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Figure 1: Publicity image for Merchant City Heritage Walk (Glasgow Women’s Library): façade of Glasgow Maternity Hospital at Rottenrow
It is a hot Saturday afternoon in early June when my mother-in-law, daughter and I make our way to the site of the former Royal Maternity Hospital in Rottenrow for a Women of the Merchant City Heritage Walk run by Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL). The library, based on Landressy Street close to Bridgeton Cross in the East End of Glasgow, is the only accredited museum dedicated to women’s history in the UK and has an impressive collection recognised as of national significance. Volunteers (or ‘history detectives’ as they call themselves), research and deliver a range of Women’s Heritage Walks in Glasgow. The most recent one in May 2023 was a new walk through the Gorbals and there are also a range of Suffrage Walks as part of the programme. The aim is to make Glasgow’s women’s history visible, and to tell the stories of women who have had an impact on the city and beyond.
In Where are the Women? (2021), Sara Sheridan claims that our sense of self and where we come from is not confined to history books (2021: 7) arguing that if women don’t see themselves represented in the world around them, the message that girls and women receive is that ‘their stories, and indeed achievements, don’t matter’ (ibid.). Sheridan notes that in her home city of Edinburgh there are more statues of animals than there are of women, and she embarks on an imagining of a Scotland that maps the achievements of women, celebrating their lives and making them visible. In The Feminist City (2021), Leslie Kern argues that ‘physical places like cities matter when we want to think about social change’ (2021: 14), but as Rebecca Solnit reminds us, walking the city streets is not equal: ‘Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk’ (Solnit, 2001: 234). These two elements; of accessing women’s invisible histories, and the act of taking a walk in the city which has for women often been constructed as ‘performance rather than transport’ (ibid.) come together in this women’s history heritage walk through Glasgow’s Merchant City.
Three generations of women in my family stand looking over the foliage of the Rottenrow gardens where the old hospital used to loom over the city. I point out to my daughter that the portico we are in was the entrance to the hospital. Huge green leaves fill the windows and she asks: ‘are they real?’ I assure her they are. While I am on a walk with my family, I am also undertaking what David Overend describes as ‘creative fieldwork’ (2023: 6), acknowledging the ways in which our presence and engagement with a site becomes part of it. Once everyone has gathered, we walk a short distance to find some shade and learn about the now demolished hospital, commemorated by a 7m high sculpture of a safety pin with a bird on top called Mhtpothta/Maternity created by George Wylie and installed on the site in 2004 by the University of Strathclyde. Our guides tell us that we are on the edge of the Merchant City, but that this area would have been populated by the poorer classes, who lived in the shadow of the smoking factories while the wealthy merchants lived further down the hill. Everyone laughs when the guide tells of the famous tobacco lord John Glassford (the namesake of Glassford Street) who had a portrait of his wife repainted with the face of his new spouse: ‘This piece of 18th century editing deems women to be replaceable, almost ghostly; there in spirit but not important to the story’ (GWL heritage walk).
Figure 2: Foliage through the windows of the portico on the site of the old maternity hospital
Figure 3: Rottenrow Gardens
The artist Joan Eardley painted the children in this area and was notorious for walking around with her paints and canvases in a pram. Her Three Children at a Tenement Window provides the cover of the map for the walk. Our tour guide tells a story about how Eardley painted her male friend nude, and after a Glasgow newspaper printed her address in the paper she was inundated with offers from men to take their clothes off for her. She was known to say that Glasgow has ‘a living thing. While Glasgow has this I’ll always want to paint.’ Joan died of breast cancer in 1963 aged 42 but her depictions of Glasgow children live on in galleries across Scotland and the world.
Our guide says, ‘If you hiked up the hill, imagine doing it whilst nearly 9 months pregnant; the incline was known by some as Induction Brae or Hill’ (GWL heritage walk). As well as a maternity hospital, it was also a midwifery training centre and pioneered ultrasound (used at Glasgow shipyards) and risky caesarean-sections. We learn from the tour guides that women who suffered from poor diet and no sunlight (referred to in the medical literature of the time as having ‘rickety dwarfism’) had deformed pelvises and became pioneers of the surgery. The first woman, a 27-year-old who had the operation in April 1888, called her son Caesar Cameron, after the procedure and Dr Cameron who delivered her baby.
Figure 4: Image of women who underwent caesarean sections at the hospital
Figure 5: Nurses at Rottenrow
My own daughter was born by emergency-c-section, and I think about the lineage of women who had this surgery in the 1880s, who would stay in bed for 18 days after the surgery (we were out the hospital less than 24hours later). Now aged four my daughter sits in her pram and draws while the women talk. I am not sure how much she is taking in but when I ask her what she is drawing she says it is the ‘green ladies’, the names given to the nurses due to their green uniforms and strong sense of sisterhood. The Lock Hospital for Unfortunate Females was also on this site, a treatment centre for women and children with venereal diseases which opened in 1805 and was based in Rottenrow in 1845-6, designed to look like the surrounding tenements, presumably to hide what were seen as morally objectionable diseases.
As we walk deeper into the Merchant City on to George Street, the tour guides battle against the traffic noise to be heard. We stand on the site of the home of the former Strickland Press, where The Word (a Socialist paper which ran from 1938-1962) was published. Ethel Macdonald and Jenny Patrick were two of the key figures in the paper ensuring issues such as family planning and equality for women were covered. They travelled to Spain during the civil war and Ethel earned the name ‘the Scots Scarlet Pimpernel’ due to her role at an anarchist radio station in Barcelona and supporting comrades in prison.
Figure 6: Ethel MacDonald
Figure 7: News article about The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel, Ethel MacDonald (taken outside the Press Bar).
The smart green tiles of The Press Bar are a legacy of the news heritage of these streets and on this sunny day, people enjoy a cold pint of lager on the outdoor tables, Glasgow passing for European in the sunshine. We stand outside the Herald building on Albion Street (1980-1995) as our guides focus on women in news, charting the histories of those writers and the occasional rare editor who ‘made it beyond the women’s pages’. They evoke the sounds and atmosphere of the street when at midnight the presses would be fired up and the sound of machinery would be followed by the noise of bundles of newspapers smacking on to the pavement. A picture is passed around of Dorothy Grace Elder, a features editor within the worker’s co-operative which created The Scottish Daily News.
