5

THERE IS NO WASTELAND

Barbed Wire’s Allure

greenish belt

The bungalow is non-rolling stock. It is intermittently faced in ginger-nut pebble-dash. The paint on the window frames is flaked. Here a window has been replaced by a sheer sheet of glass set in plastic. The porch is skewed. The roof has been randomly layered with tarpaulin. A collapsing lean-to has a lean-to of its own. Here’s a former guard’s van surrounded by nettles. A horse wearing a damp blanket dares not drink from a rusty trough. Immobile vehicles of several vintages and states of decay are sinking into oozing mud. A matt caravan is listing. Bales of rusting barbed wire have shreds of polythene flying from them like grimy bunting. The distant roar of a motorway is incessant.

Welcome to The Green Belt which is evidently not literally green.

And yes, let us preserve it. These scapes with their breeze-block piggeries are precious. Corrugated iron – which is to be found in abundance – was, a century ago, the material of the future. Sheds and byres built of it are as deserving of protection as limestone dovecotes or cob walls. Britain’s ‘edgelands’ – the ungainly epithet is planning-speak – are disappearing fast. They are unloved save by topophiliac perverts and amateurs of the ad-hoc, among whom I obviously include myself.

I acquired a taste for these marginal places at a tender age. Close by where I grew up, the western edge of the New Forest was all unmade roads fringed by self-built shacks. They spoke of indigence, certainly, but also of resourcefulness and of a thrilling pioneer spirit born of desperate necessity. They were tree houses on the ground. They have almost all disappeared. The land they occupied was more valuable than the bodged structures themselves. So as their occupants died they were demolished and replaced by dinky dream houses of sturdier but much less ingenious construction.

Such colonies were once commonplace: nearby there was also Palestine and Four Marks. There greatest incidence was in Essex, north Kent and at numerous seaside sites. When some years ago I decided to make a film about them I toured the country from Spurn Head to Tatsfield (the ‘London Alps’ – really) to Birling Gap. The only remaining extant sizable concentration of these structures, the one I eventually shot, was in the Severn valley between Bewdley and Bridgnorth. The shacks there remained – and still remain – because local custom happily decreed that they should be leasehold: the land they stand on is still owned by farmers.

What militates against the preservation of shacks and edgelands is a perceived lack of aesthetic worth. They are expendable despite the fact that they are valuable repositories of working-class history. But Britain’s thraldom is to the ancient, to the sacred, to the picturesque and to Good Queen Bessery. These places are not very old (1910 to 1930, mostly); they are low in the hierarchy of building types; they are seldom pretty; they rarely possess important associations – no blue plaques on shacks. Today we are all Binneys, thankfully. The chances of a work by, say, Nash or Teulon or Mackmurdo being destroyed are slight. But such buildings are atypical. We should apply the same protectionist sensibility to the banal and the humble, to the formerly quotidian stuff which doesn’t quite qualify as architecture.

This may sound like a plea for some sort of tectonic relativism. Well, so be it. Yet there is another reason to cherish the overlooked. And that is the prospect of what might replace it, what indeed will replace it: the executive home, the science park, the retail mall, the big shed. So long as these infrastuctureless, exurban aberrations are allowed to exert their centrifugal pull our cities and towns will decline. Their density will be lessened. We must learn to value the scrappy and the atmospherically unlovely if not for its own sake then for that of urban survival and civility.

(2010)

last resort

The word ‘lazaretto’ derives from Lazarus. It signified a place intended to receive and hold, for up to forty (quarante) days, lazars, the potentially or actually contagious, the crews (and cargoes) of yellow-flagged ships from the plague ports of Genoa, Marseille, Messina, etc. The lazaretto was the successor to the hulks, the precursor of the sanitorium: fresh air and isolation – those were the things. Two hundred years ago a different gamut of diseases was epidemic: cholera, yellow fever, typhus. The terror that they and their vectors fostered is emphasised by the desolation of the lazaretto’s site at Chetney Hill, which is no hill, but an island on the Medway marshes: an artificial and circular island separated from land by a convict-dug canal.

The place was not a success, no matter how that is measured. It was abandoned in 1820, only five years after building stopped. Its full capacity was never used. The materials, which had cost an astonishing £170,000, were sold. Still, the Office of Works and its comptroller, James Wyatt, had chosen a site which was nothing if not apt. Gloom does not begin to describe it. The only visible habitations were hulks, and new vessels arriving with fresh viruses for Blighty. Otherwise there was nothing save marshes, mud, water, purslane, sky, tufty saltings, glasswort, wrack, sheep. But the chromatic and textural variations of sky, mud and water are infinite so it can’t have been too bad, can it?

It can. It still is today. It is thrillingly cheerless. This is a landscape of despair. It is also a landscape of giga-sculptures, of abstracted shapes. Who needs Christo when we have the CEGB? Who needs Caro when we have cranes the size and articulation of those at Grain? Who needs Judd when we have such chimneys and 100-foot-high bridge piers and henges of hay? The repertoire – it also includes pylons, silos, hoppers, bulky mills, ships that tower over the earth, horizontal bands of smoke – is not large, but its repetitions are endless. On Sheppey and Grain, you are dogged by utilitarian grandeur, by structural rawness, by industry in its nudity, by mostly unwitting sublimity, by the forms of might. The conjunction of environmentally insouciant buildings and machines with flatlands and wetlands is immensely potent: the former provide gross accents which nature cannot deliver. All that is missing is a halma set of cooling towers. Still, you can’t have everything. In lieu of cooling towers, there are the names: Deadman’s Island, where those who perished at the lazaretto were buried, ranked east-west; Pigtail Corner; Bedlam’s Bottom; Egypt Bay which brought me here in the first place.

The plot of Robert Hamer’s 1952 film The Long Memory, and of the Howard Clewes novel on which it is based, is convoluted, thrillerish. The film does not approach the brilliance of either Kind Hearts and Coronets or Pink String and Sealing Wax. But it has the late John Slater as a punch-drunk pugilist shadow-boxing his way into tiny rooms. It photographs the mean terraces of Gravesend with a studied expressionism. At Egypt Bay, John Mills lives in a beached boat, a man who has been wrongly imprisoned and is out for revenge. I cannot think of any other film whose loci I have chased, but The Long Memory possesses a rare topographical specificity, and Hamer owned such a beguiling gift for the distillation of place . . .

The point is that the north Kent shore is obstinately disobliging: it persistently refuses to correspond to the notion of the soft South, which is a notion born of torpid generalisation, maybe, but none the less often true. So much of it seems displaced: a slice of Humberside or Teesside where the accent has an East Anglian twang. The land of oasts, orchards, hops, hedges, clinker-build and sweet English plenty collides with something indisputably harsh. Idioms of human enterprise (agricultural, architectural), which are sympathetic to their host land, clash with ones which are defiantly hostile to it. The process begins as far west as Woolwich, which may pretend to belong to London, but whose martial brutality and rollercoaster roads are echoed all the way to the three-named but united conurbation of RochesterChathamGillingham, estuarial towns whose streets dive precipitously down parlous gradients and swoop up the next like regimental lines. The collusion with slopes, escarpments and the land’s lie, which characterises gentler places such as Bath or Malvern, is nowhere to be found; but, as I say, the quintessence and the very excitement of this protracted dystopia reside in its tradition of bone-headed vanquishment, of impoliteness, of brutishness.

There are two distinct sorts of primitivism here. The beauty that there is – and I would maintain that there is great beauty – is not the beauty of beautification, let alone of prettification. The functions of land, of structures, of marine enterprise, are never dissembled, never disguised, never euphemised. They are often hidden, but that is different – the approach to Chatham dockyard (whose magnificence is not mitigated by its emasculation and rebirth as a tourist outfit) is through a canyon of brick walls that have a Piranesian capacity to talk to the base of the spine.

A lot of north Kent takes its cue from Chatham: big walls are big here. Old ones topped with chevaux de frise; new ones topped with barbed wire; spanking up-to-date ones with razor wire; ad hoc ones built of crates and sleepers, and crudely painted with invitations to end up as a dog’s lunch. The main gate of Chatham dockyard sets a mood, if not a style, for much that was to follow it. This is Primivitism (1). The main gate, finished in 1720, is a work of acutely self-conscious art, theatrical, vaguely medieval, certainly inspired by Vanbrugh (who inspired no one save naval, military and prison architects). It has the upside-down air of Battersea power station. Grain power station, the largest in Europe when it was built in the mid-’70s, is another essay in artful primitivism, fearsomely dramatic and deliberately symbolic of power; that symbolism is part of its function. It is an awesome piece of machinery. (Architects: Farmer and Dark.) The predominantly late-Georgian and Victorian dockyard buildings at Chatham and Sheerness belong to the tradition of engineer’s architecture, whose laureate is Sir James Richards; this is Primitivism (2). These stupendous sheds, up to 350 yards long, include the Sheerness Boatstore, which is among the earliest iron-framed buildings anywhere; it, too, is long, and exceptionally graceful. I write from the memory of having seen it as the Vlissingen ferry pulled out of Sheerness some years ago; I was unable to see it the other day because I was nabbed by a dockyard jobsworth.

Beyond primitivism, there is the simply primitive. A distinction must be made: it is Picasso on the one hand, Lascaux on the other. The one is wrought by artists, the primitive by . . . well, by non-artists; industrial non-artists and domestic non-artists. Some of them work on a grand scale. At Swanscombe, there are pyramids. They may be made of roadstone, gravel, earth, but they are pyramids, and there are tipper trucks crawling up them, loaded like Brobdingnagian ants; you do not get that at Giza. Had the nearby chalk pit been dug by Romans or Saxons or some other oldsters, it would be venerated, and its amphitheatrical majesty lauded, but it’s post-war (Second World War not Gallic), so it isn’t. The striations of chalk with the inevitable green icing on top and clunch below are quite as fascinating as any limited spectrum can be. Follow this shore with open eyes and renew your historico-aesthetic sensibility. As in any area where the land has been wantonly scarred, there are chunks of dreariness; they, however, are the chunks that might be anywhere – arterial road naffery, waste plots where the buddleia suffers brewer’s droop, light industrial plants of the ’50s and ’60s. Much, however, reeks of nothing but itself. There is much that is peculiar to this neck of the estuary: the sudden stunning views of the Dartford bridge, ditto of Canvey and its refineries. Even the bales of swarf gleam in a special way – ascribe that to the quality of light.

And there is nowhere else like Rosherville, Jeremiah Rosher’s new town of the 1850s, which had a Thameside pleasure garden, an ape of Cremorne where the punters ate so many oysters that their shells made nacreous pyramids (again) that were visible from Tilbury. That, anyway, is what Hippolyte Taine reported. Rosherville is now recalled in the name of Rosherville food market; in the streets between the Italianate villas, Sikh kids play cricket under the Rosherville sun.

Across the river from the ferry at Gravesend is the prodigious oddity called Bata: the model village designed for workers of that (then) Czechoslovak shoe company by Czechoslovak modernist architects in the ’30s. Even the disposition of the trees looks central European. The last time I went there, the Bata hotel was still operating. That is Essex, though; that is not Kent. Kent: home of the British bungalow. The town of Birchington has much to answer for: here is the fons et origo of this building type. Are bungalows primitive, or are they primitivist?

