RESCUED

http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/parks/pos/pos_hazleheadpark.asp

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The park has

a significant collection of

sculpture by a range of artists

and heritage items

which have been rescued from

various places within the city

Before Fountainhall Corner became Queen's Cross

Plinth rescued... But no lamp on top? Why not? Where is it? 

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WHERE?

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-25816315.html

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http://www.findaproperty.com/displayprop.aspx?edid=00&salerent=1&pid=5084984

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http://www.kaal-aberdeen.co.uk/projects/57-the-firs-dalmunzie-road-bieldside.html

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>>

£3,500 pcm

OAK LODGE, DALMUNZIE ROAD, BIELDSIDE 

Superb modern family home in woodland surroundings on Dalmunzie Road. This house was purpose built in 2009 and has all the facilities of modern day living with solid oak flooring downstairs and all bedrooms have en−suite facilities. GCH, DG, Garden, Double Garage

.......................................

<<<<...

Location: Dalmunzie Road, Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire

Type: 4 bedroom house to let:

Bedrooms: 4

£2100pcm

THE STABLES, BIELDSIDE. Charming 3/4 bedroom detached property (formerly stables) in quiet location, close to the International School. DG, GCH. UNFURNISHED 

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>>>

The Firs, Dalmunzie Road, Bieldside

The existing house was a nineteen sixties design with a mono-pitch roof which the client wanted to replace with a more traditional design that increased the floor space by creating a new first floor.

The new design involved replacing the mono-pitched roof with a pitched roof, complete with dormers to the front. The new first floor houses a new master bedroom, en-suite and dressing room running from front to back full width. Two further double bedrooms are housed to the front, with a family bathroom and study to the rear while a snooker and entertainment room run full width at the other end of the house.

On the ground floor we reworked the existing W.C and utility room area and added a new conservatory to the West gable. The front façade was overclad with granite facings and all the windows were replaced. The double garage was also extended and had a new pitched roof added below which is housed a workshop.

The house has recently been valued at over £900,000 giving the client excellent value on his investment.

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...

Ferryhill's Mystery Masonry; Enigmatic "S"

A little while ago, we posted about "unknown stones", and in the post, we included this picture of an "S" marked stone in Ferryhill.

At the acute angle meeting of Ferryhill Road and Ferryhill Place

We had assumed that, like so many marked stones we see around Aberdeen, this was a boundary stone, marking someone's commercial or political property. These stones are very often shown on the large scale Ordnance Survey maps, but there's no sign of this one on the 1869 25 inch-to-one-mile map. So, it's later than that...

The map shows a couple of 'stones' on the northernmost curve of Ferryhill Road. That'd be close to where the defunct public toilet is situated. We hear that the toilet is still in occasional use; No 17 bus drivers having a key! Brilliant!

Stop the bus!

Walking down (northward) Ferrhill Road from Ferryhill Place towards Crown Street, we see these:

This one's got an OS Cut-Mark and Rivet Bench Mark,
down at the bottom.

They're all the way down the road, each about 50m from the next. A neatly incised "S", surrounded by a perfect rectangular border, on a piece of flat-faced granite - ashlar at the top (southern) end of the road, rubble at the bottom (north). The bottom (north) end of the road is characterised by a large retaining wall which encloses the steep-sloped common green of Archie 'Pech' Simpson's Marine Terrace.

By the time we reached the bottom, our eyes were well-opened, and we also noticed this wall-bound artifact:

"Presented by
Andrew Lewis Lord Provost
1927"

So regularly spaced, so unlike the other boundary stones; these "S"-marked stones are perplexing. Often, boundary stones are marked with the initials of the landowner, like this one at on the top of the Broad Hill:

Marked "R" to the north, "ND" to the south. Grooved on top.

So these stones in Ferryhill aren't the usual Aberdeen boundary stones, they're quite different. We've got a few theories:

• We've often noticed the words "sundry proprietors" marked on older maps of our town, and we wondered whether the single "S" might refer to that. 
• My old dad thought that the "S" might stand for "Simpson": that's Archibald Simpson, who built Marine Terrace, up above the stones.
• Someone suggested an infrastructure connection, referring to Soil- or Sewer-pipes.
• Similarly infrastructure related - Aberdeen's first source of electricity - the "Corporation Electricity Works" is at the bottom of Ferry-Hill, and so at the bottom of Ferryhill Road. Might the "S" be something to do with that? Substations?
• Aberdeen's first electrified tram ran up Ferryhill Road to the south and Crown Street to the north, it's source of power being the "Corporation Electricity Works" at the bottom (south) end of Crown Street. Perhaps the "S" is related to the trams?
• Ferryhill Road connects with the bottom of Crown Street, and so is close to the Masonic Temple. Amongst many things, the Masons are/were know for "masons marks". Is it possible that the "S" is a latter-day and more literate version of these ancient esoteric signs?

