Baker and Clapham (Trends in Ecology and Evolution Vol.19 No.7 July 2004), indicating that the fall in production after the peak was caused by depletion and not by the switching to different fuels.

(...)

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A DESCRIPTION OF WOODSIDE IN 1894

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The atmosphere is charged with granite dust; factory stacks and quarry tips mingle incongrously with woods and pastures. From the Cruvies to Stoneywood, the banks of Don are dotted with factories in all the stages between full activity and silent decay.

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Abridged from "Woodside Nae Mair!"

Fullerton Court and Murray Court Oral History Group

Frae a the Airts to Haudagain

Dorothy Crichton

In 1798, Lord George Gordon Noel Byron, celebrated English poet, was a young lad living a short time in Woodside with his old nurse, Agnes Gray. She lived on the first floor of the old house at 719 Great Northern Road. The house was demolished in the 1950's to make way for the dual carriageway. The exact date of Byron's visit and length of stay in Woodside isn't known. But when there he 'fell in love' with an attractive girl named Lexy Campbell who lived with a very respectable spinster - Nelly Calder. Poor Lexy lost face by this affair and her subsequent history was unfortunate. 

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Crossing North Anderson Drive at its junction with Rosehill Drive/Provost Rust Drive is a trial for pedestrians. A two-stage pelican crossing with the usual central reservation 'sheep-pen' (that's what the traffic engineers actually call these things) in the middle places the pedestrian in the centre of the high-speed traffic flow, surrounded by fast-moving traffic, oppressed by noise and fumes. To get to the sheep pen we press and wait. When at last the green man shows, it's necessary to remain vigilant and be sure that the motor traffic actually does bother to stop for the red-light, which is these days so often taken to mean: "first three only please". When sure that the vehicles have actually stopped, the pedestrian crosses meekly under the frowning glare of the impeded motorists who's high speed progress has been so thoughlessly interrupted by young mother with buggy, elderly carmudgeon with some shopping, pre-teen kids in their own worlds and a couple of middle aged researchers. < why don't these people just get about by car>  Then standing crammed into the sheep-pen we press the button and wait again.

Across at last, we would be taken by the pavement round a pointless loop to get to where we want to go. Instead, we use the well-worn desire-line path which crosses the grass and bisects the shabby shrubbery to reach the top of Smithfield Drive.

54 ABD

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March Stones 49 to 51 ABD. Persley and Woodside

"49 ABD"
(the new one)
South-east parapet of Persley Bridge

Regular visitors to Other Aberdeen will well know that over the weeks and months, we've been tracing the line of Aberdeen's medieval boundary. The boundary of the land gifted to Aberdeen (the "Freedom Lands") as a salve to his conscience by Buchan-harrying Robert the Bruce is marked to this day by a series of boundary stones or "march" stones, some of which are easy to see and find - perhaps you pass one or two of them every single day - some others are quite hard to get at, and you need to do a bit of research to pinpoint their exact locations and decide how you plan to reach them.

Tracing the boundary - the Old Scots word for boundary is "march", hence: "march stones" - is one of the constructs which we hang our psychogeographical excursions upon: by setting out to go somewhere which is off the beaten track and for no other reason than just for itself, we can find out a great deal about the four-dimensional shape of the town we live in (the fourth dimension being time, heritage, the historical aspect) and over and above that, we find things out about ourselves and our relationship to all that external stuff which forms the environment which we live in.

The most recent stone (stone no. 48 ABD) we wrote about was in residential Northfield, amongst the pleasant residential cul-de-sacs and circles so characteristic of that type of mid-20th century suburban social housing. We like Northfield with its human-scale planning; with its generous gardens, open spaces, grassy public areas, civic amenities, local shops - it definitely doesn't deserve the formidable reputation that social prejudice has labeled it with over the years. From the self-employed decorator who pointed us to stone 46 ABD, to the headsquared old lady getting off a bus just having a wee cheery wordie with passers-by, and to the fat emo teenager walking his longhaired daschunt puppy - we've had genial interactions with absolutely everyone we met on the day we traced the marches through this part of our town. In its built environment, in its people and in its outlook, Northfield is a generous place. That's so much more than can be said for supposedly 'nice' parts of Aberdeen, where we've found that people often tend to be hostile and suspicious; where property and 'things' are regarded as more important than people and their activities. Where what someone's got is so much more important than what they will give.