Birchington, the point on the foreshore where the sub-architectural virus from Bengal first hit, may be Buchan’s ‘Bradgate’, the site of the thirty-nine steps. He certainly worked on the book at Broadstairs. It does not matter one way or the other. But mark this: the first bungalows to be built in England were those at Birchington, on the cliff, and from their gardens led (and still lead) stepped tunnels to the shore.

Moreover, these were buildings associated with aesthetes. In Buchan’s crass cosmos, that meant spies – witness, too, his ‘Biggleswick’, a crude analogue of Letchworth Garden City, in Mr Standfast. The bungalows at Birchington are all greenery-yallery, decorated with sgraffito cherubs. Rosetti died here. There is a road named for him. They got something right. The bungaloid successors – did they get it right?

We can all agree that Britain’s coast has been trashed. Yet has it ever been so sedulously trashed as on Sheppey? Leysdown on the north-east corner of that isle is terminal England, the last resort, the nadir of bungalow development. It makes Hayling look like Biarritz. Even its kitsch is unconvincing. The bricolage and inspiredly untutored inventiveness of most early twentieth century plotlands is missing. On the shore, half a mile from the village’s centre, there are asbestos and wooden hutments, endlessly buffeted by the howling easterly. Bent bushes try to smother them. The groynes in front of them are like the bones of prehistoric creatures. On the road beneath the sea wall, a car is parked facing the marsh: oblivious to the birds and the swaying grass and the distant chimneys, the man in the driver’s seat concentrates on the Sunday Sport.

Back in Leysdown, in a car park behind a boarded-up amusement arcade, four men are transferring the contents of an articulated lorry into two Transits and a rusty hatchback. They do not like me, I can tell this from their faces. Now, what’s that shooting through the air? That is a series of jellied eel bones. A jellied eel family has synchronised its buccal expulsion of bones. There are many jellied eel families; there are also extended problem families, rottweiler families, double doberman families. There are the White Men freelance entrepreneurs who are very proud of their Y-reg Escorts, and drive them at an average of sixty miles an hour anywhere. That’s the White Man’s right. The English can be terrifying. They like their fun, though. The air of Leysdown is filled by the amplified, beery croak of a bingo caller. Someone is having fun. And there will be more fun tonight when Big Al’s Radio Stars Disco Roadshow gets gigging. Right now Big Al’s deafening yellow van is parked among maisonettes on an unadopted road. Two huge dolls dressed as bridesmaids stare at it from a lavishly netted window.

Northern Sheppey is dense with caravans, immobile homes, metal habitation hutches. Glinting white tombs, they appear in the distance the way the ranked graveyards of Flanders and Lorraine do. Every caravan park has a pretty name – Lazy Days, Song of the Sea, Sea Cliff, Willow Trees; and every name is just a bit of a fib. These caravan parks are not blots. They possess a despairing summeriness. They are also the most ordered items in an area which really is falling apart.

Man’s depredations have, as well as creating a terrible beauty, given much land to the sea – the digging of silica clay from the Medway and the Swale has caused those rivers to spread. And nature has done its part too. Wind and water have taken their toll on friable rock. The coast is eroded. Blockhouses and bungalows have tumbled into the sea. Notices warn of the dangers of walking the cliffs, lest the land slip from under your feet. All places are in a state of permanent mutation, but here the process is accelerated, overt.

The newest wheeze is to bury toxic waste. That figures. A history of mistreatment engenders a future of mistreatment. The by-product of this unstoppable force is an Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty.

Oh, and there’s much, much more: at Harty Ferry, on the south of Sheppey, stout wooden fruit crates are piled high and as long as a three-storey terrace; Kemsley, beside the Swale, is a neo-Georgian model village of the ’20s with, at its centre, a doll’s house of a pub and, beside it, a concert hall; not far off, at Ridham dock, is a field of caravans which resolve themselves as you approach into rectilinear bales of paper; a mile or so north of Sheerness, where the lanes of the Thames and the Medway join, there juts from the sea the masts of the liberty ship Richard Montgomery, which struck a sandbank and split in 1944. Its cargo included 3,000 tons of bombs, 1,200 tons of TNT, etc. Were it to go up, it would grossly accelerate the process referred to above.

(1991)

terminal

When did my fondness for railway stations become suspect? In the generation and a half since Ray Davies composed the most charming of London songs, termini have been stripped of their innocence. To own up to an appreciation of, say, King’s Cross is akin to expressing a wish to work in a children’s home, to become an ordinand, to train as a Scoutmaster. Yet stations draw me to them. I blame . . .

Well, where does one start? Salvador Dalí doesn’t help. He used to genuflect in front of Perpignan station. I recalled this in Barcelona one late autumn when I was too young to know better, and set out for that town across the border by way of Puigcerda, Saillagousse and le Train Jaune. I disembarked at Perpignan, walked out of the station, turned, gaped. And nothing happened, nothing. It entirely failed to move me. But I was so green I booked into l’Hôtel des Moustiques et Hyperpuces which overlooked it. Still nothing happened. Of course it didn’t. I stood in the forecourse and realised something: that one man’s madeleine is another man’s potential tragic traffic casualty statistic. So it was an epiphany of sorts, after all. A lesser epiphany, one that afflicted my reasoning brain, not the small of my back. My reasoning brain told me that I had stations of my own.

St Pancras. I had first seen it one all-blue summer’s day in my teens. It seemed to belong to a beneficent fairy tale. The bricks – I was evidently ignorant of their Midlands provenance – glowed, the structure was fantastical. I’m afraid that it was Scott’s pseudo-Flemish pastiche rather than Barlow’s engineering that appealed to me then, and it still engages me to this day. This is, I realise, aesthetically incorrect. But we don’t elect what excites us.

Sloane Square. This District and Circle Line stationstop had (has?) an improbable bar on the westbound side. Why? What was it doing there? It felt like it was custom-built for spies/drops/illicit meetings. The reason I don’t know whether it still exists is that it feels as though it might be fated. The two people I knew who ‘discovered’ it are both dead. David MacTavish (the singer in the largely forgotten psychedelic band Tintern Abbey) and Tariq Yunus (actor, writer and supreme card sharp).

Paddington. There is a social gulf between the places served by the west of England and Welsh route and those served by Waterloo. Oxford, Bristol, Bath, the Cotswolds and north Wiltshire are apparently inhabited by a rather different tribe to that which roams in the Surrey heathlands, Basingstoke, Southampton, Bournemouth. At Paddington, posh accents are far from extinct and received pronunciation is commonplace. So too are Barbours, British Warms, loud corduroys, hefty checks, culture tourists, books.

Waterloo. This was my entry to London. Not my station of choice. But I repeat: we have no more say in this matter than we do in that of our parents – whose domicile is liable to be a determining factor. So until my mother’s death just over a decade ago, this was the station that I was best acquainted with. And the sites beside the track from Salisbury to Waterloo are etched deep in my memory. Bleak downland, extinct watercress beds, a mill that manufactured banknote paper, the once derelict, now repaired Basingstoke Canal, houseboats on the River Wey Navigation, golf course after golf course, the pines and rhododendrons of Brookwood Cemetery, Brooklands’ embankment, the pretty mosque at Woking, the orphanage beside it, a nearby wedding photographer’s pebble-dashed corner premises, about which Cecil Beaton sniffily remarked in David Bailey’s film about him, ‘There but for the grace of God . . .’

Cyril Connolly wrote with acuity of the point that exists on every line into a London terminus where he would be beset by an inchoate terror of returning to the metropolis. I wonder if all provincials experience this in their early London years. I certainly did. It was the jolly floral clock in front of the art deco palace of Sutton’s Seeds near the Kingston bypass that signalled a sure lowering of my spirits. The last time I returned to London on that line I could not summon even an echo of those sentiments. So something changed for the better. And, though it may be shocking to say it, so too has the train service changed for the better: faster, cleaner and on time.

As for Waterloo itself? The cinema which had begun life as a ‘news theatre’ has gone. So has the machine which enabled you to pointlessly stamp your name on a piece of metal. And the DIY recording booth is no more. But the sad truth is that none of these facilities was really much good. Further, I’ll hazard that the existence of countless undifferentiated stalls and shops selling the same espresso, ham, fruit, pastries, ‘freshly squeezed’ juice, is a marked material improvement on the days when the choice was a Wimpy or nothing.

However, retail’s exploitation of public and semi-public concourses is not without cost. Although lip service is endlessly paid to the notion of public space’s worth, this country seems bemused by the point of it and is lax about implementing prescriptions which might inhibit our inalienable right to buy, to buy, to buy. One unwritten law of the free market is that every space possesses potential as a marketplace, and that to fail to realise that potential is an offence against mammon. Public space for the simple sake of public space is, I fear, a European idea too far. Its provision encourages ambling, flânerie, hanging out, wasting time, dreams of escape – dreams that were once triggered at Waterloo by posters promising ‘The Strong Country’. This was not some blackshirt fantasy but a long-running advertisement campaign by Strong’s Brewery of Romsey near Southampton, which featured the work of the landscape painter Rowland Hilder. Of course, the intention was to sell wallop. But it was achieved doucely and with what were not then called environmental benefits. Indeed, the environment had yet to be invented.

(2004)

 

the other grove

And at this point I make a detour into Newton Road, a secluded street of somewhat Cheltonian classical-survival villas among which stands a singular oddity, Denys Lasdun’s first building: a strangely graceful house completed in 1938. But it’s hardly a landmark. It lacks the cachet of Highpoint or the De La Warr Pavilion. Maybe this is because Lasdun survived the architectural hiatus of the Second World War and its long aftermath in a way that the majority of first-generation modernists did not. (Younger readers should be instructed that not only, for obvious reasons, were few buildings made during the war, but that there existed for almost a decade after it the proscriptive tyranny of ‘building licences’: thus British architecture 1939–1954 is a blankish page.) Then again, maybe no. 32 Newton Road is off the map because it doesn’t accord with received notions of that tentative British modernism. First: it is symmetrical. Second: its emphasis is vertical. But Lasdun’s work was ever thus. He made up his own rules and was out of step with his time. Indeed, in retrospect much of his stuff seems positively eccentric. This diversion into tranquillity and the solace of art was taken to escape Westbourne Grove, a frenetic street of such diversity and scuzzy richness that a little goes a long way.

In Fresco, a bearded young Buffalo Bill in a floor-length fuchsia velvet coat and cowboy boots goofed a stoned grin as he ordered a smoothie using every available ingredient. Across the road a newsagent was selling The Kerryman, The Limerick Leader, Western People, The Munster Express, The Longford Leader, The Nationalist, The Kilkenny People, The Irish Post, The Connacht Tribune, The Clare Champion and so on, and on. The electrical shop next door had a luminous tortoise in the window. What is a luminous tortoise for?