I grew up and went to school in this specific area, and I played on Ferryhill Road and the Marine Terrace green countless times. Since my childhood I've walked up and down Ferryhill Road regularly. It's amazing to me that I'd never noticed these plain-as-your-face marked stones before the day that we walked down Ferryhill Road looking for anything out of the ordinary. 

Neither our local council's Sites and Monuments pages, nor RCHAMS "Scotland's Places" pages mention these "S" marked stones on Ferryhill Place. So, if anyone knows for sure what they are, or has any other theories, we'd be delighted to hear about it. 

March Stones 40 to 43 ABD

Over the weeks and months we've been tramping the ancient boundaries of Aberdeen, and tracing the marker stones or "March Stones" which identify the extent of those boundaries. The word "march" deriving from the Old Scots word translating as "border", we probably see the same linguistic derivation in the "Welsh Marches", meaning "borderlands".

There's all sorts of histobunk 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.

Newhills Church, Newhills 

The stones we're going to write about today take us from Newhills, on the eastern face of Brimmond Hill into Bucksburn on the north-west edge of the built-up part of our town, and this marks a bittersweet end to the more rural side of the adventure of visiting all the stones. Bittersweet, for we've very much enjoyed the rural journeys and destinations; they've taken us to places we wouldn't otherwise have gone, and so we've seen and done things we wouldn't otherwise have done. We've also gained an insight into the three four-dimensional (including time) shape of our town that would have been impossible to get by any other means. Actually getting to all these spots under our own steam and being there - in the open air is its own reward. Having said all that, though, we'll not miss the clambering over barbed wire fences. We're getting too old for that sort of thing. (Not really.)


Stone 40 is in a field, south of Newhills Home, and north of the church at Newhills, accessible via the unsurfaced road which runs between the road to Bucksburn and the road from Forrit Brae.

Stones 41 and 42 are on opposite sides of the road into Bucksburn, about 200 yards apart. Stone 41 is on the south side of the road, Stone 42 is on the north.

Gorse!

Barbed Wire!

We noticed something about both stones that we'd not seen before... You'll notice that stone 41 has what appears to be a little metal button set in its top surface.

Stone 42 has marks which look like a bird's footprint incised on the top surface. Both the button (know as a "Rivet") and the incisions (know as a "Cut Bench Mark) are Ordnance Survey Bench Marks or ("Vertical Control" marks). These mark points of known height, from which other points of know height can be derived through a surveying process known as "levelling". Which is all very boring and technical.

Anyway, there used to be about half a million bench marks but since the advent of the Global Positioning System they aren't needed any more and about half have disappeared in the normal course of land and building re-development.

There is much we hear of today about the need for 'resilience'. We usually hear the term just after some bad weather or natural disaster or something unforseen has caused some sort of infrastructure breakdown. It strikes us as sad that a highly resilient method of mapping the land has been rendered obsolete by a method (albeit much more convenient) which lacks reliability and resilience, and is in the control of foreign powers (albeit 'allies'). We have sacrificed resilient autonomy for tenuous agency.

According to the Ordnance Survey's (OS) website:

Traditional horizontal control stations, triangulation or 'trig' stations (pillars and other survey marks) and vertical control (bench marks) have been the mainstay of control information in Great Britain for many years. They provided the means to link surveys to the national horizontal and vertical datums as well as providing structure to a survey. To do this it was necessary to physically occupy either the triangulation station or bench mark with survey equipment and purchase the control coordinates from Ordnance Survey.

Ordnance Survey has made a commitment to continue to offer traditional control information to surveyors who do not use methods such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) to provide control. However, due to the quantity of traditional stations and the expense of their survey, tied in with the greater accuracy and uniformity that new satellite-based survey techniques provide, it is neither sensible nor realistic for Ordnance Survey to maintain the triangulation and bench mark network.

