Thin Places Delineated at the Broad and Gallows Hills

A couple of months ago, we were on Aberdeen's Broad Hill to visit the innovative and subversive art installation: "By Order of Me".

Some of the artworks invite the viewer to consider the psychogeographical aspects of our situation ("You make the world the world"), as well as the psycho-historical aspects of the location ("Just think - there used to be bears here"). Go along with an open mind and time on your hands, observe the signs and you'll see what we mean. The installation is to remain in place until the end of the year.

It was a most raw February day when we were there, with a high tide battering hard against the esplanade which forms the sea-wall protecting the links from the North Sea. We walked under the esplanade and between the beach and the Broad Hill, then traversed the Trinity Cemetery up to the summit of Gallows Hill. Our interpretation of and interaction with the landscape inspired by the artifacts and the topography of the area.

Under the esplanade

Esplanade surveillance cluster.
For your safety and comfort.

From the top of Broad Hill, we see some remarkable views over the town lying to the west and, it being a prominent landmark, we're not surprised to find both an OS Trig Point pillar and a granite boundary stone at the hill's summit.

South face "R"

Both photos are of the same stone, we think it marks the boundary of fishing rights, the incised groove runs west to east pointing seaward. The inscribed letters will be the initials of the proprietors of the fishing rights. We're not certain of this, so if you know better, let us know...

North face "ND"

Traces of the foundations of recent structures can be seen in the low-lying flat links land - now a cricket pitch - beneath the hill. The area was heavily militarised during the Second World War, reflecting one of its historic uses as a convenient open and flat place to hold wappenshaws - "weapon-showings" - mustering of men under arms to satisfy clan or feudal lords that a suitably large, fit, well-equipped and bellicose corps of men could be gathered to execute their war-like bidding. We can't say whether the marks we see are the outlines of military camp structures and emplacements, or whether they are to do with the more conducive sporting and leisure uses of this land, which have included horse-racing, livestock shows, football, golf, galas and markets.

Impressions of previous land-use.

The shifting patterns of land use in this marginal zone between the town and the sea reflect the dynamic nature of this littoral zone itself. It is said that from time to time in pre-history the mouth of the River Don would become silted up and its waters would flow southwards, innundating the area now occupied by a links golf course and exiting to the North Sea somewhere around the latitude of the Broad Hill. Recent geographers doubt this assertion, the impervious clay bed of the links being at too high a level to allow the river to flow all the way south to the Broad Hill before finding an outlet or re-breaching its established one. However, the past undoubtedly saw the area characterised by a dynamic and shifting landscape with boggy quicksands, tidal lagoons, freshwater and brackish lochs (the Canny Sweet Pots - a bastardisation of Gaelic roughly translating as "the head of the settlement by the deep pools of water) fed by the Powis Burn and Banstickle Burns, which now run in underground culverts beneath the links. At their confluence, those burns became known as the Tile Burn which had a tidal flow allowing sea-going vessels to navigate some half-a-mile inland to the 18th century tile and brick works which gave the burn its name.

On the day when we visited, when a very high tide and a storm blowing in from the sea caused the waves to bluster and batter against the sea wall with more violence than we'd ever seen before, it was very easy to imagine a similar day in a time before modern sea defenses, the water inundating the land and reconfiguring the shifting sands, lagoons and watercourses.

This feeling of impermanence; of the diaphanous edge between something and nothing - the delicate balance between certainty and inconstancy which we felt and experienced as we stood braced against the onshore gale surveying the foreshore - put us in mind of the concept of the "Thin Place" in Celtic spirituality and the early Christian church. I've heard there's a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, and that in the "thin places" that distance is even smaller. The early Christian church in Ireland, in Wales and in Scotland sought out these "thin places" for pilgrimage and in some cases to co-opt the sites and plant their missions on the foundations of pre-existing spirituality.

We feel that others have felt the same about this site throughout the history of our town and perhaps before. On the western slope of the Broad Hill, descending into a hollow and then ascending up to Gallows Hill is the Trinity Cemetery, which hosts a unique monument to people who've willed their remains to medical science for research.

The increase of knowledge and the advance of medicine

An ancient scabby dog-shit strewn right-of-way leads up the side of the graveyard to the summit Gallows Hill. As if to emphasise the theme of changeability and inconstancy, as we mounted the summit, the weather changed dramatically, the skies cleared and the sun shone strong and low in the late winter sky.

