Gaude Terminalia

Yesterday (23rd February) was Terminalia - the Roman festival of Terminus - god of boundary stones and border features and, by extension, god of edges and things on the edge. We're all about edges, so we honour Terminus. Here he is, depicted as a bust on top of a familiar-looking stela:

CONCEDO NULLI
=
YIELD NO GROUND

On Terminalia, Romans would make a sacrifice to to the god at the nearest boundary markers (called Termini). The sacrifice would be in the form of a cake, or some ground meal, flowers and fruit. No blood or flesh sacrifice was made, it being forbidden to stain a boundary marker with blood, for the point of having a physical landmark plain for all to see was to demonstrate that no force or violence should be shown when setting mutual boundaries.

So, we crossed out of Pitmuxton, over Great Western Road to Hammerton Stores (a grocer shop named for the Hammermen Guild, who were once the proprietors of the lands north of Pitmuxton) and got some stuff for the ritual. Crossing back into Pitmuxton, we made our sacrifice to Terminus on the nearest Termini.

Newly budded crocusses, fruit and a rowie. Concedo Nulli! Gaude Terminalia!

Poxy-metal

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/08/hazlehead-externalities.html

 <<<<<<<<

[...]

When I returned to the Piper Alpha garden, all the gardeners had gone. There was peace and space and air and light in which I could now contemplate the memorial, its 168 engraved names, that dreadful night.

Then I began to remember.

Then I remembered something of that time...

>>>>>>>>>

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...Then I remembered something of that time.

All those years ago. Another life, in another time, I worked for an engineering consultancy in the North Sea oil and gas industry. In those days following the Piper Alpha disaster, at the fag-end of the 1980's, something new was happening with young people. Out of the London suburbs and the empty warehouses of economic decline had come the acid house rave culture. And in this town too, the drugdance fever hit: The former post-punk alternative and indie club culture mixed with the nascent hip-hop upwellings and we danced and we danced and we danced. Thursday to Sunday we danced. But this life needed funding, and funding was available from the shiny engineering consultancies of the dirty oil industry. All suited up, ties tied, shoes laced, collars buttoned-down, it was quite common - more than common; it was inevitable - that you would come across fellow ravers working in drawing offices or oilco technical libraries, print rooms, server rooms and the like. Self-employed contractors we were; junior engineers, tech clerks, tracers, data input operators, dye-line printers, hot-shot document couriers in rented saloons, coining it in through the day and necking the eckies when the sun went down. A knowing nod across a drawing office on Thursday afternoon was then later a roar of recognition and a huge hug on the dancefloor on Friday night. An expensive life for young people to lead, clubbing every night - so we funded it right out of the pockets of the oil companies, for that year the offshore disaster had blown an ill-windfall bonanza for those in the right place to harvest it.

The consultancy I worked for in the year following the Piper disaster was contracted by the company Occidental itself - operators of the ill-fated platform where 168 had died on that one awful night. We were contracted to audit and remediate the working practices and equipment on their Claymore gas production platform which was similar in layout and operation to Piper. Occidental - the company had once been know affectionately as 'Oxy' - unsurprisingly had a big PR problem in this town after the disaster. Rightly or wrongly they were seen as liable, as criminal. They were seen as having caused the deaths. They became known around town as 'Poxy' or 'Poxy-metal'. At best they were known as 'Accidental'. If you say "Occidental" in a slack-jawed Texan drawl, it sounds like "Accidental", so this bit of cheek you could pull off in front of the companymen's faces while retaining plausible deniability. Not that they would ever again dare challenge a 'local', for power had shifted in the wake of the tragedy. They had a desperate need to be seen to be doing the right thing, and so, when they let their 'right thing' contracts, money was no object, and they let them locally.

Occidental was unusual in the oil industry by being about the last of the truly independent oil companies. While it's stock was traded, it remained under the majority control of one man, a second-generation Ukrainian New York immigrant called Armand Hammer. Having spent years adventuring in the newly-formed Soviet Union during the 1920's supposedly looking for the lost Romanov treasure (but truly no doubt on the payroll of the US secret service - more on this later... ), Hammer became personal friends with Lenin. Hammer used to boast that one fine day Lenin took him to a mountaintop and, gesturing to the unspoiled vastness of all the Russias below, offered him exclusive rights for mineral exploitation in the Soviet Union. Whatever the truth of this, the similarity to the bible tale of Satan tempting Jesus is both striking and telling. In any event, Hammer did not go on to exploit the geological wealth of the Soviet Union; rather, he founded a high quality pencil manufacturing company which competed indigenous Russian manufacturers out of business. Hammer's pencil company received the Huge Central Annual Stationery Order of the Soviets, worth millions of rubles in gold. Gold which he then immediately exported to the US and parleyed into control of Occidental Petroleum.  