The next stone is stone no. 49 ABD, which we walked to by following the ancient "Freedom Lands" boundary which runs the length of the Scatter Burn (Scatterburn) between Old Town Place and the burn's outfall underneath Persley Bridge. To follow the route of the burn is a simple matter - its valley (a tributary of the River Don) is quite easy to see looking north between Heatheryfold and Middlefield. Indeed, the etymology of the burn's name "Scatter Burn" means "burn with a deep eroded channel". The valley is an open grassy area with playgrounds, skateboard half-pipes and the like. While it's not possible to see the burn itself - it was covered over and tamed in its own pipe at some point in the 20th century - the route of the Scatterburn is more-or-less traced by the residential street Manor Walk which leads us down from Northfield through Middlefield into the valley of the Don at Haudagain. Here, for the first time in the entirety of our tracing of the route of the march stones, we find the environment becomes unpleasant. Motor vehicle pollution sticks in the throat, conversation becomes impossible over the roar of traffic and the entire layout of the built environment has been artificially conceived for the convenience of machines over that of people. We felt cheated, abandoned, alienated and at a bit of a loss; for in this place, pedestrians are not welcome and are barely catered for.

Not wanted.
Car journeys deemed
more important than housing.

Not only that, but things are about to get an awful lot worse. Some commuters claim that the roundabout at Haudagain is the very worst thing that there is in the whole of Britain, but we think that motorists who complain about traffic congestion in Aberdeen suffer from a hopelessly parochial viewpoint: Aberdeen traffic's really not that bad. Unfortunately, so strident have these selfish commuters' voices become that, like the child who pesters and pesters mummy for sweeties, their calls have been heeded - probably more to shut them up than anything else - and they're going to get what they want (no matter that it's not good for them, and that they'll just want even more soon). Consequently, the social housing tenements of Manor Drive, Logie Avenue and Logie Place are to be demolished to make way for a relief road "improvement" which is "vital". We find it astonishing that planners should regard it as "vital" that families are moved from their homes, that those homes be demolished and that a community be split up and scattered merely because of the exigencies of the unsustainable transport choices of a few commuters. That this maniacal wrecking-ball-based option should be seen as an "improvement"; as preferable to attempting to encourage a small minority of commuters to change their habits just a little bit is sadly, we think, indicative of some of the wrong-turns which planning policy in our town seems keen and likely to blindly take. That these poor choices are dressed up as "improvements" which "contribute" to and "complement" the Middlefield area (pdf) is nothing but doublethink duckspeak.

Anyway, once we were away from Haudagain and it's appalling psychogeographical outlook, following the slope down to Persely den to march stone 49 ABD, we first encountered the charming Persely Walled Garden, where sits this remarkable monolith memorial obelisk above the outfall of the Scatterburn.

Inscription reads:

WORKERS' MEMORIAL
Commissioned by
Aberdeen Trades Council
This monument was made possible
thanks to financial assistance from
the Trade Union and Labour Movement
It is dedicated to those who lost
their lives in industry
MCMXCVIII

Aberdeen City Council's March Stones Trail leaflet (pdf) tells us that stone 49 is, like stone 44 ABD, a doubled stone - a newer, more accessible doppelganger copy having been created and placed in an easy-to-get at spot. This is fair enough, but we love a challenge and couldn't resist crossing the toxic outfall estuary of the Scatter Burn to see the older stone. If you're going to do this, a level of reasonable fitness is required, as is decent robust footwear that you won't mind getting filthy.

Scatterburn outfall.
Toxic.

49 ABD
(the older one)
That's Duncan Bannatyne's
'fitness' centre across the water.

Weir

The boundary now follows the Don for about 2 km towards the former independent parish of Woodside. A path alongside a mill-lade (which is a high-level water-feed channel) takes us through an area rich in the industrial archaeology of water-power, water-capital: mills, weirs, lades and sluices; the evidence of ancient and more recent, now obsolescent, equipment vital to the exploitation of this water-plus-gravity equals wealth-generating resource is all around.