This street is as layered as a millefeuille. It is also singularly anachronistic. Its appeal derives from its reluctance to slough its multiple pasts. Forty years ago it was the high street of Rachmanland, and the neighbouring roads, Newton included, were all gas-meter lives, transience and damp lino. Today there’s not a slum to be seen. Domestic property is as expensive as anywhere in London. Multiple occupation is no longer a norm; ‘original features’ are – you can clock them at dusk. Of course, they aren’t really original but re-enactments of the cornices and roses and fireplaces which were removed in the years of destitution.

Somehow the eastern end of Westbourne Grove has failed to get the message about the area’s demographic and economic ascent. Many of the shops and services suggest that this is still bedsit land, that it’s forever 3 a.m., and that Neil Young is droning from the room across the hall. A marked shabbiness abounds. The clunky all-night vending machine which dispensed dodgy pies has gone, and so too has the International Film Theatre, an upholstered ashtray where I saw, inter alia, Buñuel’s marvellous El. Yet there remains an ample supply of empty launderettes, iffy supermarkets, sparsely furnished letting agencies, unreconstructed Indian restaurants, beer halls, booths offering rock-bottom price international phone calls, money exchanges, cheap carpet shops and heavily defended minicab offices.

Gentrification’s progress has been halting at best. There is certainly a whiff of heavily laid on local colour about the businesses, but would you want to buy anything from them? Impasto ambience and retail utility do not necessarily go together. This is probably a street made for that puzzlingly overrated recreation ‘street life’ – at least it would be were the pavements not so narrow.

(2004)

raw

‘He’s no oil painting.’ In which case, is he a watercolour, an acrylic, a gouache, a pastel? The implication is clear: oil is the supreme medium, thus a work executed in it is necessarily better than one wrought in those other, baser, chromatic agents. I exaggerate (of course), but not that much. Despite Girtin, Cotman, Crome and Burra there still exists the notion of a hierarchy of materials, an inapposite hierarchy when you consider how pervious English light and sky are to representation by watercolour.

In the case of buildings an even more preposterous situation arises. Here there are two forms of hierarchy at work. The first is that which so persistently infects and unbalances the greatest architectural-historical enterprise of the past half century, Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Buildings of England: it is the unquestioning assumption that a sacred building is somehow superior to a secular one. Pevsner was far from alone in decreeing that a building’s worth is determined by its usage rather than by its intrinsically architectural qualities. He was merely adhering to a form of thought born in the nineteenth century and which was accepted as a given by his generation.

And it’s not dead yet. Witness the touristic popularity of cathedrals; though, of course, age abets that particular popularity. Oldness plus holiness is a most potent combination. It sells tickets. In this hierarchy, department stores, bridges, airports, factories, multi-storey carparks and so on are consigned to the lowest tiers. They are not god’s house, they are not even man’s house. They may be works of imaginative energy and soaring accomplishment but they are still meant to know their place. Social mobility is our norm but building types remain resolutely stuck. They are set in stone. And make sure it is stone, not some ‘lesser’ material.

Here is the other pernicious hierarchy which we apply to the built environment, the hierarchy of materials. It is more complicated than the hierarchy of building types because it has always been subject to regional variation. Is Portland stone intrinsically the ne plus ultra of our quarries’ yield – or does the cachet attached to it in some measure derive from that isthmus’s former inaccessibility and its limestone’s consequent expense: it’s a point worth pondering because Weymouth, a couple of miles distant, is predominantly stucco in apparent rejection of the local material. There are countless examples of such eschewals. To build with stone in brick country, and vice versa, was to demonstrate wealth and freedom from the vernacular.

The use of ‘redbrick’ as a snobbish derogation of late Victorian universities and their alumni went missing a couple of decades back. But industrial red bricks themselves, Accrington Bloods and their like, are forever with us and not much more liked than they ever were. Their glaring harshness and their inability to age gracefully (or to age at all) are qualities which put them beyond the pale: and the same goes for terracotta and faïence. But none of these materials owns the same problems as concrete.

You know the griff. Concrete is a serial offender, a sullen, grey, stained recidivist. Building material? Catalyst of social mayhem, more like. It is forbidden to utter the word without one or more of the suffixes ‘wasteland’, ‘jungle’, ‘monstrosity’. Concrete is at the very bottom of the pile. Or would be were it not so often 100 metres above ground, affronting everyone else’s eyes.

There’s clearly something wrong with my eyes. With my taste, too, no doubt. I’ll happily admit to enjoying much brutalism – which name derives not from brutality but from béton brut, raw concrete. The derivation of the actual sculptural, plastic forms that characterised its use in the ’60s is less happy. It is not difficult to discern a direct link back from, say, Rodney Gordon and Owen Luder’s wonderful Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth to the Organization Todt’s West Wall and the defences it built in Occupied France and Guernsey. But it was evidently not that covert provenance which turned this country against concrete but, rather, the sheer lack of ingratiation of the buildings made from it: might, muscle, perversity and bloody-minded ostentation are in opposition to a public, collective taste which even to this day values prettiness and the picturesque.

A gamut of what sound like occluded lodges – the Reinforced Concrete Council, the Ready-Mixed Concrete Bureau, the Structural Precast Association, the Basement Development Group, The Concrete Society – have mounted an RIBA exhibition, wrongly named Hardcore, in an effort to rehabilitate its product by demonstrating its versatility and its mimetic qualities.

Here, then, is concrete that looks like Lurex, fruit-studded nougat, marble, fun-fur which has lost its pile, marshmallow. Anything, indeed, other than the rough, tough stuff of forty years ago: the quaint modernist shibboleth of truth-to-materials is quite abjured. We are reminded, instead, of Roman concrete and of early Victorian essays such as a house in Kent which is the epitome of the chocolate-box cottage.

We’ve been here before. Hardcore – which should have been Softcore – proves that there is nothing so intractable that it can’t be made over to appeal to a base appetite for eezee-on-the-eye frivolity. At last, the people’s sand and cement, accessible aggregate for all, precast slabs for the kiddiz. I had never previously conceived of having the opportunity to describe concrete as populist, as fun. I’ll swear your lips moved when you read that sentence.

(2002)

sheds: a–m

Allotments: The allotment capital of Britain is England’s second city. The BDAC (Birmingham and District Allotment Council) oversees more than a hundred sites. Certain of them stretch to the horizon. They are racially harmonious sites. Brummies of differing ethnic origins – Poles, Gujeratis, Welshmen, Spaniards – are united by their love of plots and sheds. The future socialist MP Jesse Collings, whose slogan was ‘Three Acres and a Cow’, founded the city’s Allotments Extension Association in 1882. The diversity of veg is startling: okra, aubergines, show-marrows, chrome yellow courgettes, runner beans, etc.

Blokes: Blokes are not necessarily bloke-ish or boorish. Still, it’s blokes rather than chaps who have sheds.

Corrugated iron: A century ago corrugated iron was the building material of the future. Really. And it might have come to pass. All that it requires is a tosh of paint. The former Empire is blessed with churches that were prefabricated in Britain; the garrison church at Blackdown near Aldershot is the best preserved I know. ‘It used to be painted red and orange, and looked exactly like a toy church.’ (Ian Nairn, Buildings of England: Surrey.) There is also a scout hut in Kilburn Park Road, and there are scores of corrugated iron sheds. Get painting, gents!

Dinky Toys: My chocolate-brown and navy-blue model Bedford lorry was bought in Chumleigh, in Devon, in 1952. Down in the valley, beneath the ruins of Eggesford House near the Fox and Hounds was a railway and a railwayman’s shed which housed a linesman’s trolley which was propelled by pushing a lever up and down. I, illicitly, took the vehicle from the shed and rode it up and down the quiet Barnstable track. These were the best of times.

Evesham: My uncle Hank – who never found the right girl – went ‘home’ to his mother, my grandmother, in Evesham every weekend, to his mother and to his virgin sister, my literally maiden aunt. I am sentimentally attached to Evesham because of, inter alia, the shed. There was a dry smell of knife-grinding Carborundum and of oil and of paper: Hank, the town-clerk of Burton-on-Trent, had kept every issue of Picture Post (which is the fons et origo of all newspapers’ magazines today). The shed was wood, steep-pitched, narrow, crammed. Hank was an amateur of sheds – provided they were owned by people of the social class he aspired to. He once took me to the house at Stow-on-the-Wold owned by a member of the Riley family; Riley was, until it was swallowed by BMC, a famously sporty marque of car. The Riley who lived at Stow had a stone barn as his shed.

Engineering, Downton: In the first half of the ’60s BMC Minis driven by Paddy Hopkirk et al. constantly won the Monte Carlo Rally. These were not ordinary Minis. They were not even Mini Coopers. They were Minis that had been ‘tweaked’ by the entirely eccentric organisation called Downton Engineering. Downton is a large village between Salisbury and Fordingbridge. The company had begun in a shed and had expanded into premises on the north side of the village, on an aspirant industrial estate. It was owned by the Hon. Daniel Richmond, a delightful man who was married to Somerset Maugham’s niece Bunty; who fished Avon salmon with my father; who made a pass at me when I was sixteen and pretty. I turned him down. We remained friends; my father was merely amused. I still have a chromed piston from one of his winners that he gave me. This is a rare instance of shed gone global.

Eccentricity: It goes without saying that sheds not only promote eccentricity but are deliberately constructed to that end.

Flat hats: Were once the headgear of choice of all shed users and were routinely worn both in and out doors. In Northern Ireland they were, and perhaps still are, known as ‘dunchers’, whose etymology is puzzling. Worn when smoking Park Drive or Weights.

Greengage: Is a sort of plum. When I was a child there was a fruit- and-veg shop in Salisbury named for its owner Clement Gage. He was known to my father and me (if no one else) as Green Gage. In those days there were hothouse plums, grown locally on the Downton Road by the exotically named Hedley Combes. His glasshouses and sheds stretched for a quarter of a mile beside Edgar and Cath’s house down to Britford Lane – which was a wonderland of sheds sited between the trees of former fruitholdings. My reckless friend Adrian would cycle among them like a daredevil forever skidding on rotten fallers and wasp-infested plums. I was more timid, and besides I didn’t want to fall off because there were adders hereabouts. Mrs Braithwaite had found one swimming in her pond.

Les Hortillonages: On the edge of Amiens along the north bank of the Somme is a remarkable area of mostly former market gardens irrigated by narrow leets known as watergangs. Few of the plots are still commercially exploited. They are now pleasure gardens. Each is equipped with at least a hut. Some of the huts have grown to the size of bungalows. The people of Amiens recreate themselves there at weekends and on summer evenings. The place possesses an unmistakable gaiety. The river is thick with scullers and canoeists. Flaneurs ambling on the towpath have every chance of being mown down by megaphone-wielding rowing coaches on racing bikes. Old boys sit on their stoops smoking curly meerschaum pipes. Families tuck into gargantuan meals surrounded by gnomes and plaster windmills. 120 kilometres due north at St Omer the scene is virtually reproduced on le Marais Audomerois; here, though, a majority of the plots is still used to grow vegetables which are transported in flat-bottomed vessels like punts; the sheds are duly less decorative. Again, in the outskirts of Ghent there are sheds in immaculately bijou gardens surrounded by watercourses. At these Flemish sites the shed is not a male preserve.

Isle of Wight: The range of sheds on the island is impressive. They range from the distinctive boatsheds at Bembridge to a plotland development near Newtown to beach huts which require annual painting and may not be slept in.