A young couple on the summit of Gallows Hill

Looking back down the right-of-way from Gallows Hill
 to Broad Hill in the backgound, North Sea beyond.

Some old maps show a powder magazine sited on Gallows Hill, and a rifle range extending down the right-of-way between Broad Hill and Gallows Hill, chiming with some of the martial aspects of this part of Aberdeen. An ancient site of execution, where the gibbet remained in place until at least 1776, the choice of this site for the storage of volatile military materiel was apt. No doubt folk would avoid the area if they could, because of its associations with crime and punishment, death and bodily corruption. The Victorian Trinity Cemetery tempers the negative psychogeographical aspects of Gallows Hill somewhat with the usual mawkish Victorian aspirations towards spiritual redemption and resurrection in an idealised afterlive of child-cherubs and young-women-as-angels. These Victorian signs and symbols strike a saccharine note with us in the 21st century, and so merely add a further freight of peculiar queerness to the undeniably singular atmosphere which is embodied in the topography, artifacts and history of this area, despite it being very close to the town centre today.

Clinging to the old rugged cross

Gravediggers baronial-gothic cottage

The hill is marked with a couple of 19th century (probably) boundary stones and a much older stone, marked with a cross. The retired grave-digger (no, really) who lives in the splendid Gothic-Victorian pavilion guarding the gates of the graveyard told us that this was a "Doupin Stone" like the one out west at Wynford, but we can't corroborate that. Aberdeen City Council's archaeology pages don't appear to have a record for it and the RCAHMS record it as a boundary stone.

Groove-incised boundary stone.

Boundary stone inscribed "TH"

Cross-marked stone

The hill overlooks Aberdeen Football Club's stadium at Pittodrie. We understand that the hill was at one time known as the Miser's Hilly, because hard-up or parsimonious football fans could watch the match free from the prominence. We suggest you read Alex Mitchell's pieces on the Ancient Burgh's of Aberdeen in the Aberdeen Voice for more background.

Remains of a bonfire on the summit

There used to be a manure works nearby to the north at Linksfield, involved in the production of fertiliser and chemicals for the leather tanning industry and bleachings. The feedstock for for the works was provided by a police stables, it's dung-heap occupying the site of the present-day football stadium, the name of which - Pittodrie - is from the Gaelic "pitt" - place of and "todhair" - manure; bleaching. 

The Manichean paradox embodied in the fact that the filth of manure is transmuted into an agent of purity: the bleach for the tanneries and bleachings, similarly chimes with the transformative and dynamically charged psychogeography inherent in the shifting topography of the area and how that in turn has affected our use of it. A place of comings and goings; of shifting surfaces; of things which are not as they seem; of deaths, planned and natural; of aggression and recreation; and of crime and redemption all in a "thin place", a place on the edge between the land and the sea, the edgelands between here and there; the border between the past and the future. The difference between something and nothing.

Water is Wealth - Woodside vs. Stoneywood

Pond at Stoneywood House

Readers might be aware that the Other Aberdeen HQ is in the upscale heart of downtown Pitmuxton (or "Pitmuckston"), on the south-facing slope of the valley of the Dee, nestled around the Geldieburn (or west branch of the Pitmuxton Burn), between Ferryhill and Garthdee, and encompassing Ruthrieston. Recent psycogeographical expeditions have taken us to the Don-valley mirrors of our home turf - those being Woodside, Bucksburn (or, indeed "Buxburn") and Stoneywood. There's simply a huge amount of stuff for us to discuss about these fascinating parts of Aberdeen, not least of which is the fact that (and reasons why) these areas are but recent additions to the administrative boundaries of the City of Aberdeen.

Divided

When you visit Woodside, its difficult not to be alienated by the A96 Trunk Road which is a gash in the community's social fabric; a dead space designed for machines rather than people. A hot-spot for noise, congestion, pollution, accidents and isolation. At one time, Woodside hosted and boasted a terminus for the much mourned Aberdeen Tram system, and was conveniently connected by that clean, efficient, quiet and cheap transport provision to the rest of the town. Today, the urban dual carriageway separates Woodside even from itself.