We met an old man walking on the artificial river-bank wall which separates a mill-lade on the south side of the river from the roaring-fast river itself. He was in his eighties and had lived in Woodside all his life. Warming to our interest, he told us tales of the many mills and their legion workers; Woodside in its wealthy 20th century pomp; a tram from The Fountain into town and a spur to the Haudagain. How the tram united Woodside to Aberdeen, but how, when it came, the dual carriageway divided Woodside even from itself.

He talked of the Crombie Mills, whence coats to the world originated - Churchill, Gorbachev, and Cary Grant, all Crombie-clad lads.  He talked of the Rag Mill ("the ragger") which pulped scrap textiles for use in papermaking, he talked of the retiral of the mills, their desuitude, and the fact that we could walk these routes today was because of their retirement: where once industry thrived, today moss encroaches, ivy overruns and the dilettante psychogeographer mooches. His whole life and work in Woodside amongst the mills, now walking "his three miles every day" beside their gently declining artifacts - this man embodied and stood as a living metaphor for the progress and decline of the industrial activity in this area. Now good for a story, now interesting but retired, he walks away from us along the path of the mill-lade. How long will he manage to keep up his three-miles-a-day. How long before his stories are away?

Rag Mill
"The Ragger"

We'll document the post-industrial Don in much more detail over the coming months: There's a great deal to explore and think about in this area, and the resonant impulses of what we saw will still animate us for a long time to come: water being wealth; a diverse and mixed sustainable economy - capital goods, consumer goods, only recently disappeared; autonomy versus agency; the remnant artifacts of a way of life and a way of work only recently past, but now as psychogeographically distant as the medieval marker stones which we were tracing when we came across these traces, picturesquely framed by benign neglect.

Past the remnants of the Rag Mill, we mount the stairs at Jacobs Ladder to find stone 50 ABD which sits against a wall at Don Terrace. Then it's under the railway, past a canal-remnant bridge span and back across the Great Northern Road dual carriageway.

Jacob's ladder

50 ABD

Under the railway

Stone 51 ABD is situated on Clifton Road, near the top of Deer Road. Deer Road was named for a moss and turf dyke which kept wild deer out of the nursery gardens of Woodside. For centuries dating back to the time of medieval Bishops' parish charters this wildlife management feature was known as the boundary between Woodside and Aberdeen's Freedom Lands. Today, we seem to have lost the knowledge or will to manage our natural resources - the wild inhabitants with whom we share our town - in this sustainable way, choosing rather the immediate violence of an eradication cull over the long-standing science of sustainable management.

51 ABD
At the top of Deer Road
At the top of the Deer Dyke

And so between March Stones 48 and 51 we've traversed the psychogeography of loss. Consider the dreams of the planners who created the pleasant social housing of Northfield - those dreams today so far lost in a debt-driven speculative fever-dream of chimerical property aspiration that now social housing of this type is thought of as being lower than the lowest. Indeed our current UK government would have it that council-owned housing should be regarded as emergency short-term accommodation only. This is a grave and dangerous loss to our sense of society. Consider the deliberate destruction of some of that very housing to make way for a big roundabout or gyratory road system or something - the twice daily commute of some cubicle-jockey office workers being deemed more important than many peoples' homes. Consider the message this policy sends to the people who lead their lives blamlessly, yet live in those very homes scheduled for what we can only regard as arbitrary destruction.

Consider now the worker's monument at Persley, consider those who died creating the wealth which we now enjoy in the comfort we take for granted. Consider those metaphorically crushed by the wheels of industry, and consider the real and literal remnants of those very wheels themselves - evident on the banks of the Don. Sentinels to a diverse and sustainable economy now past even decline, now irrevocably gone. This is a loss to our economic sustainability. 