Jerusalem, New: Seldom lives up to the name. Has been built of tarpaulin, former railway rolling stock (which was once available from Cohen’s of Kettering), the fuselage of gliders, old buses, etc. Invariably ends in tears.

Kinema in the Woods: Woodhall Spa is a Lincolnshire watering place which had its heyday between about 1890 and 1920. It was built on sandy heathland and its abundant sylviculture is determined by that terrain: pines, rhododendrons, birches, broom – it is akin to Arcachon with villas sheltered by the trees. The Dambusters of 617 Squadron were stationed nearby and are commemorated in the hotel whose bar they frequented along with Guy Gibson’s labrador, Asterisk: his name may not be spoken. That hotel like most of the rest of the village is red brick with fanciful half-timbering. The most interesting building, however, is different. The Kinema in the Woods was built as a genteel sports pavilion and was extended when it was converted to its present use in the ’20s. It has, to this day, the air of an inflated shed. It is wooden, eccentrically proportioned, with a bizarre ground plan. There is no other cinema like it in the UK.

London Alps: Tatsfield is one of the many shack colonies which grew up on the North Downs in the aftermath of the First World War. It was advertised, in earnest, as being situated in the London Alps. Former soldiers were able to obtain grants to start smallholdings. The Bethersden company called Colt, which sold prefabricated wooden chicken coops, soon discovered that its structures were being used as domestic dwellings and branched out into supplying houses. Shack colonies – or plotlands – have disappeared for two main reasons. Successive planning laws have militated against them. The land on which sheds and shacks were built has increased in value in the way that the properties themselves have not. So where there were ad-hoc structures built of what could be begged or recycled or found for free there are now dream bungalows. The largest concentrations of extant shacks are on the eastern end of Sheppey, beside the Severn between Bewdley and Bridgnorth, at Jaywick Sands near Clacton (where the streets are named after forgotten marques of British car: Lanchester, Alvis, etc.).

Men’s secrets: A garden shed was, perhaps still is, a man’s private domaine, a man’s cave, a grounded tree house, a haven. Whatever went on in garden sheds was covert. And it was meant to stay that way; hence the elaborate locks with which shed owners protected their little world from the prying eyes of their family. The hobbies pursued in sheds were legion. Collecting (beer labels, matchboxes, cigarette cards, pebbles, etc., etc.). Tinkering – the Midlands, especially, had a tradition, killed off by the introduction of the MoT test, of men who built cars called ‘specials’, bodged with a Birmingham screwdriver from components of other cars. The roads of the Black Country were graced on Sundays by these wonderfully Heath Robinson contraptions. Radio: until the introduction of the transistor radio hams would construct their own receivers. Astronomy: this requires a skylight. Light relief: the father of a childhood friend had a shed piled with boxes crammed with copies of Health and Efficiency – a naturist magazine, daring in its day – which published photos of airbrushed nudes throwing beach balls.

(2002)

[SCRIPT #5]

ISLE OF RUST (OFF-KILTER, PART 3, 2009)

 

PART ONE

EMETIC PICTURE POSTCARD PHOTOGRAPHY – DANGLING BRANCHES, ULTRA-CUTE, OVER-COLOURED. STIRLING – CASTLE AND ENVIRONS. HERITAGE SCOTLAND AT ITS MOST OBVIOUSLY PRETTY. PEOPLED BY TOURISTS OR, PREFERABLY, GROTESQUE PRETEND TOURISTS – JM PLAYS ALL OF THESE. CASTLE CAR PARK. COACHES. TOUR GROUPS. [CM: FIGURES IN HOODS. MAYBE SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATIONS – EG, AMBULANCE SIREN AND FLASH OF VEHICLE. BLOOD-SPLATTERED CLOTHES. LORRY RADIATOR. SYBILLANT ENCOUNTER IN TOILET. WORK BOOTS. CHEF’S CLEAVER, ETC.] POSTCARDS HOME. TO DES MOINES. ALICE SPRINGS. JO’BURG. QUEBEC (IN FRENCH). V/O:

Why do they do it? Why do seen-it-all A&E personnel from Auckland, granite-faced truckers from Council Bluffs, cartilage-splattered abattoir operatives from Manitoba, brutal diesels from Durban, butch sous-chefs from Wagga Wagga, hard-cottaging marine mechanics from the Tigre Delta, leather-skinned coiffeuses from Port Moresby, cynical lawyers from Boston . . .

CHURCH, GRAVEYARD. STIRLING GRAVEYARD OFF LOWERCASTLE HILL/GOWAN HILL (NOT MAIN STIRLING CEMETERY)

Why do they do it – why do they come to Scotland in search of their ancestors who are no more than names? They pore over all but illegible faded copperplate in parish registers with no regard for the damage inflicted on they eyes.

They scrape the lichen from headstones.

DOUNE CASTLE FROM NEAR DEANSTON DISTILLERY: RIVER TEITH AND BRIDGE.

IDYLLIC PICTURESQUE COUNTRY. PTC (INDICATES SHEEP WITH NOD)

They walk beside burns where someone with rickets who happened two centuries ago to share 100 per cent of their mother’s surname and 1.575 per cent of their DNA might – just might – have walked in inadequate footwear past that sheep’s ancestor.

QUICK CUT TO SHEEP – AND BACK AGAIN. PTC CONTINUES

What is the matter with them? What is this obsession with roots? And why is Scotland world leader in the roots caper?

THE TARTAN GLOBE – NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA, NEW CALEDONIA, AUSTRALIA, ROME, LONDON, SOUTH AFRICA, CALCUTTA, ETC., MOSTLY PTC

Why Scotland? Because Scotland’s chief export – like the Basque provinces’, like the Auvergne’s, like the Campania’s – has always been people: brain, muscle, cannon-fodder: powerful Scots send humbler Scots to die in distant countries. People leave in search of a living wage, a better life, the chance of material improvement. It’s largely a matter of economic survival; partly, too, of the desire to seek a bigger stage. Scotland has seldom been able to provide for all of its people. So they make a hard-nosed decision to leave.

DUNBLANE: CATHEDRAL WITH MUSEUM IN BACKGROUND

And their descendants make a soft-nosed decision to come back, coo at the quaintness and delude ourselves that they are somehow connected to this place . . .

. . . The stuff in their veins is blood group Mac. When they bleed they bleed tartan blood.

DUNBLANE: LEIGHTON LIBRARY

Scotland’s tourist industry naturally encourages this genealogical enquiry. Indeed Scottish tourism is founded on the obsession with burrowing for old bones. This year is the year of something called Homecoming, a summer-long orgy of golf, whisky, tartan, cabers, kilts, pipes: a parallel world of cliché, pure corn, fabrication – and income.

The internet has been a great boon to fans of pornography and amateur genealogists.

One pursuit will make you go blind . . .

STILL. MONTAGE. MR JACQUI SMITH IN FRONT OF GIANT KLEENEX BOX.

LEGEND: ‘NO MESSING’ IN OFF-WHITE SCRIPT WHICH LOOKS FONDANT, DRIPPING

. . . the other will merely boost sales of Superstrength Kleenex Mansize New Labour Expenses Wipes.

ABSTRACTED FLESH. ‘DO IT TO ME ONE MORE TIME’ BY CAPTAIN AND TENILLE

The principle of pornography is incremental.

SHEEP WITH PIXELATED FACE

There must always be more – more participants, more contortions, more sheep, more sheep in burkas.

MONTAGE: OLD PHOTOS MULTIPLYING; MUMMIES (SAVOCA, SICILY); NEANDERTHAL MAN.

The same applies to genealogy. The past has a past has a past has a past. It’s not enough to stop when you’ve discovered your great-great-great-grandmother’s birth certificate – you have to find her mother and her father and her father’s father’s father’s christening mug with the dent from the Big Bang . . .

It’s a sort of addiction.

DOUNE CASTLE

Best never to get started – for at the very heart of this dismal enterprise lies a form of recessive communitarianism, of ancestral tribalism, of a literal backwardness. We demean ourselves if we define ourselves by the community that we supposedly belong to – whether that alleged community is determined by skin colour, religion, political persuasion, football club, or any other criterion.

STIRLING: MAR’S WARK

This coarse pigeon-holing is like apartheid. It is the enemy of miscegenation, social mobility, assimilation: it exacerbates differences, indeed it manufactures differences.

LODGING OPPOSITE MAR’S WARK

It’s an instrument of inequity. And in tracking down our ancestors we are simply subscribing to another way of defining ourselves by group or clan. We are creating a new file, a new enclosure, a new separateness. We’re also kidding ourselves.

STIRLING: OLD JAIL HOUSE

Telling ourselves a lie of the old days. We have the good fortune to speak a language which – unlike Arabic or Sicilian – has a future tense.

STIRLING: ST NINIANS CHURCH. DANGLE. PTC

My maternal great-grandparents were both born and brought up in the Stirling suburb of St Ninians. My mother spent childhood holidays with their extended families in the nearby burghs of Dunblane and Bridge of Allan . . .

BRIDGE OF ALLAN: KENILWORTH ROAD, CHALTON ROAD

. . . whose grand villas they could never possibly have aspired to.

BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPE SHOT IN FINTRY HILLS SOUTH OF DOUNE – MUST BE

GREEN, DOUCE

She and her sister had to sleep in a button-bed, a niche next to the oven. It was an arrangement akin to that used by Kazaks and Turkmenis who placed palette-like constructions over ovens. This ad-hoc bucolic alcove would come to be formalised as a built-in feature of many Glasgow tenements.

OLD STIRLING HIGH SCHOOL, SPITTAL STREET (NOW A HOTEL)

Baird, McInnes, MacAllister, Taylor . . . I know the names of my forebears but they do not touch me.

Stirling High School is by the architect James Maclaren who died in his mid-thirties, leaving a mere handful of exquisite works. It is infinitely more interesting to me than tiresome tales of the Taylor brothers’ elaborate ruses to prevent their parents discovering their chronic truancy from the school.

SEVERAL DIFFERENT VIEWS OF THE WALLACE MONUMENT – ALL FROM DISTANCE, NO C/U

The Wallace Monument’s archivist is unable to confirm that my great-great-grandfather was its first keeper. That, however, was what my mother told me. Keeper means caretaker, janitor. Hardly, then, a boast that anyone would bother to make up, so I guess it’s true – if unproven.

That frail familial link does not dissuade me from the conviction that this astounding structure commemorates a murderous medieval terrorist. It is the supreme architectural emblem of Scotland’s dodgily fabricated past. Brute force in the service of gross sentimentality and mawkish victimhood.

DUNBLANE CATHEDRAL FROM ACROSS RIVER. DANGLE. PTC

The lavishly false heredities that Homecomers eagerly weave for themselves are as predictable and as bogus as tartan and Highland games. They perpetuate the myth of a land as sloppily counterfeit as Merry England, a land that hardly was.

A dead land, a millstone – all those Bairds, MacInnes, Taylors stretching back to elemental mulch.

There are other Scotlands – vital, living, untarnished by Walter Scottishness: places of the strangest energy and greatest delight. Time for a rebirth . . .