And not for the first time has this phenomenon of a transport "upgrade" ill served Woodside. Between 1807 and 1854 the Aberdeenshire Canal ran through Woodside. The canal was a considerable convenience and, indeed, luxury to the inhabitants of Woodside who would swim in it in the summer and skate on it in the winter in addition to using it as a virtually inexhaustible source of clean, safe, fresh water. It was the very centre and continual re-genesis of their already ribbon-developed community. The canal also had the effect of feeding and adding to the natural springs below it on the north face of the Don Valley at Hayton and Tillydrone. Those springs, in turn feeding a gathering system which provided the water supply for Old Aberdeen. Old Aberdeen was at that time also a burgh independent of "New" Aberdeen.

Canal remnant at Station Road, Woodside.

With the building of the Great North & Scotland Railway the greater part of the canal-bed was to become the bed of the railway, and so the canal was closed, drained and (having been established by Act of Parliament in 1796) was abolished in 1854. This had a devastating effect on the springs below it, effectively depriving Woodside and Old Aberdeen of a fresh water supply. Fresh water extraction from the River Don itself was out of the question, the river being already quite heavily industrialised. The provisions of the Acts of Parliament relating to the establishment of both the canal and railway obliged the railway company to remedy any injury done or deficit caused by the building of the railway and so the railway company agreed to make good the loss of water. Various schemes were implemented drawing water from here and there but all proved inadequate, and in a precursive example of short-sighted venality the town council of Old Aberdeen accepted a sum of £1000 from the railway company instead of the water. The fate of Old Aberdeen and Woodside was thus sealed. Ill-conceived attempts by Old Aberdeen council to secure a supply of water for their inhabitants proved more ineffective than even those of the railway company, and so both Old Aberdeen and Woodside lost their independence, being forced to go cap (or rather, water-jug) in hand to the neighbouring burgh of Aberdeen, where the citizens luxuriated in their new state-of-the art high-pressure water supply brought from high up the Dee at Cairnton. Thus deprived of its independent water supply, and mistaking money for wealth, Woodside's autonomy was sacrificed for the agency provided by neighbouring Aberdeen. Old Aberdeen and Woodside were formally absorbed into Aberdeen in 1891.

Aberdeenshire Canal artifact at Stonewood Terrace:
Mile stone: "5 1/2"

Old Mill at Bucksburn House

Contrastingly, Bucksburn and Stoneywood (parts of the parish of Newhills) - a little further upstream on the Don, remained independent of Aberdeen until the big nationwide local government reorganisation of 1975. Stoneywood and Bucksburn are areas characterised by both water and mills; the prior being the source of wealth, the latter being the means to convert that wealth into affluence (or, at least, prosperity).

Following this area's two main water courses to the Don (the Bucksburn itself and the Greenburn) we find mill after mill, manor-house after manor-house in a fractal succession of water-descent driven capital ascent from the small-scale meal-mill at Bucksburn House to the vast internationally-exporting paper-manufacturing enterprise at Stoneywood. The meal-mill at Bucksburn House is long-retired, and the flourmill on the Bucksburn which supplied the famous Chalmers bakery is now the site of a large motel, but the Stoneywood Mill still operates, manufacturing speciality paper. There's a histobunk section on its retail website which is well worth a look, so we recommend it.

Stoneywood Mill

The Stoneywood Mill is the last of the seventeen (we think) papermills which once operated on the banks of the Don, and is one of only two remaining paper mills in Scotland (the other being in Fife).

[edit - correction
Six papermills remain in Scotland. Stoneywood, two in Fife, two on the west coast and one in the Borders.
- Thanks to Mark Chalmers for the info]

The weir and mill-lade are on a bend in the river below Stoneywood House, accessed by a little zig-zag path. The entirity of the capital manifest in the site of this internationally renowned papermaking enterprise was accumulated through the judicious use of the diverted - gathered and mustered, wrangled and re-tasked - waters of the Don and Greenburn as they fall onto and through, past and across the inch upon which the mill stands.

Stoneywood House and Mill-lade intake.
"Water is Wealth"

Greenburn at Bankhead Road.

No Trolls under this bridge.

The water-workings of the mill are, em, "in retirement" now, benign neglect allowing a picturesque and whimsical aspect to subsume the once rigorously industrially rational and practical. Motive power for the mills is derived from a three-phase electricity supply, which is transmitted to it (largely, notwithstanding grid-balancing on the National Grid) from the gas-fired power station on the very north-east corner of Aberdeenshire at Boddam. That power station itself is fed by gas through the integrated North Sea gas pipeline system, by which gas is brought from the Norwegian-controlled sector of the North Sea, the UK being these days a net gas importer.

