At the Watershed on the Last Day of Winter

The leap-year day's morning sun shone low and wan, but yes; surprisingly warm - record-breaking warm, in fact - on that windless morning last week above the town. I was between, on one side, the utterly deserted championship golf course at Hazlehead and, on the other, the scrubby edgeland which is made up of the not-quite urban, not-quite rural landscape to the immediate west. Horseriding centres, market-garden smallholdings, deep-infrastructure municipal reservoirs and pine-forested monoculture woods along with all the other usual edgeland ephemera form a patchwork of land use at the western edge of the town. A never-to-be completed network of paths for walkers, equestrians and mountain bikers waits to be discovered or ignored - relaid or allowed to overgrow into desuetude. 

Exploring edgelands like these, where the town frays into the country you might find a path you'd never noticed before. You might follow it through a forested area then between a field of scrubby grass with a magnificent white stallion on one side and on the other, the newly tilled soft rich black soil of this good earth, moist and shining in that warming sun. Your newly-discovered path might bring you to an area you recognise, ah yes, connecting round from a way you'd never come before. And you'd experience an odd mix of feelings. Satisfaction, yes - happy that you'd found a new route that joined up with paths you already knew. But a sadness too - the regret that comes with finally completing a collection, a closing in and rounding off of knowledge, the expiry of a mystery; is that all there is?

Exploring another path - you might find it not-quite-yet overgrown, but hard-enough going, gorse-barbs nipping your arms and legs. Was this an old farm-access road? Was it a drover's road? A tight avenue of mature trees and dry-stane dykes, the once-made now unmade road beneath your feet now grassy green with a desire-line muddy trail up the middle. Who's were the last feet to walk this way? When? And what for? Then the route just stops, cut dead by a recently-built embankment, upon which a commuter's dual-carrageway thunders; Evoque and Focus alike, Hi-Lux and Transit shouldered upon heroic-high revetment thirty feet above your extinguished desire line. You'd have no choice but to turn around and retrace your steps.

And on that anomalously-hot morning last week, that's where I was. Exploring the paths beyond Hazlehead and marvelling at the morning's dew - now sunshine-liberated steamy mist, atmospherically drifting between the pines and highlighting that low-slanting sunshine. Then, secreted somewhere in this liminal zone between the barely-used paths, deep in the small woods I found what I was looking for.

There I found nature's centred silence. A serene stretch of silver-surfaced shallow water amid the trees. These still waters spread wide; a labyrinthine mirror, serpentine between the pines. A seasonally-natural reservoir of the late autumn, winter and early spring months. Then to be exhausted; just-drying cracking mud or even dusty parched concrete-hard in the hottest of summers.

Pushing branches aside, there I stopped and stood by the edge of the still water. As my consciousness slowed and expanded, I began to perceive the sounds which are embedded in silence. A single bird sings to establish territory, or maybe to attract a mate. A sudden gentle breeze ruffles the treetop canopy, it sounds like a breath. Above - dewdrops on the pine-needles come together and surface tension overcomes the tendency to misty evaporation; gravity becomes the major motive force; a drop forms at the end of the needle gathering weight; and more and more, then poink! First one drip, then poit-poit! Two others drip from the branches into the water and make ripples that radiate, disturbing the mirror-perfect surface. Now I can hear, now I know, that this landscape is a waterscape is a soundscape, subtly it is dominated by the gently soft sound of the slowly running trickling gurgles of water flowing from the reservoir. The drips that plopped from the trees above, I knew would find their way to the sea in time; how would they get there?

I perceived that from this reservoir the winterbournes trickle out slickly, slowly propagating and shallowly leaching, following inevitable gravity - reaching down through the woods to the three watercourses which originate nearby. Water branches, like the bifurcations of the trees' branches above, radiating out through the sphagnum carpeted, cone-strewn winter-wet forest floor. This landscape is alive with sluggish silvery gurgles; some streams as wide as I am tall, some as thin as my wrist. A temporary and ever-changing dynamic wetland, the channels altering week to week - day to day. I stood perfect still, slowed my breaths and harkened, listening to the trickles of this three-way watershed. And I sent my thoughts out through the landscape, accompanying the waters on their journey to the sea. Down through finding folds in the landscape; rushing tumbling through gushing gorges and dens; sluggish broad floodplains; dead straight constrained in dug channels; sometimes in the open behind the terraced homes of west end; then covered in concrete culverts and brick-vaulted crypts, audible beneath manhole-covers in the town centre. 