As we enter the gates of the St David’s Ramshorn Church the street noise fades away and the stillness of the green leafy graveyard settles over the group. We are here to hear the story of the story of Pierre Emile L’Angelier who died in 1857 and rests in the Fleming family tomb. When his body was exhumed two days after his death, he was found to have enough arsenic to kill 20 men in his system. Miss Madeline Smith’s love letters were found at his home and her murder trial became one of the most famous Victorian cases. ‘Why is there only one boy?’ my daughter asks, nodding to the man who has accompanied his wife for the day (and who ends up playing the judge in the short re-enactment of Madeline Smith’s trial – the verdict of not proven saw her walking free). I explain to my daughter that we are on a women’s history walk so it is mainly women here, but that everyone is welcome. She nods, seemingly satisfied, and returns to doodling on the map with her favourite pink pen.
Figure 8: Images of Blythswood Square and rendering of Madeline Smith in Ramshorn churchyard
Figure 9: Exterior of the Ramshorn Church, Ingram Street
Returning to the bustling streets with people sitting outside enjoying beers and a late lunch, we hear about women’s involvement in the temperance movement, as 19th century Glasgow became a haven for tearooms to try to move away from the problems caused by the ‘demon drink’ (GWL heritage walk). Carrie A. Nation, known as the bar-room smasher came from Kentucky armed with a hatchet to smash bars in the city. Her newspaper The Hatchet was part of the highly active Glasgow temperance movement which aimed in politicising women and making visible the effects on families, such as domestic abuse, as one of the women detectives tells us ‘A nation never rises higher than its mothers’ (GWL heritage walk).
As the tour is running late, the route is diverted to a final stop, on Brunswick Street where we learn of Miss Catherine Cranston, one of the most important businesswomen of the Victorian era, famous for her tearooms. At a time when women stayed home, her father George Cranston was a supporter of women’s suffrage and wanted to educate his daughters. She cannily listed herself as C. Cranston in the phone book as women came after their husbands, and she also decided to keep her maiden name after she got married, something that was unheard of at the time. She walked up Sauchiehall street, named as the street ‘where the willows grow’ to make herself visible on the streets, a businesswoman amongst the flaneurs at a time when women’s place was in the home.
Figure 10: Detail of entrance, Brunswick Street, final stop on the tour
Figure 11: My daughter holding a cartoon image of Dorothy Grace Elder: Women Make History
I was inspired to come on this walk after reading Where are the Women?By Sara Sheridan which my mother-in-law gifted to me for Christmas last year and it felt fitting to come with her as she has a keen interest in history. My daughter also attended, and I was glad, as I want her to know of the women that shaped this city, invisible compared to the men who are monumentalised and celebrated through the statues, street names and buildings. There are some who should not be celebrated, Glasgow’s role in the history of slavery more evidently traced in the Merchant City than any other part of the city. Geographer Gillian Rose argues that one way in which identity is connected to a particular place is by a feeling that you belong to this place. Can you feel like you belong if you don’t see yourself represented or monumentalised or even acknowledged? Kern also writes about the ‘geography of fear’ (2021: 149) that many women experience (often more acutely for women of colour, transwomen and queer women) as they walk through the city streets, especially at night, the threat of sexual violence never far away. As Kathleen Jamie writes: ‘It doesn’t seem too much to ask, to be able to walk outdoors, even in daylight without fear’ (2021: 9).
Sheridan’s book opens with Solnit’s reflection that she couldn’t imagine how she might have conceived of herself and her possibilities if she had moved through a city where most things were named after women. Glasgow, like many other cities, was built and historicised by men, as the dominant gender. So where are the women? They live on in the stories that are told on the streets of the city, not often visibly monumentalised, but traced through the oral histories of those pioneers and rebels, mothers, wives, and daughters who made their mark on Glasgow. This is walking the feminist city.
Bibliography
Andrews, Kerri. 2021. Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. London: Reaktion Books.
Field report: Making Routes visit to Gully Cave, Wells, and Wookey Hole cave and Attractions (18th – 20th November, 2021) by Phil Smith (University of Plymouth)
let’s lay it cross the landscapes
landscapes
lansdscapes
landscoap[e
land scope
lanscspaces
lance spaces
Limestone: bnnneerertet;;ansdsliiiistonooooneeee
What does a sound like stone make?
What stone is turned when unleft is we really look for?
So let lansddacvpe
So let lansdacpe
Sol let lnddscape
So let landcspae
So let slanderscape
Soi let lanadscaope
So let landscappee screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
To Let landscape
So Let landscape speak
What thing it is #
What things there are
Part one after all that, the privileged points hmmm……………..
The tiny stone bridge above the first rush of Mendip water off King’s Castle Hill
Dinder Estate, the ridge of the worm
The deer park land-grab
Is there a real worm? Or is it a vegetable?
How long is the memory?
Let’s lay it across the landscape
Limestone: what do humanssssssssssound like
What doi yow umans zound like?
What do yu
What do you
Human sound
Like? What?
Again?
Bone: let me tell you what sinew feels like, let me tell you the truth about marrow
When it’s stripped from me
By the canines of
All the voices are fake
So how do we speak?
There’s this thing between artists on the one hand and scientists on the other who want to be less anthropocentric, but struggle because all the academic measures of reliability are human, and then to confuse matters and discourses the artists appear to be useful idiots hoovering up science and expressing it with some craft and a little guile, which appears extraordinary and yet thin, but as a media officer an artist delivers. When, however, an artist suggests that they engage with the work itself the scientist often gets nervous, because fools are not useful within the anthropocentric parameters of science and funding if they do not understand the maths or the politics or at least the detailed chronology or how to drop a few of the latest nuances, so the fool becomes useless, and feels it that way, too. The scientist falls back on the hard human rigour of theory and analysis and returns to wondering how they can break from the cycle without fools.
The story speaks: let me lay across the landscape it says and I will show you a rhetoric of repetition, for example… the woman at the entrance to the cave – whether Mary Beauchamp at Gough’s Cave, or the woman whose bones were found by H. E. Balch’s team at the mouth of Wookey Hole, or Danielle standing on a platform of breccias before a grille…. water, magic, time…. do you honestly think you will make a science of any of this without art?
So, let’s lay it cross the landscapes
like a strawberry lin
e
never quite whole, never quite right, satisfying maybe, but neither complete nor sincere
let’s lay it cross the landscapes
there’s something, maybe it’s water, maybe it’s an abstract flow, maybe it’s something else, that is worked and working, from the Dinder Ridge (and maybe, slightly further than that, from Wormheister Sleight) above the deer park sequestered by Jocelyn, the bishop who slew the giant worm – what was that? water? land? riots? what? or is the worm a question mark? Like the large curling yellow vegetables in Bishop Law’s communal allotments?
