Up the Stairs to an Understanding of Topography #01

Desire lines diverge

As we walk the concrete, adamant and flagstone pavements of Aberdeen, from time to time our feet stray with purpose onto grass and topsoil desire lines - on the beaten track unrecognised by those who have placed the paving, mis-planned our best route from place to place.

And just as often, we find our feet climbing or descending the many staircases of the public townscape. When gradients become too steep for feet to comfortably and safely walk an incline and the ground beneath them breaks up into the discontinuities of riser and tread, those stringer-held steps can help us to a topographical understanding of Aberdeen. An understanding of human interventions in the landscape - building up artificial features; bridges and causeways, embankments and revetments to span hollows and valleys, to terrace inclines or consolidate banks and tame hills. And we can reach an understanding of those banks, inclines, hollows, valleys and hills themselves - the treads and risers whisper to us a story of the three; no-four (not forgetting time, not forgetting heritage) dimensional shape of our urban environment.

And so a mental acquisition is gained and augmented by the agency of our calves and thighs and their unconscious and unblended apprehension of scarp and glen: the sixth psychogeographical sense is fed by unconscious muscle memory and conscious eye.

Up from Virginia Street to Castle Terrace, up Castle Hill. These steps, according to Aberdeen Civic Society's Alex Mitchell, may well correspond to the former Hangman's Brae, where a house was allocated to the town executioner.

Up from Ruthrie Terrace to Ruthrieston Road, vaulting over the Old Deeside Line disused railway (now re-used as Sustrans National Cycle Network route 195). Up from the broad flat valley of the Ruthrieston Burn (its flood-plain occupied by Asda, carparks, playing fields and a trunk road today). Ruthrieston Road connects the Foords o' Dee (fording the river-shallows where newly feudal modern medieval Ruadri extorted his licensed tax and gained his power) with the south-western marches (ancient borderlands) of Aberdeen along Countesswells Road. But who was the countess?

Devanha Lane climbs step-terraced between unremarkable modern tenements on the après post-industrial sites where brewery and foundry and cattle-exporting/royalty-importing railway terminus once helped built Ferryhill's wealth.

All the way up to splendid Devanha House on the summit of Ferryhill itself from the once tidal mudflat - long-since railway re-claimed - land at the southern end of South College Street, the ancient right-of way connects the southern turnpike road and Wellington Bridge to the heart of Ferryhill.






We've identified about 36 sites like these around town, we'll document them bit by bit over the coming weeks. Nominations are welcome.

Ruthrieston Pocket Park erases a dark period from our history.

Mere metres from the perma-queued traffic at the southern end of South Anderson Drive, we have to thank our favourite quango Aberdeen Greenspace for preserving and enhancing Ruthrieston's Pocket Park.

Down an embankment and screened from the road by judicious new planting, the pocket park is an island of tranquility for pedestrians and cyclists. A recent addition to the park is this piece of public art which is a homage to Aberdeenshire's Pictish symbol stones and to the people who made them.

Symbols (from bottom) show copies of the Pictish Comb & 

Mirror, Double disk and Z-rod and Flower (or Bronze strip)

This side depicts copies of the Pictish symbols for Goose and Salmon. 
A Bull, Boar and Wolf are being herded by a axe-wielding, bearded (yet bald or tonsured) 
tribesman who has been carved in homage to The Rhynie Man.

This new piece of public art has been placed as close as is possible to the probable location of Ruadri's Mound (Motte and Bailie castle)

Ruadri was a 12th Century war-lord and strong-man who declared his estate and made his citadel on this strategic sight. Raising himself up to the heights of his commanding Motte he could look down upon his peasants, land-slaves whom he would have bonded to the fertile earth in the broad flat fertile valley of the Ruthrieson Burn below. (Now the site of the Bridge of Dee shopping and parking experience and some playing fields stretching north to Auchinyell Bridge and west to Pitfodels; bounded by Kaimhill to the south west.

Also, Ruadri's stronghold would have commanded the Foords o' Dee crossing point (the only reliable ford on the Dee east of Park) where he could have demanded tribute from all crossing the river to and from the Causey Mounth - the only road (causeway, causey) over the mounth (hilly upland) which isolates the Dee Valley from lands to the south. (We'll be examining the Causey Mounth road in detail soon, so watch this space.)

Ruadri, along with Gillecoaim (Gillecoaim's town -> Gilcomston) signed a charter for King David in 1125 in the Book of Deer which sowed the seed of Aberdeen as a Burgh in the context of the very much wider 'Davidian Revolution'. This 'revolution' was  the 'enlightenment' of its day, though, em... medieval in content and context. Sweeping reforms under the hand of King David saw the 'Normanisation' of Scotland with the establishment of a feudal order over the existing tribal social organisation which had prevailed since pre-history.

Ruadri's titles - he was the so-called last Moramaer (tribal chieftan), and first Earl (feudal big-man), of Mar - underline this changing of the social order from the tribal socialisation of wealth and power to the feudal concentration of power and wealth in the hands of self-styled 'noble' families who were, in fact quite simply the most violent stop-at-nothing in their will-to-power land-thieves and court-prostitutes in any given locality.

Now that we've learned this, we can interpret the erection of this Pictish-homage monument as a thumbing of the nose at puffed-up Ruadri and his feudal, land-grabbing, hierarchical impositions. The message could not be clearer. Where once the King's agent and lickspittle lacky lorded it over the local tribesmen and extracted tax for transit and tribute for trade, now the aboriginal inhabitants of the land are depicted going about their tribal business, untroubled by Kings, lords, tax-collectors or local strong-men.

The stain of the brutish feudal era has been erased by Aberdeen Greenspace and the sculptor of this fine piece of public art in tribute to and in memory of our antecessors. Let's hope that those who'd like to try to dominate the people of Aberdeen today, and extract extra and novel taxes from our households and businesses to enable their own ego-massaging vanity-project land-grabs will similarly be snubbed by history, in time.