Out from this secret reservoir, those flows which run to the south find their snaking way between the two municipal golf courses, and eventually become the water of Holburn then the Ferryhill Burn which empties into the big famous River Dee near Union Square's shopping complex car-park. And water which spills west from the watershed trickles to Countesswells and adds to the source of the Cults Burn, rushing spectacular and steep down the Den of Cults hanging valley, again into the Dee. But water which runs from here to the north and east forms seasonal streams which empty into the finger-pattern drainage ditches of the woods and become an ornamental stream which is wrangled to run picturesque through the plastic-wrapped-bouquet-strewn garden of remembrance at the City Crematorium, then to swoop down and beneath the Skene Road commuter route, emptying into the Den of Maidencraig and the Denburn, the nearly-river which gave our town its name.

My feet had gone on paths new and old, discovered and forgotten, and came to be standing at the three-way watershed on the last day of the season. The drop of water with its choice to make - to be made for it - from three options, three ways to go. A small change in initial conditions will lead to radically different results. I went to walk away through the trees back to the path, and as I looked at the sunlight shining through the mist between the trees, I realised that there was, of course, a fourth option, for some of the morning's dew had, as I had noticed earlier, formed that thin mist in the woods, now rising high to the sky, absorbed into the air, part of the atmosphere and away. Far, far away.

On the way to March Stone 55 ABD. The Five Roads and Ashgrove

Regular readers will know that we’ve been tracing the line of Aberdeen’s ancient boundaries. Skip the first few paragraphs if you’re already familiar with the background...

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Confirmed in his Great Charter of 1319 (an ancient document which founded the real-estate and political power regime which prevails over the polity in Aberdeen to this day), in 1315 Robert the Bruce endowed the Burgesses of Aberdeen with a huge estate of land - known as “The Freedom Lands”. The medieval burgesses were a powerful group of men: police and army and lawmaking body and local authority all rolled into one, With a royal mandate behind them, their monopoly on force enabled them to enforce a monopoly on trade. They were the burgh. How our concept of freedom has changed.

The extent of this "gift" of land from Bruce (which required an annual rent to be paid to the crown - heh, some gift!) can be seen around Aberdeen today. Often mistaken for milestones, the engraved numbered stelae which lie hidden in plain view around Aberdeen mark the boundary between the gifted estate and the hinterland beyond - Kincardine to the south, Mar to the west and Buchan to the North. Bruce had occupied Aberdeen in 1307 and 1308 while he laid waste to a large part of that hinterland.




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http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/01/march-stones-37-to-39-abd.html 

The Harrying of Buchan was a devastating event for this area, characterised by its (surprisingly modern) ruthlessly systematic nature. This was a policy, managed and executed with businesslike efficiency; entire towns like Ellon were completely eradicated, livestock and crops were burned in the fields, infrastructure was dismantled and dissipated. Some historians say that so complete was the destruction that the innate and potential wealth of Buchan was damaged for centuries after. A terrible and exceptional act of vengeful spite, unparalleled in these islands before or since. 

Small wonder the Aberdonians cowered and offered Bruce whatever he wanted. The fearful and pusillanimous capitulation of Aberdeen's burghers (who had been loyal to the English crown until the pogrom in the hinterland) no doubt, in time, pricked Bruces' conscience and lead to his eventual largesse. According to the Aberdeen City and Shire website, the ordinary people of Aberdeen also "furnished" Bruce with "large supplies" of cash, food and other goods. Under what levels of terror and sword-edge compulsion was this "furnishing" obliged? In this context, the "gift" of the Freedom Lands more than a decade later might be seen as a form of belated conscience-stricken compensation from Bruce to Aberdeen's craven burghers.

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Quarry-spoil heritage
on Rosehill Drive

These numbered stelae boundary markers which show the edges of the Freedom Lands are known as March Stones ("march" being the Old Scots word for "boundary”. Between March Stones 52 and 54 we traversed a psychogeography replete with history and prehistory; redolent of stories known and unknown; stories in the process of being forgotten: strongmen and poets, industrialists and the ordinary-folk workers who made them their fortunes. This time, on our way to March Stone 55 we descend from the prominence of Rosehill, down first Rosehill Drive, then down the curiously-named Back Hilton Road following the one-time line of the Powis Burn with leafy Ashgrove to our right (south) and formidable (some say) Cattofield to our left (north) on its route from the quarry-ridge granite heights to the sand-flat estuarine lands of the seaside links.