JM WALKS AWAY HOLDING DANGLE.

FALKIRK WHEEL (THOUGH WE DON’T REALISE IT) JM C/U – BACKGROUND IMPOSSIBLE TO DISCERN

Places that have no ancestral claim on us, where the yolk of a ready-made collective history is absent. Which we can talk of in the future perfect rather than the past historic.

AT THIS POINT REVEAL THAT JM IS IN A BOAT ASCENDING THE WHEEL – MORE

EFFECTIVE IF WE DON’T SEE THE WHEEL IN ITS ENTIRETY

Places that we can elect to go towards rather than come from. Places which are potential – where anything is possible, where everything is waiting to happen.

SCREEN GOES TO BLINDING WHITE ACCOMPANIED BY WHITE NOISE. THEN SCREECHING SEAGULLS.

 

PART TWO

LEWIS/HARRIS. NATURAL MAGNIFICENCE – THE OBVERSE OF CUTE. EPIC CLOUDSCAPES. LOCHS. LUNAR ROCKSCAPES. THE SEA. MOUNTAINS. C/U LICHENS, STONES, SAND. IN THIS PART ABSOLUTELY NO SIGNS OF HUMAN HABITATION. NO HUMANS. PLACE LOOKS DESERTED. CHROMATICALLY AUSTERE GOING TOWARDS MONOCHROME. MUSIC: HENZE SINFONIAS NO.1 + NO.2. RAVEL TRIO. EXPLOIT ALL OF THE LOCATIONS BY SHOOTING IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, IN LATER PARTS WE SHALL SHOW HABITATIONS, ABANDONED BUILDINGS AND VEHICLES ALL OF WHICH ARE TO BE FOUND EVERYWHERE. IN THIS PART THEY NEED TO BE KEPT OUT OF FRAME. IN SUBSEQUENT PARTS WE REPEAT THESE SHOTS BUT AMEND THEM WITH A FRAME THAT IS MARGINALLY WIDER OR SLIGHTLY ALTERED TO SHOW WHAT WAS OMITTED HERE. SO THE SHOTS NEED TO BE DISTINCTIVE ENOUGH TO BE REMEMBERED 30 MINUTES LATER.

WEST COAST OF LEWIS. A BOAT ON A SEA LOCH. INITIALLY ONLY SEA IS VISIBLE.JM IS DRESSED IN DIFFERENT CLOTHES – TWEED JACKET, ETC. (THOUGH THE BOAT SHOULD SEEM THE SAME – AS THOUGH HE HAS TRAVELLED WHOLE WAY ON IT). BOAT POV LAND APPROACHING

There are places that we choose to attach ourselves to . . . Or which choose us. Whose genius loci is so potent that it incites us to love them. The spirit of the place renders us incapable of resistance.

LOOKING SOUTH FROM A858, MAP 8 REF NB 300 298. (NO HABITATIONS VISIBLE)

That spirit is not spiritual. It is, rather, a combination of geological, meteorological and man-made circumstances. It’s the enveloping presence, the essence which incites sensations of transcendence, awe and bliss. These sensations do not depend on the exhortations and boasts of some intercessionary deity.

PARODY OF CSI-STYLE SHOT OF WORM

. . . of a wrathful worm-god slithering through the eustachian tube to demand oblations for having worked to create this . . . this paradise.

MAP 13 REF NB 070 343. CANYON (WITHOUT SHOWING ROAD)

This is the world’s work of countless millions of years against which we measure ourselves and are found wanting. Passers-through and all that. A blink in the eye of aeons.

MAP 13 REF NB OIO 308. LOOKING E & SE

Here, at the north-westernmost periphery of Europe is what feels like a presage of the future . . . the distant future . . . the furthest future . . . After which there’ll be no future at all. This is the Island of Rust – known, too, as Lewis and Harris. It is a blueprint, a working model of the day which will have no tomorrow.

MAP 14 REF NB 374 144

It is an island of countless mysteries, enduring mysteries.

MAP 13 REF NB 152 388

The light is singular . . . constantly changing . . . The island is porous – like petrified sponge . . . Its landscape is not landscape. It is liquid . . . Its waterscape is not waterscape. It is solid . . . There are areas of glacial erosion . . . and of sedimentary transportation.

MAP 8 REF NB 520 665. BUTT OF LEWIS

The metamorphic gneiss [pron: nace] is 3,000 million years old. It is the result of several deformations. Nace, then, maight be said to be laike the Morningsaide accent. It is the oldest rock in Scotland – if this is Scotland, which I doubt. Obviously it is administratively Scotland but otherwise . . .

MAP 14 REF NB 401 183. BOULDERS

During the last ice age the alternate pressures of freezing and thawing, expansion and contraction, combined with erosion to turn what had been monolithic into a moraine of millions of loose boulders.

In Hindu mythology similar rockscapes were formed by monkey gods – bad-tempered and, evidently, very strong brothers frenziedly hurling boulders at each other.

Not here. There are no fratricidal monkey gods on the Island of Rust. Oh no!

Calvinistic Presbyterian mythology – which claims to be something other than mythology, but isn’t – decrees that God, the one God, created this Calvinistic Presbyterian island – boulders, lochs and all – in six days.

Fair enough, we all know the lad’s got a great engine on him – he’s 100 per cent work-rate, a celestial Scholsey.

But . . . what if God’s day is anyone else’s couple of million years. What if his conception of clock-time and calendars does not correspond to the mundane artifices invented by emperors, popes and Swiss watchmakers?

BEACH AND MACHAIR. MAP 13 REF 083 365. MALE SINGER. NEO-CELTIC OUTFIT. SONGS OF PRAISE-STYLE. SONG IN GAELIC WITH THESE SUBTITLES

(Translation required)

On the seventh day he went down to the sea.

He made water shimmering blue like his truelove’s eyes.

He made sand fine and yellow as his truelove’s locks.

He made machair so soft, his truelove lay down to sleep forever.

BEACH. PTC

Which may not have been part of the grand plan. No doubt he too hurled boulders in his wrathful grief.

The quaint misattribution of this island’s provenance, the denial of fact in favour of creation myth, should not bother us. The wonders of evolution are infinitely more subtle and fascinating than the coarse fabrications proposed by those repositories of ignorance called sacred texts – forgivable 2,000 years ago as a means of trying to understand our physical surroundings, but inexcusable today.

MACHAIR MAP 13 REF NB 105 358. (MANY OTHER EXAMPLES)

Machair – pretty much peculiar to the Atlantic coast – is a work of millions of years of sand and crushed shells being blown and swept on to acidic peat. This creates a thin but exceptionally fertile soil which is further enriched by guano of ground-nesting birds – oystercatchers, sandpipers, terns, lapwings, redshanks, corncrakes, peewits – and by grazing cattle’s dung.

Does this mean that cattle are coprophagic?

Let us dwell, rather, on orchids, clovers, daisies.

DUNES. MAP 13 REF NB 105 358. (MANY OTHER EXAMPLES)

And on the dunes between the sea and the machair where marram grass grows – a sort of armature, a set of reinforcing rods, that inhibits the shift of sand.

PEAT BOG. VIRTUALLY ANYWHERE ON NORTHERN LEWIS

Peat occurs in exceptionally wet temperate or cold climates where vegetable matter, notably nonflowering plants such as sphagnum moss, is prevented from totally decomposing by an excess of water. Certain species of sphagnum have spore capsules which shrink to the point where the air within them is so compressed that they explode – noisily. This may partially account for the belief, the literal belief, that peat moors are inhabited by boisterous bog sprites which infects so much twilit Celtic folklore.

NEAR DARKNESS. HARDLY DISCERNIBLE SPRITES OF HUGELY DIFFERING SIZES

WITH BROWN/GREEN FACES AND BODIES COVERED IN MOSS. JERKING AS IF WITH ST VITUS’ DANCE. SOME LUMBERING AND FAR FROM ELFIN. SOME DELICATE. NON-HUMAN YET NON-ANIMAL

Peat used to roast barley famously lends the whisky made from that malt an operating-theatre bouquet. When taken in sufficient quantity that liquor can doubtless convince the most obdurately rational mind that green creatures dance by night on the desolate moors.

These creatures – some amiable, some malevolent, some the spirits of the dead, some fallen from heaven – were thought to inhabit unseen places beneath the earth and under pools which would be revealed as the world ended.

Peat is dug and dried for slow-burning fuel. It is host to many heathers.

EXTREME DETAIL. FRAME FULL OF HEATHER > C/U MOSS IN POND

Because of a lack of oxygen and an abundance of acids it preserves animal bodies and human bodies – the bodies of those who have stumbled into its bogs and those who have been murdered or ritually executed.

Almost 2,000 bodies have so far been discovered in such diverse places as South Uist, Cheshire, Jutland, Varberg in Sweden, County Meath, Groningen in the northern Netherlands.

But none has been found yet far on the Isle of Rust. The likely reason for this is that the topography is inimical to the industrialised peat cutting which has revealed most of the bodies so far. But we can go on hoping.

The ligature or noose will often be preserved too. The process is closer to pickling than to mummification. And it is rapid. Though most of the bog bodies that have been discovered are more than a thousand years old, a Second World War soldier has been exhumed in a perfect state of preservation.

CAMERA SUDDENLY PLUNGES INTO WATER. THE WATER IS BROWN BUT CLEAR

These bogs are full of future potential. It is not inconceivable that devices which can detect the limbs of the dead beneath metres of peat are in an advanced state of development.

So we can meet our ancestors by design rather than by the chance of a plough or harrow. And if we cannot meet them in the flesh we can at least meet them in the leather. It beats reading a name on a birth certificate.

THE CAMERA ALIGHTS UPON A BOG BODY FOETALLY CURLED WITH GAROTTE ROUND NECK. MOST PHOTOS SHOW BODIES WHICH HAVE SHRUNK AND WHICH LOOK

AS THOUGH THEY ARE MADE OF LEATHER. (PROP REQUIRED – OR WILLING PERSON)

There are golden eagles in the mountains. Soaring no doubt.

And buzzards drifting on thermals looking to transform a harmless mammal into lunch.

White-tailed sea eagles – whose wingspan is over eight feet, two and a half metres – patrol the coast. They live on fish with carrion on the side. There is little competition for prey with golden eagles who eat rabbit, hare, grouse – which makes them unpopular with gamekeepers and hunters.

C/U OF THESE SPECIES. FACES PixelATED IN SOME CASES, BLACK STRIPE IN OTHERS TO PREVENT IDENTIFICATION. THE CLAWS AND LOWER LEGS OF A BIRD WITH A TARTAN BLANKET OVER ITS HEAD, WINGS AND BODY WITH

THE LEGEND ‘HELPING WITH ENQUIRIES’

There are ospreys . . . hen harriers which are white-bellied buzzards . . . peregrine falcons . . . kestrels. . . shags. . . fulmars who can eject an oil reeking of putrefying fish from their stomach to fend off attackers: this oil swiftly solidifies to a sort of wax which can be incapacitating. Beside them hoodie crows who merely pluck out the eyes of lambs seem paragons of moderation.

It should be noted that all of these species are recidivist sociopaths, murderous delinquents even into their maturity – they are thus bad role models for any youngsters watching.

