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Thursday, 10 February 2011

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.

2 comments:

  1. Lee Kindness11 February 2011 at 12:28

    See on the OS map sheet near the NE - between the back gardens of what's now Urquhart Rd and Roslin Ter... Any idea what those are, and the field of them just north of there?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Other Aberdeen11 February 2011 at 17:52

    Good stuff Lee. The 'stones' marked on the OS map are, as far as we're aware, usually estate boundary stones. Perhaps the large collection of stones in that field denotes smallholdings. Or maybe graves. We really don't know. We'll do what we can to find out. If anyone reading this has any suggestions or information, please pass it on.

    ReplyDelete

Other Aberdeen is a broad church - discourse is welcome. You're welcome to disagree with us, but do be polite. We hate it when people aren't polite.

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