The boundary line, from where we last left it at Rosehill’s March Stone 54 all the way to its end with the “Omega Stone” close to the mouth of the River Don, largely marks the route of this ancient watercourse, its tributaries and distributaries. Sloping down along Rosehill Drive and Back Hilton Road, it was long-since tamed into rod-straight ditches. And then, more recently - just outwith living memory - it was subsumed beneath flagstone, then concrete and tarmac. Once an important, prominent and known boundary between the jurisdiction of one burgh and the next, between one thing and something else, where the rights and obligations of one gave way to the rights and obligations of another; in this area, the boundary has long also been a thoroughfare. It’s almost as if the power of those rights and obligations was apt to be discharged latitudinally via the path-of-least resistance desire-lines represented by the boundaries and marked by boundary features; a surface effect - an edge phenomenon; like lightning striking water. This psychogeographical power of edges is remarkable in its longevity - for instance, the medieval western boundary of the Burgh of Aberdeen - the western edge of Bruce’s Freedom Lands; the estates marked by all these “March Stones” - remains the boundary of the modern entity City of Aberdeen to this day. And (if and when it is ever built) the proposed Aberdeen bypass motorway will, between its crossing of the River Dee to its circumnavigation of Kingswells, follow the arbitrary line of this ancient edge.

Telecoms network infrastructure at
the Five Roads

Walking the two long straight segments of the line down from March Stone 54 to March Stone 55 takes us on a dog-leg angled procession first down Rosehill Drive with its mid-20th century bungalow-boulevard suburb townscape; pleasant and mannered sitting in the sun on its south-facing slope, this suburb was suburban not for long before being encircled and obsolesced by the major social housing scheme developments beyond. Then we come upon the “Five Roads” roundabout knuckle, a confusing interchange. Confusing - firstly because the junction accommodates motor traffic flow from six roads, not five. Secondly, because approaching the nexus on foot presents the pedestrian with a Gordian Knot of you-can’t-get-there-from-here choices, as he or she may well be able to see the desired destination but is thwarted by seemingly arbitrary labyrinthine barriers and is inconveniently and frustratingly directed here and there against the desire-line flow: Make the right choice in the first instance or be diverted farther ever farther from where you want to walk to.  A handful of shops somehow survives at one of the junction’s apexes, despite the surrounding car-dominated environment which is unpleasant; polluted, noisy, smelly and fraught.

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He’s trying to organise the bags, trying to get the shopping sorted out and into the rucksack that he brought. But the dog’s playing up, barking and growling at strangers, pacing about and getting her chain tangled in her legs and just getting in the effing way. And the kid’s wailing, wanting that bloody toy.  He tries and he tries to organise the bags of shopping into some sort of order and he just doesn’t have enough hands. He can’t control the dog cos the traffic’s too loud to make himself heard - to shout down her barks - and he can’t comfort the kid ’cos he’s shouting at the dog. And every time he shouts at the dog the kid gets more upset and the more upset the kid is the more agitated the dog and the more agitated the dog the louder he has to shout and the pavement’s just so narrow here there’s just not the room and the noise ohmygod the noise and he just doesn’t have enough hands.