Benign neglect

Picturesque

While the Stonewood Mill still operates today, we cannot help but see parallels and portents in history, which is of course like all things, fractal in nature. The affluence and prosperity which bootstrapped itself out of the geographical wealth of the location and accumulated in the capital manifest in the mill site was built via autonomous means - the motive power supplied by water seeking to find its own level under gravity - right there, before your eyes and under the control of your hands. That local autonomy has now been surrendered for the agency of electricity which is manufactured remotely. Moreover, that electricity is manufactured from a feedstock which is not under the control even of our nation's agency, nor even that of the supranational agency of the EU. It is controlled by the monopoly state capitalists of a foreign power.

We said in the title that 'Water is Wealth'. Well, it certainly was wealth. Perhaps it will be again some day. No-one can turn off gravity, and we trust that rain and snow on the Cairngorms will not stop any time soon.

Stoneywood Weir. Play it full screen in HD and feel as if you're there.

We spotted these Statoil ads on the back of magazines, click them to read their messages. We think they're supposed to be comforting, but we find them more than a little chilling.

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.

Second-Generation Psychogeography, Six Senses, Stuff and Subjectivity

An old friend contacted us and delighted us when he let us know he’d syndicated a feed of the Other Aberdeen blog onto the website of Edinburgh-based band Tramplord, along with this précis of our work:

Other Aberdeen is second generation psychogeography. It is a subjective encounter with the urban environment; but it is also an encounter that acts for solutions.  The experiments aren't those of the old fashioned flaneur who is playing with the rules, but are done with the urgency - not of artistic madness or vanity - but of people working for a better city.  This is not wine glasses and maps, no boy. In fact, wine glasses and maps are childrens' toys; and this is a mature psychogeography.

If you think of psychogeography as the anarchic and playful stuff of the 50s, 60s and beyond, this is OK.  But all the early psychogeographers learned from their drunken experiments was this: Experimenting in a subjective mode enlightens the individual psychogeographer no end yes! but it won't change Jack Shit in Babylon.

Other Aberdeen is also blessed with a brilliant subject.  Aberdeen is an unusual place, sometimes at variance with the UK in terms of all sorts of ideas and trends.  Things are always happening there. Worlds collide.  And all that.  It's a funny old corner of the world.

"Worlds collide ... funny old corner of the world..." So true. We very much appreciated the appreciation, and we revel in the tag: “second generation psychogeography”.

Notwithstanding the fact that if you study something too closely it can lose meaning through lack of context, we’ve been pondering just what this “second generation” is, what is it (what are we) for, and how does it do what it does? That is to say: what are our tools, how do we use them, and what do we hope to achieve?

It should be clear to regular readers that what we hope to achieve at Other Aberdeen is a subjective improvement in the livability of our town. Our aims are no more complex nor less ambitious than that. We aver that by picking certain psychogeographical implements from the toolbox anyone can cross the boundary between merely inhabiting an urban space and actually living in it. By actually making the conscious choice to live in (rather than merely occupy) our urban spaces we can re-root ourselves as human beings and re-boot urbanism within an often alienating urban environment. That process will, in its own turn, reduce the alienating overburden which is the legacy of the decades-long misunderstanding of urbanism which so often characterises urban realm spaces in the UK.

Desire line interchange. Hub?

Foremost amongst the methods we use is walking. Simple as that; and from that we bootstrap a whole range of subsidiary strategies - tools, if you will - which we use to explore and assimilate the urban environment within the context of getting on with all the other content of our lives. For instance, a relative of mine had a hospital stay recently (he’s fine now). Arranging and co-ordinating hospital visits between myself and friends and family members became a bizarre exercise in mostly telling people that I really really didn’t need a lift to travel the 2 kilometers between my home in Pitmuxton and Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Regrettable though it is to have a relative in hospital, over the two weeks he was there, I took the opportunity to walk the streets, lanes, foot-paths and desire-lines of Queen’s Cross, Rubislaw, Mile-end, Raeden, Mid-stocket, Westholm, Foresterhill, Woodend, Summerhill, Mannofield and Rosemount in large, looping routes which descended into valleys of all-but-forgotten watercourses, traversed redundant farmyards now hemmed-in by Victorian terraces and ascended in the footsteps of historical quarry workers on their privileged rights-of-way to the high granite-bearing ridge along which the Anderson Drive trunk-road now runs. If time was short, and a direct route was necessary, my motor-centric car-dependent fellow hospital visitors were just amazed to find that I could walk the route from my front door to hospital bedside in only 10 minutes more than it had taken them in a car.