And finally, consider the sick spiteful slaughter of roe deer, today, on Tullos Hill in Nigg to the south of our town in the cause of some dubious greenwash PR policy. When the last of them lies finally bloody, every one dead on the heather and gorse, not only will it be those deer which will be lost, but we will also have conclusively and ably demonstrated our loss of society, our collective loss of civilisation. And our loss of direction.

March Stones 44 to 48 ABD.

Bucksburn dam

Over the weeks and months, we've been tracing the line of Aberdeen's medieval boundary. The boundary of the land gifted to Aberdeen as a salve to his conscience by Buchan-harrying Robert the Bruce is marked to this day by a series of boundary stones or "march" stones, some of which are easy to see and find - perhaps you pass one or two of them every single day - others of which are quite hard to get at, and you need to do a bit of research to pinpoint their exact locations and decide how you plan to access them.

Tracing the boundary - the Old Scots word for boundary is "march", hence: "march stones" - is one of the constructs which we hang our psychogeographical excursions upon: by setting out to go somewhere which is off the beaten track and for no other reason than just for itself, we can find out a great deal about the four-dimensional shape of the town we live in (the fourth dimension being time, heritage, the historical aspect) and we find out about ourselves in relation to all that.

There's all sorts of histobunk about the march stones available online, and we recommend having a look at both this article in the Leopard Magazine, and this heritage trail leaflet (pdf) from Aberdeen City Council. Both are excellent sources of information and both were compiled and written by our local council's Chris Croly. We thank and congratulate Chris for his work, without which we probably wouldn't have been able to do what we've done in tracing the location of each stone.

Howes Road
Gorge-ous (apologies).

The most recent stone (stone no. 43 ABD) we wrote about was in residential Bucksburn, and the next stone is in a small semi-rural greenbelt oasis - the gorge through which the Bucksburn itself flows. The Howes Road, now closed to motor traffic, runs along the base of the gorge and connects the 20th century housing scheme areas of Northfield and Sheddocksly with the once-independent burgh of Bucksburn.

An etymological note: Howes Road - howe meaning hollow or hole, dip, depression.
Bucksburn - buck from the gaelic boc meaning leap or fall.

March Stone 44 ABD is on the west side of the Howes Road, about half way between Bucksburn House with it's spendid dam and old mill and Bucksburn Police Station, where the Howes Road meets the A96 Inverurie Road.

March stone 44 ABD. Looks quite new. It is. 

If stone 44 ABD seems crisp and new-looking in its appearance, that's because it is.  According to the Council this stone was placed on the east side of the burn in 2006, the older stone on the west side being judged to be too hazardous to visit. Well. We'll be the judge of that!

You can see both new and old stones in this pic, with the burn between them.

So, over on the west side of the burn, this gate leads to...

A barely-used path down to the stone... 

Indeed, a little difficult to get to - and probably not possible in wet conditions. You need to be fairly fit and well-shod and sure footed. But we thought not too bad. The engraving "44 ABD" on the stone is quite hard to make out, and the stone has an Ordnance Survey leveling rivet embedded in its top-face. But, yes! Two for the price of one at 44 ABD.

Bucksburn Valley
boardwalk.

When we trace the boundaries, we are, of course, widening the boundaries of our own experience and horizons, if only in a small way, and we find our viewpoints opening up to new interpretations of things, artifacts and behaviours which we might have previously dismissed as irrelevant or worse. For instance, the now pedestrianised Howes Road connects with the Bucksburn Valley Paths network, which we've mentioned once or twice before. One of the many reasons why the Bucksburn Valley Paths network has now reached the splendid levels of outdoor access which it has now achieved was the need to provide a safe offroad means for school pupils from Kingswells to get to Bucksburn Acadamy (Bucksburn and Kingswells being surprisingly close as the crow flies, but rather far as the motorist drives).

Being in the mindset to understand human geographical boundaries - the delineations between discrete communities or spheres of interest or whatever - and having opened our minds to the arbitrary posturing of the tribal warlords who became the feudal lords who became the local civic worthies and all of whom made and maintained the marches for their own reasons, we have predisposed and conditioned ourselves to find where boundary markers might be put, and how the boundaries flow between places of interest. We noticed a new graffito on a stone about equidistant between the two communities.