God! The bloody noise! He sooooo doesn’t like it when the staffie starts playing up - things get a bit, em, unpredictable. Gotta get the dog out of here. Gotta get across the road, and then follow the barriers and another pelican crossing across another road. ’At’s it, now he’s getting somewhere: he’s got the kid on his hip - the toddler’s sticky face - tears and toffee - smirching his tracktop. Nevermind - it’ll go in the machine at the missus’s and, while he waits in his vest, it’ll dripdry quickly - it’ll have to. He’s got the plastic carriers and the dog’s chain and the kid’s toy (a nasty cheap plastic trike on a long handle for pushalong - oh my god how the kid had insisted - grat and peenged and grat until he got his way) he’s got the long bright plastic handle of the toy in his other, his right hand, dragging it behind him like the carcass of some rigoured animal. So, no hand free to push the button for the pedestrian crossing. Fuck. A gap in the traffic, sightlines are poor - risk it? No don’t be daft. Someone else, a middle-aged couple, at the crossing now, one of them pressed the Push Button for Crossing Signal Opposite thank god, he gives a smile and a nod of thanks. "WAIT", says the lit up box. WAIT... WAIT... Beepabeepbeepabeepbeepabeep. Swiftly across in front of the couple. And follow the pavement behind the barriers down a bit more. Good, quieter here - the pavement a bit wider here, good. A yank a damned good hard yank on the staffie’s chain and that - to know that there’s a big boss at the other end of the lead - calms her down a bit. Calms her down a good bit. She immediately flollops herself down, almost comically, ungainly, like a very powerful and muscular sack of tatties, on the pavement and starts licking at her bits. Nice. But it’s OK, though - she’s not going to cause any trouble while she’s at that. Now for the shopping. Squatting on haunches, eye-level talking quietly and soothingly to the kid, one carrier bag goes inside another, both into the rucksack. OK, the words to the kid have worked, and the kid rubs his eyes and sniffs up the snotters, swallowing and, literally looking up - chin out resolute, the upset is forgotten. Now to get the kid and his toy together...

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Diametrically opposite the terminus of Rosehill Drive at the Five Roads roundabout is Ashgrove Court, which we are told was Aberdeen’s first residential tower block or “’scraper”, as local usage would have it. The elision of “skyscraper” to “’scraper” is a telling piece of nominative determinism - nominative pre-determinism, in fact. The very word “’scraper”: something which “scrapes”, with its connotations of harsh friction, erosion, damage, injury, striation, denudation. Or is it the other meaning - the way that, if you were to live there, you might “just scrape by”; manage to live only with difficulty; scrimping and scraping; scraping a meagre living? In either case, our local word for residential tower blocks has determined that none should regard them as desirable places to live. Give a dog a bad name...

Un-underpass. Nonederpass. 

Ashgrove Court is, despite the nominative determinism, looking good on its age (which we guess to be perhaps approaching fifty years) standing proud and commanding a view south east to the town centre over first the former farm which was Ashgrove, where mental-asylum inmates toiled their captive days away, herded to the farm for their labours through a now bricked-up underpass beneath Ashgrove Road. Beyond Ashgrove Road, the view from the ’scraper encompasses the grounds of that lunatic asylum to which that underpass connected at Cornhill and then the vista widens to Rosemount and the town centre beyond and below. Those former fields of Ashgrove farm - though today forming a housing estate with mid-century council-house tenements, vacant shop units and the (almost obligatory) recently-closed and boarded-up disused primary school - retain the old farm’s boundary wall which somehow seems to lend the estate an identity of its own, curiously separate from the rest of Aberdeen.

Ashgrove Farmhouse
Occupied until quite recently.

That boundary wall forms the south side of Back Hilton Road which we walk down from the Five Roads roundabout. If you know where it is and what you’re looking for, and if you have sharp eyes, its possible to gaze down the entire length of Back Hilton Road from the roundabout and discern March Stone 55 ABD at the end. It’s just a tiny pixel-speck at that half kilometer distance, but it is visible.

March Stone 55 ABD

And as we approach the stone we hear a scrapey rumbling behind us, across the road - and a gurgling laugh, then a dog-bark - and another. More laughter as the rumbling gets louder. Turning round, we see again the track-suited buzz-cut young man accompanied by his status dog and toddler son. He’s got the toddler - feet splayed out sitting down - on a sort-of plastic tricycle which has a four-foot pole extending from the rear axle ending in a handle which would come to about the young man’s waist height. With his left hand holding the dog’s chain, his right hand is pushing down on the trike-pole so that the trike is wheelie-ing along - its front wheel up 20 centimeters from the ground. And he jogs gently, loping controlled and steady down the concrete pavement slope of Back Hilton Road pushing the plastic trike with his son on board in front of him. The toddler on the trike - being pushed far far faster (but safe, level and steady) than ever such a toy plastic tricycle was supposed to go - has his head thrown back laughing uncontrolled loudly in sheer delight and ecstasy. The pure glee on the pre-school boy's face is as bright as sunshine - looking up and back over his shoulder he can look into his dad's eyes, leaning over and laughing right back with him. WahayYayhay-aha-ahahahaha! And the Staffordshire Bull Terrier on her chain, in the young dad's left hand, appears anthropomorphically on her furry face to have a similar laughing grin, the same as her master's and his son's. Muscularly she trots, matching the man’s loping strides with her own elbow-out sideways-ish lollop, her front legs seeming to manage to travel far far faster than those at the back. Barkbarkbark. For joy. Man, boy, dog - an ancient family unit subset on an outing, getting in a bit of fun while getting in the shopping. Getting a thrill along with the necessary provisions - laying down a bonding substrate of happy time memory. A memory template which is held in common by men and boys and dogs since first men and boys and dogs went out together and came back with food; game for the table, serious play for the hunting unit. And now this family has a memory-bond which ties them not only together in shared experience today but which will also last them all their days together or apart - solid, pure, innocent - a tie which binds. Archaic and primordial, contemporary and eternal. Universal and personal. A timeless moment, that morning on Back Hilton Road, close to March Stone 55 ABD.