Genuinely a remarkable and complex character, Armand Hammer, it seems, was named after the 'Arm and Hammer' symbol which was the symbol of the Socialist Labor Party of America, of which his father was a leading agitator. Indeed Hammer senior led the splinter group fraction from that party which went on to become the nugatory foundation of the Communist Party USA. We should place Hammer's Soviet links, adventures and fortune in this context and, skating all too quickly over the surface of that frozen yet deep pond, reassess our earlier assertion that Hammer's US ties were those that bound him during his early Soviet buccaneering. The irony that Armand Hammer would one day control the company (Church and Dwight) which owned the 'Arm and Hammer' domestic chemical brand - best known in this country for bicarbonate of soda toothpaste - with its trademark iconography being identical to both that of US socialism and one of the symbols of world-wide freemasonry - would surely not have been lost on such a complicated man. 

During the first flush of our town's oil-boom, Hammer would have his private airliner piloted into Dyce, where he would be met on the tarmac by chained Provost and kilted piper before being whisked to a site north of Bridge of Don. Once de-limo'ed, he would then wander around the scrubland pointing with shooting-stick at this feature and that, planning the building of his 'Caledonia' HQ. Here the office block campus with its bronze-mirrored corridors and half-carpeted internal partition walls; there the comms tower with its direct line-of sight (for microwave telemetry and control) over and across Aberdeen bay to the Piper and Claymore oilfields some 120 miles away to the north-east. Hammer was in his element. He could not know what was to happen, how badly it would end for him and his company here. 

I remember that the oil price was actually rather low at the time, during that year after the Piper disaster, but I also remember that the consultancies around town were busy-busy nonetheless. The disaster had meant that the industry urgently needed to take a painful and honest good look at itself, lest similar happen again. The oil companies were all staring into the Piper abyss and thinking: "There but for the grace of God...", so they all really needed this work done. And because the work itself was a bit of a reflexive strange loop - being largely comprised of defining what the workscope was - contracts were let on a 'cost plus' basis. Which is to say that the contract sum - the final total - was left open-ended, undefined. Rather, the consultancies would, at the end of each month, summarise their costs - mostly labour, but also stationery (heh), mileage, subsistence and whateverelse you thought you could get away with - add on a percentage (usually 20%), add on VAT (at the time, 12.5%) and invoice the oilco, who would then pay up the following month. I never once remember an invoice being questioned. The temptation to pad these invoices with extra hours or miles or print runs or whatever, was, of course, overwhelming. And as the consultancy I worked for was contracted by Occidental, it became almost a duty for us to give in to this temptation; to chisel and chisel and chisel some more out of the 'Accidental' killers. At all levels, from board members to tea-ladies we plundered the hapless outsiders. With glee we took our pencil-necked revenge-by-proxy through our timesheets and expense claims, our invoices and our indents. 

The consultancy grew quickly as we took on more and more contractors, more and more bodies in the drawing offices and engineers' ateliers to subcontract out to the Oxy job cost-plus money machine. Day-rates ballooned and word got round. Draughtsmen and engineers who had until earlier that year been making an OK-enough and secure salary in the Donside papermills, Belfast shipyards, Sellafield nuke plants, came to work for us on day-rate. A night shift was instituted. We paid them handsomely and all from Armand Hammer's fortune. There was plenty work to go round on the Oxy job. We were spreading the wealth and a party atmosphere pervaded our consultancy. The company tripled in size over about six months. A move first to overflow portacabin accommodation on the Altens Industrial Estate site, then overflowed to hotel suites at the four-star Skean Dhu, then settling to sexy high tech offices in the city centre.

As the company grew, it also grew its own culture and group of young engineers and clerks within the consultancy set up a satirical review newsletter which very quickly grew beyond its initial aims. At times very close to the knuckle, this 'Private Eye for the North Sea' circulated well beyond our own company, becoming a clearinghouse for anonymous whistleblowing; exposing unsafe practices offshore and mercilessly lampooning individuals and oil companies involved in industrial accidents, oilspills, corruption, anti-union activity and the like and the inevitable subsequent coverups. Produced by individuals who nurtured their plausible deniability carefully, overnight the newsletter just appeared on your desk photocopied and stapled (sometimes comb-bound? With an acetate cover? Maybe.) This was before the advent of desktop email so this newsletter was a real physical item, with actual costs involved in its production. Who was to pay these costs?

At board level an inquiry was convened... It is interesting to note that the content of the newsletter was not questioned - demonstrating tacit approval for whistleblowing in the wake of serious loss of life; good. But pencil-necked businessmen being pencil-necked businessmen, the money question had to be asked: The chairman puffed his panatella and pushed the satirical-serious pages away from him across the dark teak. He placed the cigar in the brass ashtray to his left and sipped a little malt from the lead-crystal tumbler in front of him. An intake of breath through teeth. Leaning over and back, he whispered to the minute-secretary to put down her pencil and pad. Then, elbows on the high-lustre polished table, he steepled his fingers below his chin and raised his bushy eyebrows high into his balded brow: 

"Ahem, very good. But... er, who's paying for the printing?"

His right-hand man, the Managing Director - his old university friend with whom together they had set up partnership and formed the company way way back in the heady new days of Forties and Brent - provided the answer. For, of course, to ask the question - that day in 1989 in that post-Piper context - to ask the question was to answer it:

"Who's paying? Why - Oxy, of course!"

--------oo0oo--------

With respect. 
This post is dedicated to the dead, in the 
hope that such a workplace tragedy can never happen again.


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There's just not enough HISTORY on this blog anymore.

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.

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.