And this leads us to the secondary (but no less important) tool: time. To be alive in the 21st century urban environment is to be a privileged denizen of the most amazing labour-saving device yet conceived and realised by civilisation; the city itself. The urban construct is entirely for our convenience - we should use and exploit it as such, rather than allow it to oppress and use and exploit us. For instance, it amazes us that anyone submits themselves to the inhuman ordeal of physically going to the supermarket these days, when a month’s grocery shopping can be achieved in ten minutes and a couple-of-dozen clicks online. Of course, we’d much rather have human-scale independent-trader local shops or market-stalls for our unhurried grocery shopping - such a set-up creates community and a sense of place, encourages interpersonal discourse, provides diversity and bestows opportunities for the spontaneous generation and discovery of delight. We’d like to have all that; but in this town, in this era, we don’t. Maybe one day independent traders will return to the urban environment of Aberdeen. We wish.

Anyhow, the point is, with time on our hands, when we go outside to take part in the life of the town, we can take our time. We try to organise our lives so that we have time to take the time to think. The time to feel. The time to think about how we feel.

And, when we walk the town with time on our hands, something else happens. We find a centre within ourselves. We find that we re-discover our senses. We see the urban environment; we hear both the roar of the traffic and the songs of the birds; we touch walls ancient and modern, and the branches of trees brush our heads; we smell cut grass and Sunday gravy, sometimes Torry fish and Kingswells sharn; and yes we even taste - we taste the car-farted sulphurous particulate, wafted along major city roads and pooling in hollows.

The topography tells tales.
It says: "Take a closer look!"

And then, when we notice that our senses are alive in the urban environment; that we have all-stimulating surroundings - if we only choose and allow ourselves to be stimulated by them - something else again happens. Something very human and delightful and surprising indeed. We’ve seen travelogue and anthropological histobunk programmes on the telly discussing the Austrailian Aborigines or Masai or Bedouin or First Nation Americans maybe, and marveling at their sense of direction, their navigational abilities. Wow - no maps; wow - no satnav. We begin, in our own small way, to feel a little bit of that sense - that ability. The ability to orientate within a topography, the ability to estimate an incline, the recognition of three-dimensional landscape features. Is it too much to call this a sixth sense? Certainly we have in the inner ear an organ of orientation which is an inclinometer and gravimeter, and we have proprioception - the ability to intuitively know the relation of the various parts of our bodies to each other (this is the sense that allows you to touch the tip of your nose in the dark). We believe that when we take these three additional para-senses (orientation, gravity-awareness, body-self-sense) together in toto as we move through the urban landscape it allows us access to a mindscape in which there is an enhanced possibility of just noticing stuff. Stuff that you wouldn’t notice if you were preoccupied with something else, stuff you wouldn’t notice if you were in a rush, stuff you wouldn’t see if you weren’t looking and stuff you mightn’t expect to notice unless your mind was open to the possibility. Delightful stuff. You might discover a town that appears in parallel to the reality that others think they know - the town that is at right angles to, over, under and through the impositions of map-planned thoroughfares which disrespect the human-scale desire lines.

Water is wealth. Or, at least, it used to be.
Probably will be again one day

The stuff you notice might be geographical, topological or architectural. The stuff you notice might be historical; our heritage is all around us in a dynamic and continuous process. Or the stuff you notice might be contemporary or anthropological - modes of behaviour. But, notice stuff you will. You might begin to decipher the events and intentions, the hopes and disappointments, the stories of capital and community which are encoded within the built environment and its relationships. By thinking about this stuff, these things, we define them - and we lay down guidelines for how we (and others) might think about them in the future. There is no such thing as objective truth - all artifacts and concepts are subject to the excise tax extracted from their universal meaning by their entry through our personal gates of subjective perception. The most we can ever really define with personal certainty and the most we can therefore reasonably ask is: how do we feel?