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Craiginches Littoral

If you've used the new-ish dual path for walkers and cyclists along Aberdeen's Riverside Drive, on the north side of the Dee, between the Duthie Park and the Wellington Suspension bridge, you'll have looked across the river towards Craiginches prison, and seen a network of paths crisscrossing the steep bank (almost a cliff) below the prison and down to the riverside. I've always been aware of these paths, but, somehow, never found the time to go and explore them, to feel what it's like to be there.

So, a few weeks ago, we walked to the Wellington Bridge. This Scheduled Ancient Monument was recently restored and re-opened for pedestrians and cyclists as part of Sustrans routes 195 and 01. Crossing the bridge, we gave ourselves a new perspective by having a good mooch around the littoral on the south bank of the Dee.

The Dee is tidal up to and just past the medieval Bridge of Dee, a couple of kilometres west of here, but the river shore isn't like a sea shore. Although rinsed by the tide twice daily, it's not beaten by waves or swell, and so it has a kind of dusty crust, a dirty patina. And it attracts long-lived detritus. On the day we visited, it was very bluesky bright, with the golden sun low in the west towards the end of the day, and so an atmospheric quality of clarity was lent to our outing as winter turned to spring and as we scrambled along the shore below Wellington Road, under the Ferryhill railway viaduct and crossing the toxic Tullos burn to emerge into the nascent "Granite City Forest" planting at Inverdee (where we saw the husks of the fruit of the sherry-tree).

And finally then on to and under the George VI Bridge, with its impressive civically-emblazoned cutwaters. And there finally (mirroring the supernatural Christian blessing which the stones impart upon travelers crossing the Wellington Bridge) when we climbed onto the George VI bridge we received the more rational secular blessing of orientation, courtesy of an OS Bench Mark on the south west parapet. And we realised that both marks on the stone are essentially the same: only separated in time and the changing perceptions which that passage of time heralds both seek to make sense of the land and its forms, both seek to best orientate people in the world, both seek to give people a sense of security and both try to permanentise their world-view in stone.

And both systems try to tell people where they are and where they're going. The newer with the rational certainty of theodolite and trigonometry, the elder with blind trust in arbitrary dogma and supernatural faith in a supreme being. A newer-yet orientation system, the GPS, is the spun-off civilian hinterland of a militarised economy, and is controlled by unseen and far-off hands and minds. To what priority these far off hands and minds answer we cannot know, because it's secret.

We don't much like the idea of these unseen forces telling us where we're going, so we'll stick with the OS for now. That's our dogma.

A Christian benediction to travelers crossing the Wellington Bridge.
Click for a bigger version, see the word 'HOLY'
(with thanks to reader Bill Watt for this one)

A secular blessing from the
Ordnance Survey.
Now we really know where we are!

March Stones 49 to 51 ABD. Persley and Woodside

"49 ABD"
(the new one)
South-east parapet of Persley Bridge

Regular visitors to Other Aberdeen will well know that over the weeks and months, we've been tracing the line of Aberdeen's medieval boundary. The boundary of the land gifted to Aberdeen (the "Freedom Lands") 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 - some others 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 reach 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 over and above that, we find things out about ourselves and our relationship to all that external stuff which forms the environment which we live in.