Limestone: how are you going to control this meaning?
there’s always something else, maybe it’s showbiz? Or demons? What kind of name
breaking down
what is the Limestone word for light entertainment?
E
What is hyenaspeak for Parisian Follies?
How do we speak across different landscapes?
And who is the “we” in that last sentence?
In this situation?
Situation: when do i speak?
Lyers; one above another a
One below another
Sub super other obvious an d
How can I put this another way?
Maybe this is it? How do we reconcile
Is thetr yatra thet the that the right workjd?
How dod you hybdrdies? Withert a plann?
Er …. ….. …..
Ho can we (and who can) accommodate a hall of mirrors and an articulate layering of deepish time, of thousands of years of sedimented predation and birth and socialising and cracking and cross-species exchange of fluids and nutrient fibres and scamperings of mice and the brief sojourn of a careless human, surprised perhaps, caught knapping, dropped their flake, what do we see when we hear a story? A male, because they have a tool? A female, because the tool is slight and subtle? How does the picture contain the same ideas of gender that a “we” does? Or was there something quite different in the sensual dictionary, in the skinny ontological lexicon of the human knowing alongside Neanderthals 45,000 years ago, in the pseudo-premise, pausing briefly or spending long days perched in precarity, studying the movement in the gorge below, listening to the conversations, hearing the drips from the gulley, fearing the constant possibility of a return of hyenas to their stinking (or ornately decorated) den, horror at the chaos of cracked reindeer bones, or admiration for the subtly constructed pattern of deep instinctual and barely felt drives marshalled in white shards, what
Dos culture always begin with apes?
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Limestone: I see it all.
Can stone lie?
Not meaning to, maybe, but are there certain guileless things that limestone inadvertently gives credence to?
Like ufo witnesses who are police officers and airplane pilots… trained to observe and report? Who do the hyenas trust?
how can we escape anthropocentrism without giving up to unreliable animals and ‘inert’ things our right to academic surety?
where do we set down the caravan of critical theory, empirical attention, analytical rigour and tested speculation? How does this “we” bring the tools into the landing sites when nothing is stable?
When no past will simply and transparently step forward?
When everything around is a scree slope of trash piled up by a doubtful angel pushing the slag heap of history higher and higher so we cannot see backwards or forwards, but are stuck in the spoil…
So, let’s get back to a woman’s bones on display in the ‘museum’ of Wookey Hole… (a few years ago I was a resident walking artist for a couple of weeks at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, a very liberal community, lots of Bernie Saunders signs in the front yards, yet I discovered that only a few years before I visited there’d been an ‘eccentric’ home museum housed by a resident among whose artefacts was the severed breast of a slave woman… there are no useful brackets, no parentheses can close or catch anything in such circumstances, nothing can close the wound, there are fled connections we are missing
let’s lay it cross the landscapes though, there’s no ’s
start again
along the ridge of the Dinder Worm, then, begin with the riot, the threat to the bishop, why are there so many representations in the palace of one worm and only one representation of each bishop?
the one worm is a totality of a kind that a bishop cannot hope for?
A slanting cut, a queer bite, a hyena’s canine slicing across the whole…. from Dinder Ridge to… where? How far?
let’s lay it cross the landscapes
start again
with water, everything is water and meaning is just an island
St Michael’s Mount is inside Wookey Hole
On what line do they both lie?
A line of strawberries?
we only make sense of any of this temporarily before we re-enter the swim
so let’s lay across the landscapes the water
this is terrain that gives everything a meaning
Territory: I am the commodity
Terrain: I am the dragon, no one owns me
Landscape: what?
Is anything thinner? More human? Than how we see matter? As a dull and occasionally disgusting inertia wrapped within the sentimentality we call “home” or “country”? What if matter were a matter of worms? Not fixed points but trajectories?
So when the sediment of a cave is lovingly extracted and given attention to, each layer will slowly give up tiny tendrils of narrative, dragging in stories of fear and intelligence, pattern and agency, questing and the kinds of experiment that just happen without a research plan or a risk assessment.
So, let’s lay it cross the landscapes. The springs at Wells, sequestered by the bishops who come later, remembering at each second generation the slaying of a dragon to prevent it from returning… er… isn’t that resurrection? And in life and history, isn’t that restricted to a single persona in Christianity? So, what is so remarkable about this Worm that it causes the bishops to confuse their own theology? Or is it not remarkable, but unremarkable; is it the Demogorgan of Percy Shelley, the people monster, the folk who lost their land – who ‘exchanged’ their own land with the bishop – and did they rise up like a single monster about the thievery of this land, caught by the twilight sun?
let’s start cross the landscapes with the springs
because all this landscape forms under shallow warm oceans somewhere between 250 and 400 million years ago
I need to sleep
Maybe I can sink into those Devonian oceans, exoskeletons sinking through the water all around me, I try to remember my dreams in the Wookey Hole Inn, but I can’t seem to train my dreaming to go into the caves. Maybe I was already in the dream? Maybe I/”we” came from the cave?
let’s lay it cross the landscapes and gamble
I have a suspicion that there may be some significance to the sweep of land from the Dinder Estate through the Cathedral (and its Dipping Pool) along the path through the Wells suburbs and across country (need to walk this) to Wookey Hole and its hyena den and on to Ebbor Gorge and the Gulley Cave, and along the ridge; Priddy, Black Down, Draycott, Cheddar, down to Axbridge…. the strawberries, the lost railway line… snaking around the reservoir, almost as round as the crystal ball of the “witch” is almost spherical, like a mechanical worm…
strawberries deep time the mystical life of the cathedral
every few steps in the Bishop’s Palace Garden (entrance fee £15) a sign alerts you, with a biblical quotation, to assure you that the water around you is not water but a symbolic representation of spirit
in the courtyard of Wookey Hole paper mill, beside the entrance to ‘Santa’s (Satan’s) Grotto’ there are numerous ‘heritage’ enamel signs for oils and petrol – Shell, Castrol… most advertise “spirit”
how do we explain a materialist economy and a materialist social system that expresses itself in ‘spirits’? What if we regard the Wookey Holes Caves and Attractions as an actual machine? What is it doing? What is it producing?
