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.

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

Aberdeen: Adamant.

Now that we're obliged to use national multiple B&Q, we lament the loss of the Color Box hardware store on Holburn St, which we perviously relied on for studio supplies. We had a love-hate relationship with the family Robb who were the proprietors. The chances were, if you wanted something hardware-ish they would have it. You just had to allow 45 minutes for any visit to the shop, no matter how simple or complex your needs.

The site of 'The Colour Box'.

Nothing will last forever.

We were particularly frustrated and charmed in equal measure by the Robb's sexist and ageist policy of advertising vacancies for and employing 'Saturday Girls'. They wouldn't let them use the till, answer the phone or write in the ledger. Nor would they tell them the location of stock items (Mr Robb's biggest secret). The result would be that the girls operated more like personal shoppers than as shop assistants. Quite advanced retailing, really.

Anyway, we have fallen into the trap of nostalgia, which has made us digress... Let's get on with it...

The site of the former Colour Box hardware store is at present being renovated and converted into a Tesco Metro mini-supermarket. Fair enough, we suppose. We had feared that the site was looking a bit exposed; being bullied from the side and behind by Talisman Energy's après-post-modernist HQ building which had necessitated the demolition of a neighbouring row of Victorian mansion-block tenements in the 1990's. So we're quite happy to see the building being retained and it remaining as commercial premises. It's encouraging that human-scale local-level pedestrian shopping is making a return to the city. Naturally we approve.

The pavement outside the building is in quite a poor state, but does play host to an interesting artifact. (Let's hope it survives.)

Aberdeen Adamant.

A quick scan of the internet shows that these branded paving stones are not uncommon throughout the UK:

Hove

Dundee

Haringey

The paving slabs consist of a coarse aggregate composite concrete and granite chip material made by the Adamant Stone and Paving Co. of Aberdeen at its Adamant Stone Paving Works; part of the Dancing Cairns Quarry works close to the Bucksburn Howe. The quarry had been working since the late 18th century, when it was opened by Messrs Snell, Rennie and May, but as far as we can see, the production of paving stones from quarry tailings began only with the advent and installation of the patent hydraulic 'Fielding Press' from Fielding and Platt of Gloucester.

Hydraulic Fielding Press

From:
Fielding & Platt - An innovative Gloucester engineering company.
The First 100 Years, 1866 - 1966
by Stephen Mills.

In 1897, the Adamant Stone & Paving Company of Aberdeenshire installed a Fielding press to produce concrete slabs. This was not the first press installed, as the first unit had been installed in December 1890, followed by a second three months later. This continued to work for a total of 73 years. Originally steam-powered, it was later driven by 168 hp Fielding twin-horizontal engine that worked for 37 years. Remarkably, the total maintenance costs over this period amounted to only £42. 8s. 1d.!

The word adamant comes from the Greek adamas, adamant - an adjective meaning 'untamable, invincible'. By extension, the word was used as a poetic synonym for the hardest metal or stone.

Today, having closed in the mid-1960's, the Dancing Cairns Quarry is almost entirely filled in, and forms a large part of the municipal Auchmill Golf Course. A few large outcrops are exposed alongside the fairways and greens, and the scarps of several of the spoil tips are visible along the north side, down the slope towards Auchmill Road. An extensive network of paths (PDF) exists for explorers on foot or mountain bike.

Fore!

The name Dancing Cairns was commemorated in that of a pub with a formidable reputation in Middlefield. It was demolished about 10 years ago.

The manufacture and export of paving slabs made possible by the employment of a relatively simple, yet innovative piece of technology is an example of how value can be added to a commodity which is otherwise a low- or negative-value waste product. In this case, worthless mine tailings are made into valuable paving and kerb stones by the Fielding Press and its operators. This is the very definition of capitalism - value addition through the judicious use of technology, innovation and specialised labour.

Too often today, self-styled entrepreneurs who should know better confuse the words 'free market' with the word 'capitalism'. They mistake price for value and so cannot tell the difference between affluence and wealth.

Here at Other Aberdeen, we are perfectly well aware that these things are quite distinct.