The most recent stone (stone no. 48 ABD) we wrote about was in residential Northfield, amongst the pleasant residential cul-de-sacs and circles so characteristic of that type of mid-20th century suburban social housing. We like Northfield with its human-scale planning; with its generous gardens, open spaces, grassy public areas, civic amenities, local shops - it definitely doesn't deserve the formidable reputation that social prejudice has labeled it with over the years. From the self-employed decorator who pointed us to stone 46 ABD, to the headsquared old lady getting off a bus just having a wee cheery wordie with passers-by, and to the fat emo teenager walking his longhaired daschunt puppy - we've had genial interactions with absolutely everyone we met on the day we traced the marches through this part of our town. In its built environment, in its people and in its outlook, Northfield is a generous place. That's so much more than can be said for supposedly 'nice' parts of Aberdeen, where we've found that people often tend to be hostile and suspicious; where property and 'things' are regarded as more important than people and their activities. Where what someone's got is so much more important than what they will give.

The next stone is stone no. 49 ABD, which we walked to by following the ancient "Freedom Lands" boundary which runs the length of the Scatter Burn (Scatterburn) between Old Town Place and the burn's outfall underneath Persley Bridge. To follow the route of the burn is a simple matter - its valley (a tributary of the River Don) is quite easy to see looking north between Heatheryfold and Middlefield. Indeed, the etymology of the burn's name "Scatter Burn" means "burn with a deep eroded channel". The valley is an open grassy area with playgrounds, skateboard half-pipes and the like. While it's not possible to see the burn itself - it was covered over and tamed in its own pipe at some point in the 20th century - the route of the Scatterburn is more-or-less traced by the residential street Manor Walk which leads us down from Northfield through Middlefield into the valley of the Don at Haudagain. Here, for the first time in the entirety of our tracing of the route of the march stones, we find the environment becomes unpleasant. Motor vehicle pollution sticks in the throat, conversation becomes impossible over the roar of traffic and the entire layout of the built environment has been artificially conceived for the convenience of machines over that of people. We felt cheated, abandoned, alienated and at a bit of a loss; for in this place, pedestrians are not welcome and are barely catered for.

Not wanted.
Car journeys deemed
more important than housing.

Not only that, but things are about to get an awful lot worse. Some commuters claim that the roundabout at Haudagain is the very worst thing that there is in the whole of Britain, but we think that motorists who complain about traffic congestion in Aberdeen suffer from a hopelessly parochial viewpoint: Aberdeen traffic's really not that bad. Unfortunately, so strident have these selfish commuters' voices become that, like the child who pesters and pesters mummy for sweeties, their calls have been heeded - probably more to shut them up than anything else - and they're going to get what they want (no matter that it's not good for them, and that they'll just want even more soon). Consequently, the social housing tenements of Manor Drive, Logie Avenue and Logie Place are to be demolished to make way for a relief road "improvement" which is "vital". We find it astonishing that planners should regard it as "vital" that families are moved from their homes, that those homes be demolished and that a community be split up and scattered merely because of the exigencies of the unsustainable transport choices of a few commuters. That this maniacal wrecking-ball-based option should be seen as an "improvement"; as preferable to attempting to encourage a small minority of commuters to change their habits just a little bit is sadly, we think, indicative of some of the wrong-turns which planning policy in our town seems keen and likely to blindly take. That these poor choices are dressed up as "improvements" which "contribute" to and "complement" the Middlefield area (pdf) is nothing but doublethink duckspeak.

Anyway, once we were away from Haudagain and it's appalling psychogeographical outlook, following the slope down to Persely den to march stone 49 ABD, we first encountered the charming Persely Walled Garden, where sits this remarkable monolith memorial obelisk above the outfall of the Scatterburn.

Inscription reads:

WORKERS' MEMORIAL
Commissioned by
Aberdeen Trades Council
This monument was made possible
thanks to financial assistance from
the Trade Union and Labour Movement
It is dedicated to those who lost
their lives in industry
MCMXCVIII

Aberdeen City Council's March Stones Trail leaflet (pdf) tells us that stone 49 is, like stone 44 ABD, a doubled stone - a newer, more accessible doppelganger copy having been created and placed in an easy-to-get at spot. This is fair enough, but we love a challenge and couldn't resist crossing the toxic outfall estuary of the Scatter Burn to see the older stone. If you're going to do this, a level of reasonable fitness is required, as is decent robust footwear that you won't mind getting filthy.

Scatterburn outfall.
Toxic.