We can say with some certainty that this is a modern boundary stone - its intent and execution corresponding analogously with those of antiquity and near-antiquity - this new mark is perfectly legible and as visible as a flaming beacon to those who feel the necessity to mark a boundary for their own reasons.
This marks the line between areas of special interest for the young people of Kingswells and Bucksburn.

They have felt it necessary to mark their boundary for exactly the same reason as those men in the past who felt it necessary to mark the extent of their land and influence. It's the same thing. It's as important today to the people who made those marks as it was to those who made the marks of the past; there is no practical difference. Had spray-paint been available to our ancestors, they would have used it. Nothing changes; we are territorial animals and at times it is clear that our free will is subsumed by our nature.

A short way up the Howes Road (south), just past Bucksburn House and its dam, a narrow path leads between a farmer's field and Auchmill Golf Course and after a couple of hundred metres deposits us at the site of stone 45 ABD.

It's got a leveling rivet, too.

The Auchmill Golf Course is a municipal course built and landscaped over and among the remains of the Dancing Cairns Quarry, which we examined before. (Worth a read if you haven't already, if you can be bothered.)

Dancing Cairns Quarry / Auchmill Golf Club

Bonnyview Drive.

Nipping through a snicket off of the golf course and on to Bonnyview Drive we enter the town's Northfield estate, where, with a bit of head-scratching and walking up and down looking suspicious and asking local passers-by we eventually find stone 46 ABD, close to the wall of someone's house, in their garden.

Stone 47 ABD is against the fence of someone's back yard, down a snicket off Bonnyview Drive.

And crossing Provost Rust Drive to get to Marchburn Drive ("March" "Burn" - geddit?) at its corner with Old Town Place we find stone 48 ABD. The "burn" along which the "march" runs is the Scatterburn - more on this next time.

And at that point, having seen enough stones for the day, we were blessed by what we noticed next. It was October when we visited the site, and the weather had just turned cold for the first time in the year. Just above the roofs of the pleasant family homes, semi-detached post-war social housing - arranged around open grass playparks in horseshoes and crescents, cul-de-sacs and circles - the sun appeared to take on a smeared, dynamic appearance, as if rendered by an action painter. Five miles high in the sky, drifting hexagon nanocrystal plates of ice fluttered and fell gently downwards, prisming the wan sunlight through twenty-two degrees. The more we looked - sunglasses on, averting our eyes from the sun itself, holding up our hands to shade it away - the more we could see an arc around the sun; a sun halo! At the leftmost and rightmost edges of the halo, smears of rainbow color spread in a brightening splash; red on the inside through white to a blue-white brilliant sideways-spearing smudge. We were delighted to realise we was being treated to our first ever sight of parhelia; sundogs!

As we observed the phenomenon first brighten and then fade over about five minutes, we shared it with a young family who'd come out to see what we weirdos were gawping at from the end of their garden - passing our sunglasses around and wowing and oooohing we considered what we were seeing. We thought about how the interaction of scales from the unimaginably vast to the unobservably miniscule created this display, seemingly just for us who took the time to stand still and marvel. We wondered just how many other pairs of eyes were seeing that same halo, those same sundogs.

That night, we considered the recurring cycles of human activity, marking and re-marking old and new boundaries in the landscape we'd traversed, we thought of the cycles within cycles and prompted by the sun-dogs we thought of the cosmic cycles too - the whorls of primordial material which aggregated into the rocks and stones and water and gas that founded and maintain life on earth and the sun above which sustains all cycles of activity, however grandiose or trivial. Important or inconsequential all items and intentions, all actions and philosophies come from the same ancient stardust source. The fingerprints of the motions of the people and the events and everything that ever went on or goes on or will, the guidelines of our nature that constrain our free-will - all were encoded first in that condensing cloud of primordial dust and gas. No - encoded first in those uncountable previous star cycles; that dust and gas itself in turn the remnants of previous cycles of starbirth and death; the surface detail, the bloating darkness, the imperfections on the face of the big bang itself.

Imperfections on the face of the Big Bang.