Profits? Dreams?
Or is an energetic activity creating a phantasmagoria … surely not layers?
Limestone: walk me through it….
Lime Walk With Me
Hyenas: only if we can eat you at the end…
Limestone: slippery slab, know what i mean….
let’s lay it cross the landscapes
who said that?
Wookey Hole Cave and Attractions: it begins in the spider’s web of the Overlook Hotel, plastic blue policemen, drizzle, brazenly discarded shells of a giant crocodile and human-elves racing away from the building at the sound of a fire siren – “we’ll be five minutes late… o, we’ve fixed it” – we flow up a wooden tunnel to the cave entrance and plunge into a nightmare of fairy lights, electric decorations traducing a jigsaw of naturally eroded caverns and the violent tunnels blasted between them, the battery of Christmas songs and the fizz of the lights blur out the knobs and drapes of limestone, the galleries and natural chandeliers, the upside down of giant stone vulvas withdrawing into the ceiling, as if a great female hyena had been formed in the rock and then slowly extracted slab by tiny slab leaving its void
there’s nothing new to such traducing; in the 1920s the guides would throw a “flare” of petrol onto the river and light it; archaeologist H. E. Balch writes of the rolls of magnesium ribbon he burned during his time in the cave; sometime around 1971, for a prank, I set fire to a large strip of such ribbon at the back of the chemistry lab during a lesson, precipitating an evacuation; a piece of the burning magnesium, lit up like an ecclesiastical “glory”, dropped past my thigh onto my thick leather satchel, burning all the way through it, a couple of inches the other way….
falling just the other
slippery
sliding slab a couple of inches the other way if
it can be Christmas every day, and it may just be, a burning paper hat around everyone’s head, a cracker tearing fingers off, Brussels Sprouts and brandy setting fire to the fake lawn, I barely notice the narratives of witches and divers and the cavern making the shape of a flying saucer formed by a whirlpool. A goblin behind a transparent mask, vaguely reminiscent of the globular diving helmets of Balcombe and the others, barking muffled commands, then declaims something about farting and acoustics – “you have to laugh don’t you?” – a certain kind of humour is compulsory among goblins, a possession of the present by the 1970s.
So, there is a question right here: did we think a goblin would be like the ones in the book illustrations? Or does this short man do all the goblin things required? Is he sufficiently crass? Mischievous enough? Mining the required base materials? Telling jokes with predictable punch lines; easily dodged but not so easily forgotten. They lodge. The goblin undermines magic. Without the goblin there is no matter exposed. With the goblin there is no light.
He chases us into the muted sunlight to tell us about “woolly mammals”. He’s right, they were, but did he mean to say “mammoths”? Are we clever by laughing at him, or is he cleverer by tricking us into thinking we are?
“you have to laugh don’t you?”
What? Becos it’d all be too massive?
The cave’s too small, and the time’s too long?
How many floors down does this elevator go?
Hyenas: till us.
Limestone: there’s no bottom, it’s whirlpools all the way down
The moment you take the place apart, the moment you separate the elements and the agents, you miss the wholething the wholething binding holding on the homing and and and runningawayoff into down up and you know the rest
Phil: the moment I try to write this, the parts defy the whole, the bone of the wild horse, which I suspect may be the key to all this,
and now, after these few days I am re-thinking because of the hyenas and their organising and the pseudo-penis of the female hyena and the work of Edward Bernays (“pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda”) in selling cigarettes as pseudo-penises to American women in the 1920s, as tools for flappers’ freedom, capitalism’s toxic liberty, we eat at the Fountain Inn on the corner of The Liberty in Wells, a “liberty” being a parcel of land within which a privileged agent has to the freedom to do what the hell they desire without subjection to laws and authorities… like the society of Pasolini’s movie ‘Salò, 120 Days of Sodom’
This from ‘The Pattern’ (2020):
“Erewhons
On St Mary’s, the largest of the Scilly Isles to the West of Cornwall, there is a natural amphitheatre at its most Southerly point, Peninnis Head. It is a grass bowl, surrounded by the cliffs at the water’s edge around one half and around the other by giant rock shapes; both cliffs and rocks have the look of giant tableaux, cyclopean figures clambering from the soil and the procession of souls into the West. They make for a space of Erewhon. A time out of time, a place out of space. We had not created this space, but we activated it for those who walked with us by leading them on a walk of transitions – walking first with a red thread for life and desire, asking the walkers to feel the circulation of the blood in their bodies, and then adding to the red a white thread for bone and death, asking the walkers to feel their skeletons holding them together – it was demonstrably a different way of arriving to that of most of the tourists and hikers who briefly wandered through it admiringly, but seemingly little changed by it.
We watched business advisors leaping rock to rock, and chit-chatty artists sit silently watching the foam.
Erewhons are spatial and temporal. A space can slip in and slip out of Erewhon. Not all Erewhons are good. The elite have their Erewhons, spaces for re-setting the status quo; those Erewhons change nothing; they generate a crazed energy for a minority that leaves everything the same. But the Erewhons that excite us are connective; times out of time that jerk the apparently inevitable narrative of the world (and of individuals) out of joint and spill their consequential strangenesses into the lives of everyone who participates in them.
Opening the gate to the Erewhon on St Mary’s was the first time we had worked to open these things up for others; first heating things up for them, then cooling them down. Erewhon spaces are not passive ones; they are places of experience outside of the everyday, outside of clockwork time; something we discovered that we could give, or gift, to people. But just as we learned how to open them up, so we needed to learn how to close them down; for the nature of what comes through the gate is never wholly certain.”
maybe Bob was on to something….
i mean what if?
if so
make believe
as if
that we found a seam of nowhere/erewhon stretching from the heart of established mysticism in the garden of the Bishop’s Palace to the multiple hearts of the red strawberries in the shadow of the Black Down?
this time it’s red and black
that there is something in this landscape that defies the discrete/overt occultism of Glastonbury to slide and elide; wormscape, burrow, a cave-diving connectivity of chambers
all of this overlooked by the hotel of the dead
to pass through which you must undergo ordeal in Wookey Hole Cave and Attractions
hahaha
watched by twa ravens
hahahaha the sounds of things talking in the gorge below overheard and overlooked
Chorus (of Limestone, Hyenas, etc.): what if we are voiced by demons? Could you tell? For example, what if the demons of 60s and 70s light entertainment spoke flatly from the posters on the walls of the Wookey Hole Cave and Attractions?