What we do at Other Aberdeen is record how we feel about things in the urban environment - what these things do to us (collectively) by what we (collectively) do to them. This psychogeographical process is reflexive, and it is the very reflexivity of this process which furnishes the opportunity for iterative improvement in the urban environment. We seek a new understanding and practice of urbanism for Aberdeen based upon a desire to improve its livability. That would make us feel much better about remaining in this fascinating town with all its little and big stories; all its 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, however uncertain.

We are all part of that process, part of the story of the town - that participatory process is 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. Other Aberdeen's mission is to demonstrate that this is wrong-headed.

This town is so much more than that.

Greenwash, offset, culling and cars.

Granite City Forest Project
New planting at Inverdee.

Aberdeen-based readers will no doubt be aware of the controversy surrounding the planned cull of roe deer on Tullos Hill. This cull is necessitated, so its proponents insist, by the Granite City Forest Project, which had aimed to plant a "Tree for Every Citizen" by 2011.

There's an excellent article in the current Aberdeen Voice citizen journalism online news and information source - which we recommend, along with their ongoing coverage of this issue.

According to the council web-page, the trees of the "Tree for Every Citizen" project are intended to 'reduce' [sic] CO2 emissions, by offsetting 15,000 tonnes of the greenhouse gas over the next 50 years. That's 300 tonnes / year.

We just consulted the Other Aberdeen Abacus...

A mid-range Ford Focus (the most average of cars) emits 150 g/km CO2. And the planned Aberdeen Bypass AWPR (pdf) route is 46km total one way.

When you crunch it all together and cancel zeros and everything, the Granite City Forest will offset only sixty (60) average-car return journeys using the AWPR per day. That represents only 3 cars on the road at any one time (approx).

So, we can see that the 'tree for every citizen project' is meaningless greenwash which is being executed - including the deer cull - rather than make the politically much more difficult effort to encourage just sixty people to change their commuting arrangements. Indeed, it is clear that the forthcoming Aberdeen Bypass AWPR will much more likely induce additional people to commute to Aberdeen from distance using cars.

Yay for Aberdeen Cars!

Marischal College - second look.

Aberdeen City Council are due to move into the famous Marischal College building later this year when the building will become their new corporate headquarters. The building has been completely re-developed with an entirely new interior but 'reconditioned' frontages retained as part of the multi-million pound conversion of the site. The scaffolding came off the frontage back in January and after we'd been to see it we wrote about our concerns. We thought that the re-conditioning of the frontage stonework didn't look great.

Since then, we've heard that the poor blotchy condition of the granite surfaces of the apparently botched reconditioning of the Aberdeen's famous Marischal College frontage was merely part of the 'bedding in' of the cleaned stone. Hmm... Since then, we've read that the anomalous marks evident on parts of the stone facings - which looked like burns, scuffs and stains - were scaffolding marks which had now been remediated. Hmmmmm...

Burnt, blotchy, stained and scuffed

Well, it was a bright day yesterday, and there had been a dry spell of weather, so we went along and stood and had a good long look. Unfortunately, no amount of emperor's-new-clothes wising-it-were-not-so can make us ignore the blotches, the burns, the scuffs, the uneven finish and the horrifying patchy yellowing which is evident. We are horrified.

 Apparently - and this is hearsay, the source of which we can't even remember, so take it as such - Historic Scotland advised Aberdeen City Council against cleaning of the frontage, fearing the outcome would be the unsatisfactory result which we now have. Nevertheless, the work was done, we hear, at the urging of the then but since-departed council chief executive. Unfortunately we must bear the heartbreaking results. The best we can say about it is: "it could be worse."

From a distance, or if you're passing through Broad Street in a vehicle, it looks OK-ish. Perhaps that's all that matters to whoever wrote the specification or managed the job on site. We prefer to take a slower, measured and more contemplative and up-close approach to our life within the urban realm, and it is this unhurried and ruminative attitude which has allowed us to notice problems at Marischal. We say that the standard of the work at Marischal is a scandal. We all should be outraged. But it seems we are at variance with the times, for when we try to discuss this issue with our fellow townsfolk, very few of them seem to have noticed. Or if they have, they deny that it's an issue.

Discoloured, patchy. 

Discoloured, uneven, stained, blotchy 

Blotchy, discoloured.