They may inhabit paradise but they make it hell for their prey.

DEER

There are deer everywhere. They don’t fly – save in France, where a kite is called a flying stag, un cerf volant.

There are hare, rabbits, otters, bottle-nosed dolphins, seals, basking sharks that are allegedly harmless though it’s hardly worth the risk of finding out, brown trout – the ones with the white flesh which taste so much better than gaudy rainbow trout, salmon, cannibalistic crustaceans.

BARVAS MOOR. MAP 8 REF NB 242 390

There are slow worms – which are legless lizards. But no snakes.

So despite the ancient belief that Barvas Moor was the Garden of Eden it obviously wasn’t. Unless, that is, the snake – as maligned as Judas, but as necessary to the story’s structure - moved on once it had performed its role.

No doubt some of the many other claimants to Edenhood – the source of the Tigris, a spring in Jerusalem and so on – are more climatically plausible and, of course, they are in the Middle East, font of all monotheistic mumbo-jumbo. But are any of them as primal, as primitive, as truly paradisiac as this elemental moor whose Gaelic name is Barabhas – like that of the outlaw or terrorist whom the mob had necessarily to wish pardoned in order that it be Jesus who died.

SUDDEN DARKNESS

It is more Calvary than Eden. Abattoir rather than cradle.

TERRIBLE NOISES OF CATTLE SQUEALING AS THEY DIE

 

PART THREE

LEWIS/HARRIS. FIRST TIME THAT WE SEE SIGNS OF (ANCIENT) HUMAN INTERVENTIONS ON THE ISLAND. PHOTOGRAPHY SHOULD STILL AIM FOR MAGNIFICENCE, SUBLIMITY. NO HOUSES, NO ROADS, NO PYLONS, NO CARS. ALL STANDING STONES SHOT IN DIFFERENT LIGHTS, DIFFERENT CLOUDS, DIFFERENT SCALES.

SCARISTA (SINGLE STONE BY BEACH) WITH SEA IN BACKGROUND. MAP 18 REF NG 020 939

This is the north-western extremity of Europe.

It prompts wonder.

It prompted wonder and bewilderment to our distant, preliterate forebears.

SUBTITLE

Oy atpqayrf epmfrt smf nreozfrtqrmy

yp pit, smf fodysmy atrzoyrtsye

yp pit. Gptnrstd?

CLACH MHICLEOID (TALL SINGLE STONE DRAMATIC POSITION ON PROMONTORY).

MAP 18 REF NG 041 973

And it prompted too the urge to investigate and measure what was around them.

STONES BESIDE BRIDGE TO GREAT BERNERA. MAP 13 REF NB 163 343

They had no recourse to the supernatural.

AIRIGH NE BEINNE BIGE (SMALL STANDING STONE). MAP 8 REF NB 222 356

They calibrated their place in their surroundings by marking the actual:

CLACH AN TRUISHEAL STANDING STONE (THE TALLEST IN SCOTLAND). MAP 8 REF NB 375 537

where the sun sets at the vernal equinox;

CALLANISH 2 & 3 ADJACENT STONE CIRCLES. MAP 8 REF NB 211 330

where it rises at the summer solstice; the positions of constellations, the vagaries of the moon.

CALLANISH 1 MAP 13 REF NB 213 330 (SHOOT IN DIFFERENT LIGHTS, IN SEVERAL STAGES. THE NEARBY HOUSES MUST BE KEPT OUT OF FRAME)

This was practical. This was the first germ of what would become science. Curiosity sated by investigation rather than by crude hypotheses.

These sites may have been calendars of a sort. Unlike the much more extensive menhirs at Carnac in southern Brittany it’s improbable that they were instruments to foretell earth tremors – no area of Britain is less susceptible to seismic activity.

It’s likely that they were also places of celebration . . .

. . . of the sun which provided power and warmth, greater warmth 5,000 years ago than it provides here today

. . . of the moon which determined tides and illumined the interminable winter nights.

Celebration isn’t the same as worship.

The presence of ritual – which appeals to a certain cast of mind with a fondness for occluded drama and ancient conspiracies – cannot be confirmed. Nor for that matter denied, though it is worth noting that while these stones are 5,000 years old, Wicca, Druidism and Paganism are little more than 300 years old and much ancient ritual derives from polytechnics in the 1970s and ’80s.

FEMALE SINGER IN NEO-CELTIC GARB ON SHORE, WATER LAPPING NEAR FEET. SONGS OF PRAISE STYLE. SONG IN GAELIC (WITH SOME ENGLISH WORDS

FOR WHICH THERE IS NO GAELIC EQUIVALENT) SUBTITLES:

Theoretical models of Wicca inclusion/exclusion,

Workshopping Paganism’s assessment strategies,

Multiple-choice date in Druidical knowledge sourcing.

These I learnt in my third year in the Celtic Studies Department.

CALLANISH JM MULTIPLIED. LOCKED-OFF

It was about that time, too, that Celtic folk rock established itself here and in Brittany, Ireland and Galicia – a cleverly marketed kind of pop music based on nationalistic sentimentalism, on a sense of victimhood, on the Celtic world’s secessionist destiny and on an antipathy to the primacy of the English, French and Castilian languages. The entire package is as rooted in historical certainty as tartan and Ossian’s epic. Which doesn’t mean that it is not real. Bogusness has its own reality.

The nature of these sites’ funerary roles and their uses as commemorative cemeteries is moot.

But . . . the disposition of boulders by evolution is visually random. We obviously witness it on this island. We see it too on the Breton coast near Carnac and in the sarsens on Marlborough Downs near Avebury – sarsens that were often mistaken for sheep. Which must have caused some embarrassing injuries.

The presumption that henges and menhirs and dolmens are sacred is based more in the interpretative and speculative biases of the early modern age which first concerned itself with such phenomena than in irrefutable evidence. The ascription of fanci­fully conceived primitive belief systems to our ancestors is wrongheaded.

The contention that the religious instinct was paramount in all peoples and in all epochs is taken for granted: which is a good reason to question it.

Why should ancient man have been any different from us – some of us are credulous, more are not. In societies where there is no cultural coercion or political obligation we believe or not according to our conscience and intellect.

It is patronising and ahistorical to assume – as neo-Celtic musicians appear to – that the ancient Gaelic world was monocultural. Some sites may have been sacred, others secular.

What is indisputable about these sites is that they tell us mankind is a maker. That is what is paramount. They do not tell us why they were made. And we shall never know for sure.

Given a few pebbles and an idle moment many of us will position them in lines, grade them according to size, form elementary shapes with them. This could very likely be diagnosed as symptomatic of obsessive compulsive disorder. Which it was not called all those millennia ago.

Mankind obsessively devises patterns. Maybe these sites have no meaning. They are patterns made for their own sake or for the sake of controlling their environment. Maybe they are pre-Euclydian exercises in creating a non-representational kind of art, specifically what we know as land art. An art based in the collection and regimentation of local materials which happen, in the case of gneiss or granite, to be durable. There may have been thousands of kindred sites constructed in areas of friable material – chalk or sandstone or gritstone or wood. Sites which have not come down to us because they rapidly eroded or rotted leaving no trace. Our knowledge is dependent on geological chance.

DRAMATIC CLIFFS, CRASHING WAVES

The most circumstantially persuasive argument for these neolithic sites being sacred rather than the result of collective OCD is their very location.

Which is topographically extreme, climatically extreme.

GAUNT LANDSCAPE EMPHASISING ISOLATION

It is in such exaggerated places that religions are born and it’s where they flourish: deserts, steppes, tundra, mountains, salt flats, aridity, permafrost – these are propitious conditions for the shift into hallucinatory irreason that is dignified by the name of faith. The more extreme a landscape or climate the greater its effects on its inhabitants.

Temperate climes are, happily, less effective cradles of what David Hume called ‘sick men’s dreams’. They promote the greatest of human virtues, cynicism – in its true sense. The UK, France and Denmark are the least observant countries in western Europe. For the moment.

RODEL CHURCH, SOUTH HARRIS. MAP 18 REF NB 048 832

The Isle of Rust is entirely atypical of the UK as it is today. There are 50 churches – one for every 400 people – in a population of 22,000. Over a third of those people attend a church every Sunday. A vastly larger proportion than anywhere else in Britain. Though it must be noted, too, that two thirds of the population is not observant.

This church at Rodel, founded by a gentleman called Hunchbacked Alasdair, is the most impressive medieval building on Rust. But it would be nothing special elsewhere in north Britain. It is the exception that proves the rule of the island’s churches’ unfailing banality.

TYPICAL CHURCHES, CHAPELS, PRAYER BOXES AND THEIR OVERFLOWING CAR PARKS (CAR PARKS WILL OBVIOUSLY HAVE TO BE FILMED ON SUNDAY WHEN THEY ARE CROWDED AND CARS ARE ALSO LEFT ON VERGES). WE CAN HEAR GAELIC PSALMS WHETHER OR NOT THERE IS A SERVICE TAKING PLACE. THERE ARE SERVICES THROUGHOUT SUNDAY IN BOTH ENGLISH AND GAELIC.

GRABHAIR 12.00 GAELIC, 18.00 ENGLISH (REMOTE CHURCH WITH LARGE AND FULL CAR PARK). MAP 14 REF NB 375 156

And unfailing dreariness. The idea that a church might be visually enjoyable is alien to Calvinism. Enjoyment?!

Indeed while Presbyterian sects are forever diverging over doctrinal nuances invisible to the lay observer they are united in their contempt for the pursuit of beauty. The jezebel called architecture is a papist strumpet. Icons are sacrilegious. Music is the devil’s work. Ritual is theatre – which is an abomination. To delight the eye is an offence against modesty. These paltry insipid buildings are slights to mankind: they are incitements to lead a life in fear of life. They are the very obverse of the great stone circles which are hymns to mankind.

CROSSBOST 12.00 GAELIC, 18.00 ENGLISH. MAP 14 REF NB 387 246

Unlike Anglicanism Calvinism demands commitment. It is a matter of conviction and unconditional acquiescence. It affects the way its adherents lead their constrained life.

Even though it is today a minority pathology – just – it still attempts to create a cultural tyranny and to impose its morals and wacky brand of tolerance on the majority – who can think for itself.

KINLOCH CHURCH 12.00 GAELIC, 18.00 ENGLISH. MAP 14 REF NB 322 221

The most evident manifestation of the sacred’s contamination of the secular is on Sundays. The Lord’s day. The Sabbath.

Even though, despite the clamorous minority’s objections, a Sunday ferry now sails, the island closes down. The majority of the vehicles to be seen are those of church-goers. Work of any sort is disapproved of, but so is leisure – don’t tend your garden, don’t go for a walk, don’t listen to music, don’t go fishing, don’t swim. Don’t . . . don’t . . . don’t . . . Proscribe this. Prohibit that.

STORNOWAY. DAY. MAY NEED TO SHOOT EARLY MORNING. VARIETY OF DESERTED STREETS. CLOSED SHOPS AND PUBS. NO TRAFFIC. NO PEDESTRIANS. SILENCE – HOLD FOR LONGER THAN MIGHT BE EXPECTED

The cause may be delusional credulousness – but it results in the greatest of modern luxuries. Silence. Calm. Something close to serenity.