Janet Brown (an impressionist): howwwwwwwwl!
An American Execution: I saw the best entertainers of my generation destroyed by an angry fix
Chorus (of Limestone, Hyenas, etc.): let’s lay it cross the landscapes, the acts of Dorothy Squires and the Robert Marlow Dancers, Stan Boardman and Supporting Company at the Webbington Hotel, grrrrrrr, gnash, tear!
Janet Brown: The moment a human tries to imagine a wolf they tell themselves a story….
Chorus (of Limestone, Hyenas, etc., interrupting): But what if they attend to the wolf, the limestone, the hyenas – will they eventually become pack, strata, sediment?
Janet Brown: or is it worse than that if they think they do? If they sincerely feel they do?
Chorus (of Limestone, Hyenas, etc., interrupting): hahahaha, yes, I underheard them from the bottom of the gorge, dodging falling ash, in the form of roebuck I underlistened and they were underlooked, perched as I was on a platform of breccias, working hard to turn the mounds of spoil in their heads into a righteous narrative that chastise and chastens and saves all those ‘others’ who populate the rooms of the Overlook Hotel and take the phantasmagoric frights of the Wookey Hole Cave and Attractions, “let’s lay it cross the landscapes” we underheard them say, as we underlooked their filming and explaining to themselves…
Cave: Let me interrupt you? Thank you. I am cave.
And I am the Goblin King…
Cave: Who said that?
I did, said the goblin, channelling Stan Boardman, do you see the shape of me?
And we looked at the disc-like shape of the chamber, as if a flying saucer had formed there and then been excavated slab by slab and carried away along the fairy-lit tunnels and sprinkled everywhere; there is no time here, he said.
“…made by the action of a whirlpool, which explains the wonderful acoustics, I had that woman in here, from the opera, trained voice, she asked if she could sing” (flattering us with the assumption that we know what opera is and understand that the voice must be trained and not a simple talent) “there are bones”, he explains, “a ‘Celtic burial site’” (as if he’s quoting from some other authority), “afterwards, she said to me, there’s a funny smell, and I said” (he sings) “‘I’m only human’” (the democratic English humour that will not let the flattered audience savour a sense of their own sophistication without dragging them into acknowledging that they know what farting is).
Hahaha, says the hyena channelling the goblin King channelling Stan Boardman dressed in an astronaut’s or diver’s helmet, we are in the guts of the earth, in the bowels with the rushing stream and the dirty river, in the absence of the shining space ship, the goblins will do all they can to keep us from feeling here, from being here, the goblins no longer excavate to understand but to remove understanding, ever since humans ventured into their darkness, took their metals and minerals, made them into something else in forges, broke the blades and threw them in the rivers, called it culture, the goblins have been manufacturing traps and voids shaped like space ships underground, darknesses like the bowels of outer space, wicked parodies of the transcendental urge to rise up and away into the sky, to not be here, to not be with, to not be, but spiritualise…
To not be in the gardens with the waters
To not be in the stone
To be Hamlet drained of ambiguity, to be Hamlet without the prince, to not be
“Not to be” as Arnold Schwarzenegger said.
Opera singer: what is a human being?
Goblin King: a thing that is not a goblin.
Opera singer: and what is a goblin?
Goblin King: a human it a woolly mammal it say to itself ‘be true to yourself’ and a goblin it say ‘be yourself and fuck the rest”
Opera singer: and what are you?
Goblin King: myself
Opera singer: (mishearing in the ufo’s strange acoustics) ‘go around’?
Goblin King: ha ha… yes… be your best elf…
Opera singer: I can’t see you
Goblin King: that’s because I am the darkness and the emptiness that you will never be
Opera singer: make me a troll
Goblin King: marry my daughter
Opera singer: who is she?
Goblin King: you passed her bones at the front door
(And the Goblin King offered the opera woman a smooth, polished and slightly uneven ball that might have been made of alabaster or plastic or a slimy kind of crystal; the parentheses are not closed, Bob refused the job, he will not close the gate, he will not obey the instruction
Mary Beachamp, the Witch of Wookey Hole, who are these women gatekeepers?
let’s lay it cross the landscapes
I think we’re going to have to rethink the terrains; in the chalice of Gully Cave, the layers are held discretely, with integrity, on the edge of precarity, on the edge of chaos, where the powerful dynamics, changes of gait and emerging new dynamic patterns (J. A. Scott Kelso), spill out along strings of digital communication, where they have always spilled out, let’s lay it cross the landscapes between the Dinder Worm and the Webbington Hotel, THE NIGHT SPOT OF THE WEST, 21st birthday parties, stag nights, in the late 1960s Jane Russell would perform in late night cabaret there after her shows at Cleopatra’s Palace in Newport, Jayne Mansfield did the same just before her death, refusing to wear the see-through dress provided by her agent, she sang, told anecdotes and played the violin for a fee of £3000, in the 1970s Angie Bowie launched her fated cabaret act there (“like a parrot being disembowelled” [Melody Maker]), 1975 and Peaches and Cream were “Webbingtons favourite ‘Girls’”, and in the 1980s Gary Glitter was alleged to have met a fourteen year old fan there who he shortly after assaulted and though found innocent of this charge in 1999 the unsuccessful prosecution uncovered his deep engagement with child pornography, in 2008 the Kings of Wessex School held their Leavers’ Ball there the same year that training in stunning poultry with a constant voltage stunner was held in the hotel including the application of dripping wet shackles and a neck extender to submerge the animal’s head in water so it would lose consciousness when subjected to electrocution (echoing the slot machines in the Attractions which for 20p will enact an ‘English Execution’, ‘American Execution’ or ‘Guillotine’ no end to these parentheses, in 2011 Tessa Munt MP declared as expenses £5 of canapés consumed while a guest of the Somerset National Farmers Union, in 2017 a charity boxing match turned the hotel into “a slaughterhouse”, in 2020 the marriage there of Kieran White and Tilly Christmas, to make them White-Christmases, was cancelled due to Covid…. these demons speak to and with the posters on the walls of the Wookey Hole Cave and Attractions of the sexual liberalisation of the 60s and 70s turning into a tiny circus for hotel lounges and club rooms, sprung from brothels and country houses into a light entertainment for a web of freemasonry, small businesses and local government corruption that needed to be organised and distracted from the ever rising tides of disconnection, media, organisation-being, de-individualisation and all the while being told that this is the revolution, change is accelerating, this is freedom under the protection of the missiles everything is forgotten uploading ganglia into the nexus of escorts and cabaret and dinner dances that morph into discos and orgies and showbands that turn into pop groups and customers into fanatics, getting younger and younger, adolescence turning into childhood, audiences into teeny boppers, what Mark Fisher called “disavowed retro-ism”, by which everything new is a worse copy of something old, The Two Ronnies become Little and Large, Morecombe & Wise become The Chuckle Brothers, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles become the Bay City Rollers, and all of its state deteriorations presided over by Savile, the Goblin King…
2015, blasting through to Chamber 20, up until then a chamber visited by less people than have walked on the moon….