Thoughts of agency versus autonomy aside, We find all this, unsurprisingly, quite fascinating - these March Stones are (were?) dual use! Not only do they mark the ancient boundaries of our town (political), they are also known reference points which technically and accurately denote the precise shape of the landscape (geographical).

Another fascinating aspect to us is the obsolescence of these items, both the March Stones and the Bench Marks which they host. There is no functional reason for the March Stones to have survived, yet this ancient method of denoting land boundaries
survived functionally in our town well into the Victorian Era, by which time the system of land surveys and title deeds lodged with central authorities had rendered all such physical markers redundant. Yet they survived, and were replaced if necessary because of damage, flood, landslide or whatever.

We cannot help but wonder if there's something very Aberdonian about this. Sure, other towns have boundary stones, but as far as we can find out not even Washington DC (a far newer and completely planned city) has managed to retain all boundary markers in situ. It is as if the new-fangled survey technology of theodolite and trigonometry was distrusted by the city fathers and land-owners of Victorian Aberdeen, it is as if deeds lodged with a notary or in a city hall meant nothing - all that mattered was the good earth, marked out by stone pillars that you could go and see. There is probably some merit in this attitude - it's certainly resilient.

As well as hosting the OS Cut Bench Mark, Stone 42 is adjacent to a "saucer stone" which predates the Victorian Era marks. The stone has two saucer marks, full of moss when we arrived.

No-one knows for sure what the 'saucer' holes were for. Some suggest they may have been filled with molten lead, and impressed with the town's coat of arms - other theories have them as survey-holes, used in some process of surveying the land - this use would be similar to the rivets and pivots of OS benchmarking.

Today, this area is characterised by a busy road which takes traffic from the west into Bucksburn. Being high above a residential area, there is a reservoir, and having good line-of-sight to a population centre, there is a mobile phone Earth-station. These things are vital infrastructure today, but we wonder for how long they will stay as they are, and we frame that question in the context of the March Stones.

Stone 43 is in Bucksburn, beside some lock-up garages, out the back of someone's house in Nether Brae.

Edit, Addendum.

OS Cut Mark Bench Marks are really common:

Geo VI Bridge

Holburn Junction

Music Hall

Hardgate Well, and Another Hardgate Well

All the little and big stories, all the little and big artifacts, all the places and all the people. Woven together where the past meets the present and gathers its forces to generate the future. That's "Other Aberdeen"; that's what the psychogoegraphical toolbox we're building is intended to disclose. We are all part of the process, tools in the box, part of the story of the town.

That's why we're really pleased that 'Other Aberdeen' has inspired a reader to share his story of a place, an artifact and of people. It brings it all together - that's what Other Aberdeen's for. Today, many people seem to think that a town is merely the sum of all the business activity within it. Part of Other Aberdeen's mission is to demonstrate that this is wrong. Reader Bill Watt has joined in by clicking the e-mail link to the left of the page and sending a message to otheraberdeen@gmail.com with this story and photos:

When I first became aware of the intended destruction of a local landmark ‘The Hardgate Well’ I shot off the following series of photographs for posterity. 

Readers may find it interesting to know that the Hardgate Well had a brother/sister well just across the road which I very nearly fell into back in the early 1980’s.

 How I almost fell into the well; My Father (Bill Watt Senior) was employed by the owner of a house just across the road from the ‘Hardgate Well’ to renovate his basement. Part of the renovation involved lifting all the granite flagstone flooring in the basement rooms and hallway.

The need to remove the flagstones was caused by rats or voles, not sure which, tunnelling everywhere just under the flagstones causing the flagstones to sink and tilt in all the rooms and hallway, the intended solution was to remove all the flagstones, level the ground and pour in 4-6 inches of concrete to replace the flagstones thus preventing the rats/voles from returning, question being how were the wee devils getting under the flagstones in the first place.

 As my father was getting on and didn’t want to carry out the heavy work of lifting and removing all the large granite basement floor flagstones he approached me (Bill Watt Jnr) to assist him.

We estimated the removal would take a couple of days as the flagstones covered a couple of rooms and a hallway, each flagstone was about 2’ x 3’.

My job was to lift each flagstone and walk it out the back door and onto the Hardgate there the flagstone would be stacked until someone collected them to be re-used, probably in someone’s garden..

Removing the flagstones took two full days. To complete the job ready for the concrete delivery I worked into the evening of the second day, no electricity, no one to help me, I was all alone and the basement was getting dark, finally I had just one last flagstone to remove at the end of the hall.