It causes us to realise that there is a secular case for sabbatarianism. For, anyway, a day that is different – not necessarily Sunday – a day when there is nowhere to lout about at lunchtime, to chant in the afternoon, to get into a stramash, to buy pointless things in an atmosphere where your ears hurt because of drivelling pop-noise and your nose hurts because of burger stench.

It is, of course, conceivable that the Sabbath is uncomplain­ingly observed because much of the population is in no condition to do anything but slump after the previous evening’s nordic exertions.

FRANTIC LOUD HEAVY METAL. STORNOWAY. NIGHT – OR PARTIAL DARKNESS.

ROWDY STREETS. BARS

Our race’s most widespread means of escapism are religious faith and insensate intoxication. For a totally satisfactory result combine the two in the manner of dervishes, berserkers, shamans.

SERIOUS LEGLESSNESS. PEOPLE THROWING UP. POOLS OF VOMIT

Oh! They certainly know how to escape themselves.

A kip in the pews and a copious supply of Irn-Bru is just the ticket after a gallon of heavy plus chasers.

Until the beginning of this decade all alcohol was imported.

ANDREW RIBBENS WITH BOTTLE OF BERSERKER. FORMAL, ARTIFICIAL - LIKE VICTORIAN PORTRAIT. (HEBRIDEAN BREWERY, BELLS ROAD, STORNOWAY)

In 2001 Andrew Ribbens established the Hebridean Brewery . . .

MARCO TAYBURN WITH BOTTLE OF WHISKY. ARMCHAIR ON BEACH. (ABHAINN DEARG DISTILLERY,CARNISH) MAP 13 REF NB 029 324

And last year Marco Tayburn set up the Aveen Jarraeck Distillery. The Red River Distillery. Apt if belated, for whisky is the only Gaelic word most of the world knows and this island has Scotland’s largest concentration of Gaelic speakers –

GAELIC SIGNS VERY C/U SO THEY DON’T READ

If, that is, one discounts Glasgow’s Gaelic-speaking ghetto of:

Gaelic language media dimensioning operatives, Gaelic language propagation strategists, Gaelic language participation leaders, Gaelic language education vanguard light managers, Gaelic language ambit teachers’ teachers, Gaelic language vision lobbyists, Gaelic language sit-on-my-face-book inscribers, Gaelic language horizontal sausaging matrix implementers, Gaelic language translatability facilitators, Gaelic language fellation development officers, Gaelic language signage advisors and Gaelic language supremacists.

The self-important sociolinguistic industry is, of course, risible but the language it supports most certainly isn’t. That only 60,000 people speak it is no reason to allow it to wither on the tongue. The fact that it might be more practical to allow the English language to vanquish it is of no moment. Practicality is an infirm criterion.

Think of Gaelic as a threatened system of cultural ecology or compare it to a species nearing extinction or a spirituous liquor which might disappear because the recipe was lost. As in a way it was. There is, of course, a generalised Gaelic culture as bogus as the plaid and pipes of the Highlands – bardic and bearded with a brand of folk rock and a typeface that links Galicia, Brittany, western Ireland and the Hebrides in a cisatlantic union of minoritarian defiance.

C/U GUGA OR BUDGIES

But there is much that is peculiar to Rust.

Guga, for instance. Gannets. Ten men make the hazardous forty-mile journey each August to the uninhabited island of Sula Sgeir. They spend a fortnight trapping and salting around 2,000 chicks. This was once alimentary necessity. The meat apparently tastes like chicken fed on fish meal. I shall give it a miss, like I gave fermented trout a miss.

WHALING STATION RUINS. MAP 14 NB 125 044

I wish I’d given whale a miss. But I was only three – at a picnic on a Dorset beach. It would have been discourteous to refuse the lumps of grey gelatinous meat beneath an undercooked pastry crust. It was like chewing an eraser.

JAMIE FLYNN SONG (GAELIC INSTRUMENTS AS WELL AS LYRICS – BUT RECOGNISABLE AS ‘SAILING’. TRANSLATION REQUIRED) SUBTITLES

I am whaling

I am whaling

Very soaked, Mum

To the skin, Mum

Harpoon’s sharpened

Did Cowdenbeath win?

I am whaling

This whaling station was operational from 1904 till a few years after the Second World War.

WHALE’S JAW BONE BESIDE MAIN ROAD. MAP 8 REF NB 291 476

Whales were processed for ambergris – a constituent of perfumes – for oil and wax – which were used in soap and candles, and margarine, which explains a lot. The meat – cheap, plentiful, unpleasant – was a staple part of islanders’ diet.

FISH FARM, CREELS AND PENS, BESIDE BRIDGE TO GREAT BERNERA. MAP 13 REF NB 167 342

A lot of food is still produced here. But much of it is beyond the inhabitants’ means – scallops, lobster, crayfish and so on. But not salmon which is so intensively farmed that its price has plummeted along with its quality.

The lochs are factories.

MARINE HARVEST, MIABHAIG PIER, KIT, TRAPS, SHED, ETC. MAP 13 REF NB 091 343

And like factories they manifest what might be called an industrial style – though that’s pushing it a bit. Sub-utilitarian is more like it.

EXTERIOR OF BUILDING, STORNOWAY FISH SMOKERS, SHELL STREET, STORNOWAY

Herrings and salmon are kippered, salmon is cold smoked and cured as gravadlax.

BUCKET OF BLOOD. [OR: BUTCHER MAKING BLACK PUDDING; PROBABLY BEST TO SHOOT AT CHARLES MACLEOD’S PREMISES, ROPEWORK PARK, STORNOWAY - PREMISES NEED TO BE DRAB OR INDUSTRIAL)]

Macleod and Macleod, Charles Macleod, W. J. Macdonald, A. and R. Morrison, A. France. All of these butchers make the best, the truly original, the most authentic Stornoway black pudding – marag dhubh. It is the peer of the best blutwurst, boudin noir and morcilla. It can sit at the top table and hold its own.

CATTLE IN FIELD

Highland cattle. Crowdie cheese. Beef.

SHEEP ON SALT MARSH, TAOBH TUATH, SOUTH HARRIS. MAP 18 REF NA 995 905. HIGH PITCHED BLEATING

Sheep. Lamb. Hogget. Wether. Tweed.

 

PART THREE AND A HALF

PHOTOGRAPHY. JOHN BRETT STYLE HEIGHTENED NATURALISM.

STORNOWAY, QUAY STREET. HARBOUR AND LEWS CASTLE BEYOND

That toy fortress was built by Sir James Matheson in 1848. It’s in a style that a plutocrat might have chosen twenty-five years earlier, long before Victoria’s accession.

LEWS CASTLE

Which is not surprising because Matheson had been out east for all that time. He was a trader. That is to say a drug dealer – on a heroic scale that the Medellin cartel can only look on with envious wonder.

This god-fearing teetotaller bought the entire island with a fortune made from transporting opium from India to China and from promoting addictive dependence in tens of thousands of people in southern China.

It was on behalf of Matheson and his fellow dealers when they were expelled by the Chinese government that Britain waged the ignominious opium wars. Matheson should have been imprisoned. Instead he received a baronetcy and, like many criminals before and since, became a member of parliament whereupon he proposed that the grim lump of rock called North Rona, sixty kilometres north of here, should be turned into a high-security jail.

He built his castle on the site of the island’s only distillery – thus encouraging the use of illicit stills.

LEWS CASTLE PARK – SINGLE-LANE ROAD GOING WEST THROUGH RHODODENDRONS, SHRUBS, ROCKY WOODLAND. IT HAS THE LOOK OF VICTORIAN HYPER-REALIST PAINTING. THIS SHOULD BE CAPTURED. MAP 8 REF NB 362 328

While the castle is, despite its size, rather trivial, the remarkable grounds lead us to understand that zoos and aviaries and parks and arboreta – despite their association with the Enlightenment’s propagation of knowledge – were founded by men trying to play at God. Trying to mimic what was still widely considered to be his creation. They belong, sentimentally, to an age before reason. Or at least to an age before humility and reason told man that he was no more capable of controlling the world than a god had been of having created it.

RUINED CROFTS OF MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY. LOW WALLS, ALMOST ILLEGIBLE AS HOUSES. WE DO NOT WANT ONES WHICH HAVE BEEN PATCHED UP WITH CORRUGATED IRON. POSSIBLE: FUAIGH MOR (ISLAND OFF GT BERNERA - REQUIRES BOAT), MAP 13 REF NB 130 350 AND CALBOST, MAP 14 REF NB 409 169

In Matheson’s native northern Highlands the clearances of crofters had been undertaken by landowners and clans chiefs in what they believed – or at least deluded themselves – was a spirit of philanthropic noblesse oblige: the so-called Improvements were as much a project of Enlightenment pedagogy as of agrarian capitalism.

CAVES ON FUAIGH MOR (AS ABOVE) OR ELSEWHERE

People who could barely read or write and who subsisted in insanitary bothies, burrows and caves were forcibly removed from the land – the land which hardly yielded them a living.

SHEEP – THREATENING EN MASSE, ALMOST SWARMING. CAMERA AT SHEEP’S EYE LEVEL. SHEEP EVERYWHERE INCLUDING: ARNISH MOOR, MAP 8 REF NB 367 284

AND ROAD GOING NORTH FROM MAP 14 REF NB 381 178

Some were provided with houses, jobs and education in the new grid-plan fisher-towns of the Sutherland and Caithness coasts, some were transported across the Atlantic. The moors they had inhabited were made over to sheep.

By the mid-nineteenth century all philanthropic pretence had been abandoned.

Matheson proceeded to treat the islanders – his islanders – with the same sensitivity that he had displayed in Canton, though they were not provided with the balmy solace of narcosis.

He did not build a fisher-town. In the early years of the 1850s almost 2,000 inhabitants were forcibly expatriated, mostly to Canada, their passage paid by Matheson. The suppression of whisky was calculated. The suppression of Gaelic was a clumsy consequence of the involuntary diaspora.

LONG STRAIGHT ROAD. NO HOUSES VISIBLE. RATHAD A’PHENTLAND LOOKING WEST. MAP 8 REF NB 355 340

What Matheson did build was roads – they provided work during the famine years of the 1840s. He intended that they should be used to transport peat so that it might be transformed into tar: the scheme was a nonstarter.

On the mainland such roads came to be known as destitution roads because they were built by the destitute and it was along them the indigent marched away from destitution to their uncertain future on the other side of the world.

The name is prescient.

Today they still often lead to destitution.

 

PART FOUR

THE ISLAND STARTS TO LOOK LESS IDYLLIC. KITSCHY HOUSES, STORNOWAY.

EAST END OF MEMORIAL AVENUE AND WILLOWGLEN ROAD, A858, (100 M W. OF

PERCEVAL ROAD JUNCTION)

Whatever wealth is generated is mostly well concealed. It is very seldom manifest in the built environment. And when it is . . .

DUALCHAS HOUSE, BREINIS (ON WEST COAST, SOUTH OF UIG), MAP 13 REF NA 993 267

There are some works of architectural merit on the island. Well, two. And they seem impertinently pretentious measured against the startlingly abject norm.