2018, Amethyst Realm, who cheated on her ex-fiancé in an aircraft toilet with a ghost she met in the Australian bush, got engaged to the amorous spirit in Wookey Hole Caves and Attractions: “there was no going down on one knee, he doesn’t have knees” but the voice of the nameless spirit was “deep”; she’d had relationships with ghosts before, but they had fizzled out, as did this one in 2020 when the spirit, called “Ray” it seems, fell in with a “bad crowd” during a holiday in Thailand
Is the Axe the backbone that does not fizzle out?
Q: What is the knee that does not bend?
A: A ghost’s?
That’s a joke for a Shakespearean monster.
Like the Royal Wave of TODAY’s paper made in the mill, or the invitation to the Luncheon for Her Majesty’s Golden Wedding Anniversary, Harrington’s poem of 1748 is a disciplining, “re-setting the status quo”, exhorting young women to wait for a virtuous man to appear, no matter how short the supply, and avoid the lonely or transgressive path to the cave mouth, to a life with goats; yet the woman found at the cave mouth was buried beneath a stone, with “weapons” of transformed metals; a comb with six teeth doesn’t suggest someone careless of their appearance; isn’t this a high status Iron Age grave? With a tethered goat and kid left as sacrifices, perhaps; the old and the new, tokens of rebirth?
And what of the polished ball of crystalline stalagmite? Is that the origins of the crystal ball of the circus sideshow? If it is Iron Age or Romano-British….
And I looked into the hall of mirrors and I looked into the misshapen mirrors and I did not see myself any longer, but much longer, and many more of me, and others who were not where they had appeared and I lost a hold on the route, the diagram…
Is that the moment when the code kicks in? The key to the diagram? When the voices of the ancient woolly ones are heard?
Is Amethyst’s lover hairy on the inside?
Today, Gerry Cottle’s ‘circus’ at Wookey Hole recreates in recorded sound the description of the cave by the 2nd century writer Clement of Alexandria who writes, by hearsay, of “a gap, when, then, the wind blows into the cave and is drawn on in to the bosom of the interior, a sound…. as of the clashing of numerous cymbals”, exactly as I had heard in the nave of Wells Cathedral on Friday afternoon, sitting in on part of the Tidworth Band of the British Army’s rehearsal; the band is an amalgamation, one of the players, who I found wandering lost in the gardens, told me; a cacophony, a cavophany in the cave of the nave of the cavedral, cavedrill, ca the all, cave said all ca ca canine five springs
what Fisher called “disavowed retro-ism”; everything new a worse copy of something old
Is the Axe the backbone that does not fizzle out?
let’s lay it cross the landscapes
be quiet
the Goblin chased after us into the sunlight and along the leat, like a hyena tracking a group of tired and vulnerable woolly mammals, stomping off down the leaf strewn path through the plastic giants and the mechanical grunts and growly roars
Does the Dinder Worm step forward when Bishop Jocelyn “exchanges” (takes) the land of the locals for his deer park in an early form of enclosure?
Does the land grab of the Saxons drive the story of Wookey Hole into Wales where it re-emerges in the romance (saga, love story) of Olwen (daughter of the chief of the giants) and Kulhwch; the Axe becomes the Stream of Sorrows described in the Red Book of Hergest (c.1400) and in the White book of Rhydderch (c.1350),
red and white code
both composed in the 11th century? Is the Axe then the border beyond which the Saxons overlords rule, where, with the help of the shapeshifter Menw, son of Three Cries, the warrior Bedwyr and King Arthur (like some Avengers Assemble or Seven Samurai blend of muscle and wisdom in a ‘Six Go Through The Whole World’ narrative), Kulhwch sets out to accomplish the various impossible tasks set by the giant chief before Kulhwch can marry Olwen. These include getting “the blood of the black witch, the daughter of the white witch, who lives in the head waters of the Stream of Sorrows, on the confines of Hell”; on completing the task the giant is shaved, skinned and beheaded
nothing is as it seems
the keeping of a giant’s head sounds like some cruel punishment or desecration of an enemy’s body, but what if this is the preservation of the memory and wisdom of the elder, that others may walk in the elder’s skin, think in their skull, dress like woolly mammals in their beards and locks
the fetching of blood; what if that is the collecting of waters, like John Dee fetching of a red powder from the well at Glaston?
I can’t hear the voices of the blood
Of the waters
Of the bones
Of the quarters of the moon
Of the blast of the tunnels
Or the banging of the cymbals
Of the fencing of the springs
I can’t hear the voice of the rhinos
I can’t hear the squealing of prey
I can’t hear the fear
I can’t feel the intelligence of ancient beings
I can’t understand the vocabulary of foxes
Or the code of wild cats
I can’t read the fear I can’t read the snow I can’t read the scree, I can’t read the men at the bar, I can’t read the clues in the corridor, I can’t guess what is meant by
what is that boom?
what does the siren denote?
what is emergency right now?
I can’t read the instructions without my glasses
Red and white
White and black
Red and black
I can’t read the instructions without my
Without m
Without
With out
With… oh…
How do we measure what we have lost?
By what we are about to lose?
The Wookey Hole Village website expresses surprise at the Iron Age tools, hollow stones for grinding grain, pins, combs and broaches that “speak of a far greater civilisation than one would expect to find in primitive people”
one
than one
than
than one would expect
than one would expect to find
to find
one
I can’t the voice of the animals
I can only find the symbols clashing
And the animatronic roaring
The comforting hum of the heating in the Inn
Is there room at the inn?
“Are our rooms at the Inn or at the Hotel?”
Where would you place yourself in the Nativity scene?
Where would you place your elf?
Where would you place your goblin?
Where would you place your hyena?
Where would your hyena place you?
Where would your cave put you, enfold you?