49 ABD
(the older one)
That's Duncan Bannatyne's
'fitness' centre across the water.

Weir

The boundary now follows the Don for about 2 km towards the former independent parish of Woodside. A path alongside a mill-lade (which is a high-level water-feed channel) takes us through an area rich in the industrial archaeology of water-power, water-capital: mills, weirs, lades and sluices; the evidence of ancient and more recent, now obsolescent, equipment vital to the exploitation of this water-plus-gravity equals wealth-generating resource is all around.

We met an old man walking on the artificial river-bank wall which separates a mill-lade on the south side of the river from the roaring-fast river itself. He was in his eighties and had lived in Woodside all his life. Warming to our interest, he told us tales of the many mills and their legion workers; Woodside in its wealthy 20th century pomp; a tram from The Fountain into town and a spur to the Haudagain. How the tram united Woodside to Aberdeen, but how, when it came, the dual carriageway divided Woodside even from itself.

He talked of the Crombie Mills, whence coats to the world originated - Churchill, Gorbachev, and Cary Grant, all Crombie-clad lads.  He talked of the Rag Mill ("the ragger") which pulped scrap textiles for use in papermaking, he talked of the retiral of the mills, their desuitude, and the fact that we could walk these routes today was because of their retirement: where once industry thrived, today moss encroaches, ivy overruns and the dilettante psychogeographer mooches. His whole life and work in Woodside amongst the mills, now walking "his three miles every day" beside their gently declining artifacts - this man embodied and stood as a living metaphor for the progress and decline of the industrial activity in this area. Now good for a story, now interesting but retired, he walks away from us along the path of the mill-lade. How long will he manage to keep up his three-miles-a-day. How long before his stories are away?

Rag Mill
"The Ragger"

We'll document the post-industrial Don in much more detail over the coming months: There's a great deal to explore and think about in this area, and the resonant impulses of what we saw will still animate us for a long time to come: water being wealth; a diverse and mixed sustainable economy - capital goods, consumer goods, only recently disappeared; autonomy versus agency; the remnant artifacts of a way of life and a way of work only recently past, but now as psychogeographically distant as the medieval marker stones which we were tracing when we came across these traces, picturesquely framed by benign neglect.

Past the remnants of the Rag Mill, we mount the stairs at Jacobs Ladder to find stone 50 ABD which sits against a wall at Don Terrace. Then it's under the railway, past a canal-remnant bridge span and back across the Great Northern Road dual carriageway.

Jacob's ladder

50 ABD

Under the railway

Stone 51 ABD is situated on Clifton Road, near the top of Deer Road. Deer Road was named for a moss and turf dyke which kept wild deer out of the nursery gardens of Woodside. For centuries dating back to the time of medieval Bishops' parish charters this wildlife management feature was known as the boundary between Woodside and Aberdeen's Freedom Lands. Today, we seem to have lost the knowledge or will to manage our natural resources - the wild inhabitants with whom we share our town - in this sustainable way, choosing rather the immediate violence of an eradication cull over the long-standing science of sustainable management.

51 ABD
At the top of Deer Road
At the top of the Deer Dyke

And so between March Stones 48 and 51 we've traversed the psychogeography of loss. Consider the dreams of the planners who created the pleasant social housing of Northfield - those dreams today so far lost in a debt-driven speculative fever-dream of chimerical property aspiration that now social housing of this type is thought of as being lower than the lowest. Indeed our current UK government would have it that council-owned housing should be regarded as emergency short-term accommodation only. This is a grave and dangerous loss to our sense of society. Consider the deliberate destruction of some of that very housing to make way for a big roundabout or gyratory road system or something - the twice daily commute of some cubicle-jockey office workers being deemed more important than many peoples' homes. Consider the message this policy sends to the people who lead their lives blamlessly, yet live in those very homes scheduled for what we can only regard as arbitrary destruction.

Consider now the worker's monument at Persley, consider those who died creating the wealth which we now enjoy in the comfort we take for granted. Consider those metaphorically crushed by the wheels of industry, and consider the real and literal remnants of those very wheels themselves - evident on the banks of the Don. Sentinels to a diverse and sustainable economy now past even decline, now irrevocably gone. This is a loss to our economic sustainability. 

And finally, consider the sick spiteful slaughter of roe deer, today, on Tullos Hill in Nigg to the south of our town in the cause of some dubious greenwash PR policy. When the last of them lies finally bloody, every one dead on the heather and gorse, not only will it be those deer which will be lost, but we will also have conclusively and ably demonstrated our loss of society, our collective loss of civilisation. And our loss of direction.

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.