20th Century Boundary Stones "ACB"

Once you've got your eye in, it's difficult to stop seeing stuff that you might otherwise miss. We've mentioned 'unknown stones' before - our tag for boundary stones that aren't mentioned on the Aberdeen City Council's splendid archeology pages, but perhaps are mentioned on the RCHAMS database. Or perhaps not mentioned anywhere at all, like this one:

Simply inscribed "ACB"

It's about 45cm in height. The stain 5/8ths of the way up suggests that it may once have been buried deeper than it is now. And that's all new turf around it, so this may not even be its exact original location.

It's on Lang Stracht (for those without Scots - a streetname which translates: "Long Straight"), at Sheddocksly, near the pedestrian/cyclist access to the new-ish housing association homes which occupy what had been the site of the garden centre chain before it moved farther west. From the crisp quality of the stonework and typeface used for the inscription, it appears to our eyes to be post-Victorian, and being different in its form factor (not having an inclined face for the inscription) is not one of the series of "ABD" or "CR" marked 'March Stones' which regular readers will know that we've been tracing over the weeks and months.

An educated guess might bring us to conclude that "ACB" stands for "Aberdeen City Boundary"; but that geographical point on the Lang Stracht is much closer in than today's far-flung city limits. So then we think of the time during the 20th Century when that city boundary was much closer in than today...

As a child, I remember road signs with words to the general effect: "Welcome to the City of Aberdeen"; specifically I remember them on the North Deeside Road at Pitfodels, on the Stonehaven Road just south of the Bridge of Dee and on Auchmill Road just about at Newton Terrace. We suppose that we should really get ourselves along to the local studies department at the Central Library and see if we can look at a mid-20th century map for clues to where we might find others of these 20th century boundary stones, but hey - this isn't a job! (Nevertheless - if anyone's got a copy of such a map that they can let us have we'd be really grateful.)

Anyhow, by far the easiest to get to of these half-remembered street-sign border signifiers from the early 1970's from Other Aberdeen's salubrious atelier in the upscale heart of downtown Pitmuxton is at Pitfodels. So, off we go for a look. And bingo! An ACB marked boundary stone at the bottom of Baird's Brae.

Just a hundred yards up the brae, at the junction with Airyhall Road/Rocklands Road there's another.

We've been past this location hundreds of times before and never
noticed it till today.

Interestingly, at the location of the ACB stone at the bottom of the brae, at it's junction with North Deeside Road, across the road a current roadside sign still marks the boundary of Cults village. A milestone still survives at this location too. Though it's seen better days...

If you weren't looking, you'd not see it.

The face seems damaged.

This would have been the 3-mile stone. Having spent time and effort looking for Aberdeen's boundary stones, and having become accustomed to people saying things like "oh yes, you mean those mile-stone thingies", it is ironic to actually come across one of these artifacts more or less by accident.  The item itself, pre-dating as it does the 1867 survey, seems almost impossibly remote and exotic (ish).

Farther along North Deeside Road, at Bieldside, the 4-mile stone has survived in a much better condition.

We've since seen other milestones in other locations around town which mark both different routes and different transport modes. But that probably enough trainspotting for one day. We'll get around to mentioning the other milestones in the usual course of psychogeography...

Fernhill Unconfined

Looking north towards Fernhill over the Bucksburn Valley

Fernhill is a hill, a farm, and - by extension - the name of an area which sits in the greenbelt between Sheddocksly and Kingswells, to the west of the built-up part of Aberdeen off the Lang Stracht. A network of farm tracks and footpaths - some in use as farm access, some maintained by our favourite quango Aberdeen Greenspace - provides access throughout the area and connects with the splendid recently-completed Bucksburn Valley Paths network (also the work of Aberdeen Greenspace). These paths are part of Aberdeen City Council's (ACC) Core Paths Network. 

Looking at the ACC Core Paths web-page we see that :

Under the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, all Local Authorities and National Park Authorities in Scotland have a statutory duty to prepare a Core Paths Plan that will "provide the basic framework of routes sufficient for the purpose of giving the public reasonable access throughout their area. The basic framework of routes will link into, and support, wider networks of other paths" 

The vision for Aberdeen's Core Paths Plan is to "form a complete paths network throughout the City, encouraging healthy and sustainable access opportunities for all". The Core Paths Plan will form a key part of outdoor access provision and will help to support wider national, regional and local policy objectives on health, recreation, education, economic development, social inclusion, community development, sustainable transport and tourism.

This, of course, is right up our street. Or rather, right up our Core Path.

Heading north up Fernhill to Greenferns

From Fernhill, we get views west to the Grampian mountains and east down to the North Sea. But perhaps surprisingly, very little of Aberdeen itself is visible. From this location the majority of the town is hidden below the ridge which runs from Cairncry to the Hill of Rubislaw. At the summit of Fernhill, we stand on the watershed of our town. A raindrop falling to our immediate north will find its way to the sea via first the Bucksburn and then the Don. A drop of water falling to the south will travel via the Denburn and Dee. The sources of the Bucksburn and Denburn are both to the west of Fernhill, and are surprisingly close together at Kingswells, surrounding Aberdeen in its own 'ring of bright water'. Sort of.

The Fernhill reservoir occupies the very summit of Fernhill, looking for all the world like a truncated stepped pyramid built by an ancient civilisation. Its sepulchral forms devising an apposite (but surely coincidental) mirror of the Aberdeen Crematorium, which sits at about the same elevation at Jessiefield across the Denburn valley towards Hazlehead. 

The stepped forms, splayed walls and truncated summit of the Fernhill reservoir remind us of the Peel Ring of Lumphanan and the vitrified fort at Tap o' Noth, and this thought in turn puts us in mind of some of the things we said when we berated the panopticonic "Project Kraken". Fernhill reservoir is today a crucial piece of infrastructure, crucial to the provision of a vital life-sustating service to the people of Aberdeen. But all things pass, and one day, in the normal course of development (or decline) its function will be redundant, and its structure will be left to decay back to the landscape, function all but forgotten, the arcana of its operation the subject of esoterica.

Peel Ring of Lumphanan - Motte.

Tap o' Noth - Vitrified fort.

Fernhill - 20/21st Century Reservoir.

As if to illustrate this point, an earlier (yet still from the 20th century) reservoir is visible just to the east of the presently used facility.  Heavy manhole covers protect path-users from the tank-voids of the redundant facility. The words "CAUTION - CONFINED SPACE" are stenciled on the face of the manhole covers as a warning to adventurers who are tempted to explore the formerly watery void below. 

Redundant

Confined

The paths at Fernhill link working farms, old forges, semi-rural cottages, stately old stands of impressively mature trees and (last week) just-ploughed fields, the scent of the good earth rising from the newly-broken winter's crust of working farms. The very picture of Aberdeenshire. 

Unconfined

The good earth

One of these working farms is Greenferns, and is on council-owned land. This land at Greenferns is one of the so-called "pockets of market failure" which have been identified for "remediation" by the forthcoming work of the City Development Company "One Aberdeen" (which we wrote about a little while ago). We would like to point out that this definition of failure is not the same as ours.  We fear that the City Development Company appears to be set to fall into the trap of believing that a community is nothing more than the sum of the businesses which operate within it and that the market should be the final arbiter of success or failure. We deplore this pencilneck-narrow vision. 

The Core Paths at Fernhill do not in and of themselves make money; of course they don't. But they create value by enriching in non-monetary ways the lives of those that use them and the environs of Aberdeen. This is the true definition of wealth. The generation of money and profit is merely the creation of affluence. The two things are not the same.