If Danielle is buried in the Gully Cave what grave goods will she choose? Or will her students and colleagues choose for her? Will future archaeologists understand that she is a professor? Will they link her to the spoil behind the lab at the Royal Holloway?
When we read the displacements of story, of 11th century compositions eventually recorded in 14th century manuscripts, of stories that might have been conveyed and corporeally performed hundreds of years before in fragments until they were composed and even then perhaps relied on the forms of older narratives of other beings and other worlds, what do we make of the possibility of a professor buried in a cave, or of the bones of an auroch and a cave bear uncovered in the boot of a buried car?
And where are Bob’s teeth? Nestled around a pint in the Rifleman’s? In ash form? Biting down on his lip while he steers a wreck through the mist?
“Did not Gwyn-ap-Nudd await the spirits of those slain in battle, and foregather with them on Glastonbury Tor? Did not Ider, son of Nudd, when put to the test by Arthur, outstripping his king, conquer single-handed three wicked giants who harboured at the “Hill of Frogs”, Brent Knoll, himself perishing in the enterprise? Does not Arthur sleep beneath the hill on which stands Cadbury Camp? Is not Arthur’s Point with us to this day in Wookey Hole? Was it not to the Isle of Avalon that Arthur was taken to heal him of his grievous wound after his battle with Modred? Was not the reputed tomb of Arthur and Gwinevere found at Glastonbury, and the lead cross that was taken from it, seen in Wells so late as the eighteenth century? What wonder is it that every one of these stories is of the area which remained British from A.D. 577 to 658, and not one of them touches any place north of the River Axe? This fact is important.” (H. E. Balch, ‘Mendip – The Great Cave of Wookey Hole’ third edition, 1947)
Woki
Woky
Wochia
Voqui
Ochie
Ochy
We do the woky ochy and we turn about
That’s what it’s all about
According to the old story, Arthur, helping Kulhwch, fights the “hag”, cutting her into two pieces
are we listening to a story
of a place divided
of a land guage and a poetry
punctured by a caesura
of the division of community
of the trauma of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries when
a culture that survived and persisted through and beyond Roman invasion
suck comes to
speaks ing
s
peak in
of a far greater civilisation than one
than one would expect to find in
a primitive people subjected to
greater civilisation persisted through and beyond Roman invasion
is that what
the story is all about
a woman of high status buried with numerous Roman coins that would still have been
in
circulation hundreds of years after the Romans left
not of an Iron Age aristocracy but a leader in a British community
cut in two
a commu ity
I can’t hear her voice
“the outstanding fact is that during the fifth century the human occupation of the cave came to an end” (H. E. Balch) and soon the Hole is listed repeatedly as a possession of the cathedral in Wells
possession is nine-tenths of the law
was the Ochie Hole a useful hell?
dark partner to the Dipping Pool within the cloisters of the cathedral
the channelling of the springs in the gardens and into the moat
the springs are transcendental partner of the dark water
the spiritual healing water – together – with the dark Axe of trauma and division
to make whole again
to make one
one
than one
than
than one would expect
than one would expect to find
to find
one
I can’t find the voice of the animals
I can only hear symbols clashing
The beauty and the elegance of the Gully Cave, the way that over the years the layers give up their information, their stories, their different stories, cut into pieces, and yet the same cave, always on the edge of chaos, always at the precipice, making tea, talking nonsense, perched on the side of the gorge, one step back from the void, looking for a better representation, a better recording, a better dispersal, step back into the void; in order to spread the diagram, step in to the
and yet that is the way it goes, up and down and across, each layer recording in the pocket of the cave, like detritus in the bottom of a handbag or a purse that hardly ever moves, encoding the sideways movement of predators and prey until they rise, with great effort, dragged or dragging, up the side of the gorge
the vandal badger knocking the stalactite teeth
the dagger cuts the dame in two
“you have to laugh don’t you?”
light entertainment
uploaded to the hard drive of a space ship
the funnel downwards through the different layers of eco logical time, some echoes, some novelties, things change and some return, some things survive and some don’t, some go away and stay away
imagine a series of diagrams
slices through time
slices that each model the rangings of, says, the hyena packs or, say, the herds of woolly rhino and another the reindeers, some in localised wanders, others in
they never show dinosaurs giving birth
wide ranging migrations; in all of them a communal life is unfolding, over generations, older swans teaching young birds how to ring the bell above the moat around the bishop’s palace,
the government will now recognise squids, octopi and crabs as probably sentient
fear and intelligence, domestication and subjugation, the wild horses, how do they range? Before a life in bits? I heard the clip clop outside my bedroom window.
I see the iron horses strapped to the iron wheel at the gate of the farm; now the wheel does not turn and the horses do not circle in the yard. How did they once range? Did the mares have pseudo-penises?
the pseudo-penis of the hyena is an extended clitoris, allowing the female hyena to choose their partners, which may partly explain the dominance of the adult female over the adult males, which may explain something of hyenas’ bad reputation as somehow cowardly: their “unnatural” communality, the threat of pleasure uncontrolled by bishops or male professors, bringing the whole roof structure down in slabs, shaking the pillars of the nave…
“don’t be misled by the cringing creatures in ‘The Lion King’”
Supermongoose
Pliny thought they swapped gender annually
the hyenas are not cut in two
and theirs is just one of the diagrams, maybe they will contribute a number of the diagrams of ranging, there are materials that pass between and through the species, predation, carrion, eating the sick and faeces of others, the web, feeding the mycorrhizal fungi networks, each with their diagram, of threads and strings and hunting lines along which the contents of droppings and half digested or chewed plants travel; so it is that two dimensional diagrams begin to operate in four dimensions; in two dimensions across the surface of the terrains, then below in the underground and above in the atmosphere, and then between the different layers of time with the different threads running out, so it is
stepping back into the void for a different picture
or persisting, running off beyond the edge of the diagram, all the time aware that different code banks, whether the Cathedral complex at Wells or Wookey Hole Cave and Attractions or the Mabinogion or the cast list at the Webbington Hotel are operating as the legend of the map, apparently nothing to do with any of the matter in the layers of the Gully Cave and yet
and yet
to make one
one
than one
than
than one would expect
than one would expect to find
in primitive
i
animals
I can’t the voice of the animals
I can hear the symbols clashing
“you have to laugh don’t you?”
