Craiginches Littoral

If you've used the new-ish dual path for walkers and cyclists along Aberdeen's Riverside Drive, on the north side of the Dee, between the Duthie Park and the Wellington Suspension bridge, you'll have looked across the river towards Craiginches prison, and seen a network of paths crisscrossing the steep bank (almost a cliff) below the prison and down to the riverside. I've always been aware of these paths, but, somehow, never found the time to go and explore them, to feel what it's like to be there.

So, a few weeks ago, we walked to the Wellington Bridge. This Scheduled Ancient Monument was recently restored and re-opened for pedestrians and cyclists as part of Sustrans routes 195 and 01. Crossing the bridge, we gave ourselves a new perspective by having a good mooch around the littoral on the south bank of the Dee.

The Dee is tidal up to and just past the medieval Bridge of Dee, a couple of kilometres west of here, but the river shore isn't like a sea shore. Although rinsed by the tide twice daily, it's not beaten by waves or swell, and so it has a kind of dusty crust, a dirty patina. And it attracts long-lived detritus. On the day we visited, it was very bluesky bright, with the golden sun low in the west towards the end of the day, and so an atmospheric quality of clarity was lent to our outing as winter turned to spring and as we scrambled along the shore below Wellington Road, under the Ferryhill railway viaduct and crossing the toxic Tullos burn to emerge into the nascent "Granite City Forest" planting at Inverdee (where we saw the husks of the fruit of the sherry-tree).

And finally then on to and under the George VI Bridge, with its impressive civically-emblazoned cutwaters. And there finally (mirroring the supernatural Christian blessing which the stones impart upon travelers crossing the Wellington Bridge) when we climbed onto the George VI bridge we received the more rational secular blessing of orientation, courtesy of an OS Bench Mark on the south west parapet. And we realised that both marks on the stone are essentially the same: only separated in time and the changing perceptions which that passage of time heralds both seek to make sense of the land and its forms, both seek to best orientate people in the world, both seek to give people a sense of security and both try to permanentise their world-view in stone.

And both systems try to tell people where they are and where they're going. The newer with the rational certainty of theodolite and trigonometry, the elder with blind trust in arbitrary dogma and supernatural faith in a supreme being. A newer-yet orientation system, the GPS, is the spun-off civilian hinterland of a militarised economy, and is controlled by unseen and far-off hands and minds. To what priority these far off hands and minds answer we cannot know, because it's secret.

We don't much like the idea of these unseen forces telling us where we're going, so we'll stick with the OS for now. That's our dogma.

A Christian benediction to travelers crossing the Wellington Bridge.
Click for a bigger version, see the word 'HOLY'
(with thanks to reader Bill Watt for this one)

A secular blessing from the
Ordnance Survey.
Now we really know where we are!

Fear the Kraken

The taste of living in Aberdeen got a little more bitter yesterday with the launch of Grampian Police's "Project Kraken". The Kraken is a mythical sea-monster from Norse tradition - big as an island. Look it up if you want.

The announcement of Grampian Police's implementation of Operation Kraken was, in our opinion, fittingly monstrous. Appearing on North Tonight STV News, Assistant Chief Constable Bill Gordon of Grampian Police called on members of the public to report "suspicious activity". This "suspicious activity" taking the form of individuals snapping photographs or making notes regarding (amongst other things) "significant buildings", "locations" or "bridges". This is supposed to protect us from terrorism. The police are actually encouraging people who live or work on the coast to register with them as "members" of Project Kraken. We can't remember the name of the society to which the child informants belonged in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but we'll assume that being a member of Project Kraken is something like that. There'll be a quarterly newsletter. Really, there will. O how we wish we were joking.

We [Grampian Police] are also asking users and residents of the Grampian Coastline to register with Project Kraken free of charge. As a registered member of Project Kraken you will receive timely information updates by email, and a quarterly newsletter providing a summary of local and national incidents and activity that might be of interest.

In addition, you will be added to an email distribution list which will be used, when appropriate, to circulate urgent information and intelligence updates. There may also be times that we contact you with a request that you assist us in ‘observing and reporting’ particular individuals, groups or vessels.

Well, we photograph a lot of this sort of stuff a lot of the time. We also sometimes take text or audio notes. For instance, the photo at the top of our pages has Aberdeen's North Pier, Breakwater, Guiding Light and Harbourmaster's Tower photographed at the exact moment of the turning of a very high tide at the mouth of the Dee. We exhibit this photograph because it is both photogenic and metophorical. It's apparent aesthetic appeal or esoteric message can be appreciated by the viewer as they wish. Also apparent in the photo is the old, now redundant, Harbourmaster's tower, this too is significant to our aims at Other Aberdeen.

We photograph and discuss infrastructure because our human world is made of infrastructure. Part of the human condition is the story of our interaction with the infrastructure which we have summoned into being, this is one aspect of the human adventure which most fascinates us. Without infrastructure, we are like any other mammal; individual or tribal, our daily concerns are those of feeding, family and shelter. When the individuals and tribes of humanity are connected and serviced by infrastructure we transcend this baseline animal condition and become a collective society, a wider culture: a civilisation. When Other Aberdeen chooses an aspect of infrastructure as a suitable subject for psychogeographical exploration, we are looking at nothing less than the atoms of civilisation. It fascinates to see infrastructre planned and built, it satisfies to see infrastructure humming with vitality, used to full capacity. Then, at the end it similarly delights to see older, redundant infrastructure obsolesce and decay back to a trans-natural post-industrial state.

One Source of the Ferryhill Burn

One of our very first posts last year: Somewhere in Aberdeen coyly alludes to this idea. The photograph is of a pond at Hazlehead which, at one time, was one of the headers to the Holburn/Ferryhill Burn. The dammed pond was used along with a sequence of others to control the volume and speed of the water flowing into the water course. That water, in turn, turning the wheels of industry at the Justice Mills, Ferryhill Mill and Dee Village Mills. This was a water course which worked hard before it was allowed to drain into the Dee Estuary. It powered one of the means by which our nascent city nurtured itself with an industrialised food source.

It's industrial vitality (and vital industriality) now gone, the pond enjoys a photogenic retirement as an ad-hoc nature reserve. Man-made though it was, nature is taking it back, and the process is quite beautiful. Literally and metaphorically.

We usually try our very best to avoid using cliché, but clichés come into existence because they are true. Therefore, today we have no compunction in saying that we can't make up our minds whether a police initiative which might stop us taking nice photos is Ballardian, Kafkan, Orwellian or (Ray) Bradbury-esque (per Farenheiht 451).

That the police are asking members of the public to inform on photographers and others with an interest in this sort of stuff promotes a culture of secret denunciation like that of pre-Napoleonic Venice. Moreover, as pointed out by these people, the collective visual history of our country is extinguished by anti-terrorist initiatives designed to protect the heritage it prevents us recording. The irony is not lost on us. It further troubles us that these exhortations from the police will empower those who have an unhealthy interest in exercising arbitrary power over others. We have famously posted about this before.

Whatever it is, it's disturbing, it's unsettling, it's an affront to our freedom and a constraint upon our ability to go about our lives at our own liberty as free agents. To offer another cliché:

People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.  

(As Benjamin Franklin is purported to have said.)

The fact remains: in the west we are by far more likely to be struck by lightning, or killed by our family doctors than we are to be killed in a terrorist outrage.

Here's a photo of a bridge (co-incidentally, at the turning of the tide):

(With our thanks to reader spottiewattie17 for the heads-up.)