The procedure was the same for removing all the flagstones, it was, dig my pickaxe just under the edge of the slab, prise it up just enough to get my fingers under the stone then with all my strength lift the slab and take a step forward to get my body behind the slab for the last shove to get it upright against the wall, as I had done with all the other slabs, except this time as I lifted and was ready to take my step forward I heard a small plop, like a small stone dropping into water! This noise saved my life, if I had taken the step forward I would have dropped down into a well with the slab slamming shut on top of me, crushing me and or knocking me out, once in the well I doubt if I could lift the slab again as the well was 4’ to 5’ deep with slippery walls and three quarters full of crystal clear water.

Could this be where the rats or voles were coming from? We never did find out. Next day I showed my father and the owner of the house the well, I managed to get a photograph before I was instructed to fill the well with rubble before the cement arrived. You may think from the picture that the hole is an old drain, which is possible, however this does not explain why the hole is so deep and why the water so clear, in addition no one knew it was there as it had been covered by granite flagstones for a number of years, probably since the house was built which was at least 200 years ago.

With our grateful thanks to Bill Watt for the story and photos. He retains all rights.

The well(s) of this slope featured in the notorious Battle of Justice Mills (pdf) during the Civil Wars, the battle being a curtain-raiser on a dark period of occupation for and atrocities against the then people of Aberdeen.

The original Ordnance Survey of 1867 shows many wells along the spring line at Justice Mill Lane and Bon Accord Terrace on the southern facing slope of the Glen of the Holburn (or Ferryhill Burn, or Howburn or Justice Mill Burn), today's Union Glen. It makes a fascinating connection to the past that Bill and his father discovered one of these wells while making a property fit to face the future. It's all the more gratifying because today we can spread the story in this most modern of ways.

We've heard that locally-headquartered multinational oil service company Wood Group has leased space in the new office block development which now occupies the site of the derelict buildings shown in the first of Bill's photos above.

We're pleased that commerce/industry has returned at last to this historic part of Aberdeen. Now, it has a future.

Unknown Stones - Foreshore.

We spotted another couple of 'unknown' boundary stones down by the foreshore the other day when we went to gawp at stranded warship HMS Diamond, becalmed at Telford Dock.

Firstly, on the Queen's Links we noticed this concrete marker which is inscribed:

?(defaced) M
No 3

Being concrete, this stone intrigues us. It's not like the other boundary markers around town and we've not seen any others like it, but that doesn't mean there aren't any. It doesn't appear on Aberdeen City Council's Sites and Monuments Pages, but here's its RCAHMS entry.

Then, on Links Road we spotted this granite marker which is inscribed 'ABD', and also sports an Ordnance Survey benchmark rivet. Of which more later.

Oddly, its RCAHMS entry says that "Nothing is now visible of this boundary stone". We beg to differ. Here it is:

There are probably many other stones like this one, the 25 inch Ordnance Survey of 1869 certainly shows a good few. Over the coming weeks and months, we'll see if we can find some more of them.

Unknown Stones - Rosemount.

The city, having evolved to its current state over many centuries, contains many signs and signifiers, artifacts and arrangements which encode the events of the urban story and which can be understood by anyone who possesses the key to the code. Sometimes the key is apparent, often it is not. A good example of this type of artifact is Aberdeen's system of boundary stones - the March Stones - which we've been exploring over the weeks and months.

All of the March Stones are in plain view, but sometimes they are difficult to see. That's partially because our modern perception is simply not focussed upon estate boundaries; we've no need to know of rights of way along free byways and waterways or any other feudal concerns. During the psychogeographical process of exploring these boundary markers we had to learn where and how to look, where to direct our cognition so that we could locate the artifacts.

So, once we had those eyes switched on (as it were) - once we'd directed our consciousness towards ancient boundaries, where they might be and how they might be marked - we coincidentally found other stone marks and markers, signifiers of past property or infrastructure and not registered on the council's reference pages.

Back in November, we documented some of these 'Unknown Stones' which we'd seen around Ferryhill.

We've been wandering the Green Lanes of Rosemount this week, and we saw these:

Groove-marked stone - Watson Lane

Groove-marked stone - Watson Lane

M&C marked stone - Loanhead Walk Lane

These stones (and many others) appear on the first large scale OS map of Aberdeen, which was drawn in 1869.