BANAL INHABITED HOUSES – ALL OF THEM GREY HARL. (NOT WRECKS OR SHACKS). FORMALLY SHOT, STRAIGHT ON - AS THOUGH THE HOUSES ARE POSING. SHOT TO EMPHASISE SIMILARITY AND INSIPIDITY. WE SHALL NEED AT LEAST A DOZEN TO COVER V/O AND PTC. ANYWHERE, E.G. NORTH LEWIS – THE TOWNSHIPS ALONG THE A 857 BARABHAS TO BUTT OF LEWIS ROAD AND LEVERBURGH, MAP 18 REF NB 015 860, AND TAOBH TUATH, MAP 18 REF NA 980 900, AND CALLANISH – HOUSES SHOT FROM BETWEEN THE STONES

This is perhaps the only place in the world whose townships and villagescapes, urbanism and landscapes are wholly infected by the Calvinist mentality . . .

that is, by a blindness to prettification . . .

an ignorance of any recognisable notion of beauty . . .

by an aesthetic bereavement so absolute that it is a sort of insouciant anti-aesthetic.

In a way the everyday buildings are the very contrary of Matheson’s. They suggest that to compete with this most magnificent terrain would be both hubristic and certain failure. So they simply didn’t bother to compete.

The unsurpassable strangeness of the island resides in the chasmic gulf between the naturally evolved and the negligently created, between scarp and scrap, between the sublime and the sub­standard.

RUN RIG FIELD SYSTEM. THERE ARE MANY EXAMPLES, E.G. 0.75 KM SW OF ORASAIGH, MAP 14 REF NB 365 115, AND LIURBOST, MAP 14 REF NB 378 252, AND 1 KM W. OF BAILE AILEIN, MAP 14 REF NB 275 206, AND GEARRAIDH BHAIRD, MAP 14 REF NB 365 194, AND CALBOST, MAP 14 REF NB 416 169, AND LEUMRABHAGH SHOT FROM POV, MAP 14 REF NB 378 113

Not that the natural is invariably natural: it generally isn’t.

The landscape most formed by man here is not that of menhirs and dolmens. In fact man is moot in this context. The cable-knitted hillsides are the work of the sheep that man introduced. They sit alongside the field systems called run rig or lazy beds. This corrugated pattern of drainage furrows – the runs; and of fertile ridges – the rigs, is mostly in desuetude . . . but it is so widespread that it is one of the defining characteristics of the landscape.

These systems, like stone circles, possess a kind of abstract integrity that often attaches to the purely practical.

PART FIVE

WRECKS, RUINS, BROKEN VEHICLES, ABANDONED COACHES, RUSTING BULLDOZERS, UNSEAWORTHY BOATS, ETC. THERE IS A WEALTH OF MATERIAL. BUT SHORT OF RESORTING TO SHOW AND TELL THERE IS NOT A LOT TO SAY. SO ALTHOUGH THIS SECTION IS VERBALLY BRIEF IT CAN BE TAKEN SLOWLY, ESPECIALLY GIVEN THE VISUAL STRENGTH OF IT ALL. PHOTOGRAPHY – VERY COLOURFUL, SATURATED. ESSENTIAL TO COMPOSE FRAMES THAT SHOW CORRUGATED IRON, MACHINERY, SCRAP, ETC., IN THEIR SURROUNDINGS. EMPHASISE THE CONTRAST BETWEEN NATURAL GRANDEUR AND SCRAP SQUALOR.

MAP 14 REF NG 155 928, GREOSABHAGH. SCRAPYARD SPILLING ON TO ROAD

The steadings and smallholdings, too, are purely practical.

But where the field systems are ordered the buildings are extraordinarily chaotic.

BAILE AILEIN ON A859, MAP 14 REF NB 300 210, CARAVANS, SHACKS, BACK OF ARTIC > 2KM W AT JUNCTION OF A 859 AND B8060, MAP 14 REF NB 269 201

The island’s shackscape is the apogee of the northern Hebridean anti-aesthetic.

MAP 14 REF NG 132 915, CAOLAS. FINE CARAVAN AND SHACK ENSEMBLE

Members of the National Trust and kindred bastions of insipid taste will doubtless fail to recognise the fantastical beauty of what is here – they should be pitied and soothed with a Glamis tea towel.

MAP 14 REF NB 415 185, MARBHIG. CORRUGATED IRON SHACK RUSTING

These scapes are beautiful in the way that a lupus is beautiful,

MAP 14 REF NB 390 245. RUSTING HARROW AND, NEARBY, ABANDONED TRACTOR

AND ASSORTED WRECKED THINGS

or mould on fruit,

A858 BETWEEN MAP 8 REF NB 330 285 AND REF NB 288 299. THERE ARE TO THE SOUTH OF THE ROAD AT LEAST FIVE ROOFLESS HOUSES WITH FINE LOCH/LANDSCAPES BEYOND THEM

or decaying meat,

or scar tissue,

or amputations,

or diseases of the skin,

or anatomical freaks. They exert the same pull.

MAP 8 REF NB 359 265. CORRUGATED IRON SHACKS ON BOTH SIDES OF UN-NUMBERED ROAD TO LIURBOST, ALSO A PAINTED BUS. NUMEROUS OTHER BOATS IN BACK GARDENS, SHACKS AND RUINS ALONG THIS ROAD WHICH CONTINUES TO CROSBOST (SEE FIELD SYSTEMS ABOVE). ALSO SHED BUILT FROM BOAT HULLS

This is the great outdoors as it might have been conceived by hothouse poets of the darkest indoors, by virtuosi of polymorphous perversion: Francis Bacon and Arthur Tress, Joel Peter Witkin and Felicien Rops.

It’s everything that planning can never achieve. Art born of artlessness and carelessness – as though man has hurled temporary structures like the old gods hurled boulders.

MAP 18 REF NG 058 848, 0.5 KM S. OF LINGREABHAGH. BURNT-OUT BLUE VAN

It is a thrilling environment made by a beguiling lack of respect for that most sacred of cows, ‘the environment’ – worthy, green, dull and tiresomely backward-looking. Put a petrol head in a pedestrian precinct and you’ll get a fascinating crash.

MOINTEACH AIRINIS, SPECTACULARLY SCRAPPY AGRI KIT WITH SAILS OF WINDFARM PEEPING OVER HILLTOP BEHIND. TRACK OFF A859 1.5 KM AFTER TURN OFF TO B897, MAP 8 REF NB 378 297

And once the entropic template was established it was repeated with endless amendments and in countless permutations.

MAP 14 REF NB 252 175. BIZARRE BULBOUS SCULPTURE LIKE AN INFLATED ONION WRAPPED IN NYLON NETTING. BROKEN-UP CATAMARAN

There is nothing that cannot be used as an ad-hoc folly, as a felicity beacon, as an iconic icon.

And there is apparently no one on the island who is immune to the appeal of the found object and the oxidising object.

MAP 14 REF NG 158 963. MIABHAIG. IMPLODED BLUE VAN

Whoever would have thought that the last remaining bastion of fundamentalist Calvinism would become the site of a scrap cult.

That the most seductive collective expression of Gaelic vernacular culture would involve immobile bulldozers, holed boats, Allegros buried in dunes . . .

MAP 14 REF NG 117 908. GEOCRAB. HOUSE BECOMING INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM ROCKS

Whoever would have thought . . .

We should think again. This island nation, this rather enchanted island is a law unto itself. De jure it belongs to Scotland. De facto it belongs to itself – it’s a tartan-free zone.

STORNOWAY OUTSKIRTS. A859. COLLAPSED CORRUGATED IRON BUILDING OPPOSITE WESTERN LODGE OF LEWS CASTLE. SHOOT C/U. MAP 8 REF NB 404 326

Far from being stuck in the Scottish past it presages the not very distant future when continents and nations and regions and towns and villages split . . .

MAP 14 REF NB 401 244. SYSTEM OF SHEEP PENS AND FENCES. A PRAM WITH CRATE ATTACHED – PRESUMABLY USED FOR TRANSPORTING SEAFOOD

. . . into ever smaller fragments according to their language, their patois, their schismatic religion, their wacko culture – and their peripherality.

MAP 14 REF NG 112 905. BEACRABHAIC. WRECKED HOUSES, AND A CARAVAN TIED DOWN WITH GUY ROPES IN LUNAR SURROUNDINGS

Other extremities of this continent spell out their situation: Finistera, Finisterre, Land’s End.

Rust may stay stumm about it but this is the end of the world . . . The old world. And the beginning of a new one.

MAP 8 REF NB 234 321. CALANISH. PURPLE HOUSE – NEW AGE?

It does indeed foster a minority culture which has the strength of its self-consciousness.

Its language is a means of communication but it is equally a cause spoken by very few people.

MAP 14 REF NB 335 198. NEAR TABOST. FINE STRIPED CARAVAN AT ODD ANGLE

It is abnormally religiously observant. Other nations and nation states will catch up. It will come to seem normal. There can, regrettably, be little doubt that this century will witness a religious revival like that of the second quarter of the 19th century.

GROANING GRINDING NOISES TO SUGGEST TECTONIC PLATES. JM WALKING THROUGH BOG - HE ARRIVES TO REVEAL BLUE TRANSIT AT END OF PTC

1 KM N OF LEUMRABHAGH, MAP 14 REF NB 373 127. SHOOT TRANSIT FROM ROAD

LOOKING S TOWARDS LOCHS AND SEA

It suffers exemplary conditions to succour the twenty-first century’s gradual isolation and subsequent atomisation. This is the wi-fi wilderness – when the wi-fi is not climatically disrupted. Like poor crofters and weavers before them its inhabitants are discovering the hell that is home-working. Offices, labs, studios, canteens are social places. There are no canteens in the wilderness. There are no snoutcasts gathered outside a door shivering into their gaspers.

NUTS/FHM COVER WITH SHEEP IN LINGERIE ON THE COVER

How long before we succumb to the woolly temptresses on the moor who shamelessly go naked even on the Sabbath?

How long can we survive being trapped in a virtual cage? That is a bit of a mystery. There are, however, much greater mysteries to dwell on.

How do you get a Ford Transit into the middle of a peat bog?

UPSIDE-DOWN CAR IN PEAT. S. OF A858 1.3 KM AFTER TURNING OFF A859, MAP 8 REF NB 343 273

I’m not expecting an answer to that. Nor to . . .

How do you get a Mini Metro into the middle of a peat bog and then turn it upside-down?

These vehicles will gradually be enveloped by sphagnum moss. Several millennia hence, in a world ignorant of internal combustion, they will be discovered in a state of at least partial preservation and revered as sacred objects from a distant, pre- apocalyptic age – a paradisiac age which ended with a bleat and a rusted carburettor.

FULL FRAME C/U SHEEP. NOISE OF CAR REFUSING TO START. JM RUNNING (LIMPING) ALONG BEACH. TOWARDS CAMERA. AT LAST MOMENT IT BECOMES APPARENT THAT IT IS SHOT IN MIRROR. HIS BACK COMES INTO FRAME.

 

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