in order to decode the information, do we have to slice two or more ways, while at the same time applying healing waters, Deleuzoguattarian flows and energies? Deploying, together, disciplines and abstractions, the diagram and the flows of desire, rush of the Axe and bubbling springs?
is the white witch the brightness of the bubbling at Wells and the black witch the dark underground Axe?
the surging reach of the animals, the flow of the flesh of prey through the bowels of predators, the rush of a poet’s ideas, the quest? The desire that initiates and sustains seeking, and a diagrammatic discipline of circuitous tasks done to enable a successful conclusion? The male hyena cannot rush straight to the female, but must wait to be chosen, performing many greeting encounters, submissively erect; the relation of the parts to the flow to any discipline is multiplicitous, working around shifting fulcrums, wobbly criteria and mutating dna; every different thing a complex and unstable climate system.
so why
would a ‘Dark Age’ story be comprehendible to “us”? And if it was, would we be deceiving ourselves? Are we comprehendible to ourselves? How different was the past? Why do we try to use words like ‘chief’ or ‘prince’ or ‘witch’ or ‘female’ or ‘penis’ or ‘time’, as if we knew what they meant, unless we can provide a four-dimensional diagram around each word, unless we can stand in a car park and produce bones from the boot of a car?
In an emergency do we take instructions from, and build alliances with, experts or light entertainers? Where do we get our information from? Peer-reviewed journals or the circus tent?
Or are you listening again to the old stories?
Do you hear the voices of animals?
The chattering and calling and do you feel the watching of the ravens and of the buzzard and hear the strange boom inside the rattle of a hedge-eating machine?
Can you see the roebuck at least?
Can you imagine a baby woolly rhino? Imagine the tearing? Can you see that?
Can you write or draw or film or lecture or paint a way to re-see aurochs?
And un-see Stan Boardman and Janet Brown?
We stand under the roof of Gully Cave and the slabs of the roof are attracted to us and we are attracted to them; slippery slabs of limestone and flesh sliding together down the slope of gravity towards each other, gully cave and attractions, gully cave and the gravities
I can hear the voice inside the rock speak
And I don’t know what it says yet
Something about attraction
but i can wait
I hear the pack whispering at night
lying in my cosy bed at the Inn
something about hunger
but ix can wit
Conclusion
I have come away with the sense of a pillar of wisdom and knowledge from Danielle and the extraction at the Gully Cave, of multiple blocks or layers of knowing, of the fortuitous sealing and retaining of the cave and its stone, a funnel that does not lose its materials, and how there is a story of repeated precarities, even of two years’ digging in ‘inert’ materials – a period of wasteland or apocalypse that is not at the end of the book, but in the middle of the book. Just as there is a ‘death-in-life’ which in a human life can be a moment of change or renewal – going to the beach in your mum’s clothes to bury yourself in the sand and then pull yourself out (or “together”, some might say) again – so there is a wasteland in the time frame and a re-beginning, not a racing to the edge, but around many edges.
I have come away with a sense that there are two very very powerful narratives here; firstly, the ecological narrative of the succession of entities, materials, climates and organisms that pass into and out of the cave, eaten, born, flee, protect. And that while it is partly one of gravitational sinking together, it is also one of repeated pulses out into and across the surfaces of the local and distant terrain, then float up and burrow down.
Secondly, there is a not entirely cultural narrative of the Worm that stretches from King’s Castle Hill and Dinder Ridge feeding the pools at Wells all the way across the suburbs and over the fields to Wookey and then along the Axe, and parallel to it, to Draycott, Cheddar and Axebridge and on to Webbington; that there is something extraordinarily righteous and malevolent interwoven, snaking around its various selves, that has some deep-reaching significances for us in our moment right now of radical dislocation, as we have become culturally cut in two, not by Arthur’s Carnwennan, but by another weapon that shrouds itself and its bearers in bright lights and shadows.
Gully cave records hundreds of thousands of years of death. Myriad individual animals died here, or had their remains dragged in by other scavengers. Bison, aurochs, reindeer lie on top of woolly rhinoceros and mammoths. It is a nonhuman charnel house; a house of the animal dead like the catacombs beneath Paris. Many of the specimens are from animals now locally or nationally extinct, shuffling in and off as the world outside became inhospitable.
Gully cave provides a portal into past worlds; a muddy archive of deep time that can be dug and interpreted like the ice cores of polar research. It is a site for mourning, a place to be humble in the face of the inevitability of death, and a place to reflect on loss and extinction.
The cave was sealed at the end of the Pleistocene. It does not record the advent of modern humans, their domestic animals and commensals. It was capped before the great acceleration that led to the advent of the Anthropocene, or its ruination and the unravelling of nonhuman worlds. The sediment here comes as a tightly sealed time capsule from a pre-human age. We could take it as Nature and wilderness, in the ways that they are conceived by modern Western environmentalists, a past sealed in aspic untainted by human influence.
But in reflecting on extinction and Nature we can also see Gully cave as a site from which one might look to the future. It shows us worlds of animal diversity and abundance long unfamiliar to modern humans but still possible within the current and future climate envelope. It shows us that now foreign species were once here and native. That they could flourish here again. It allows us to reflect on which species coped with different climatic conditions, including those that adapted to the abrupt transitions of interglacial periods, where existence was threatened by climate changes on a decadal scale.
Gully cave offers us a ‘future-past’; it shows old ecologies that might be re-enacted in the future. These are informed by knowledge of the pure Nature of the Pleistocene, but they can be calibrated to the rupture and the new ecological conditions of the Anthropocene. It could be a source of hope; a portal through which we can imagine new futures at the contemporary juncture when time seems to out of joint.
How should a paleoecologist die? Notes while digging.
Spending time digging bones makes you think of your own remains, your afterlife, and how you will be found by others. Perhaps I will be crushed by a rock, slip down a cliff or end up in a pile-up on the M4. But what would I do if I was in control and wanted to ensure I was recorded right? How would I arrange my body for its excavation by future archaeologists? Should I be discrete and curl up like those women in the bog? Should I lie on my front to hide the parts one is not supposed to show? Should I splay myself star shaped to take up maximum space, and ensure my subsequent discovery: manspreading for future fame and glory. Perhaps it would be better not to be remembered, to become the type specimen of those responsible for the violence and loss that will be in my common strata? Hide somewhere no one will look? Burn me? Blast me into space?
Wookey Hole, near Ebbor Gorge, Somerset, UK. Image by David Overend
We drew a long, collective breath
That took in faunal remains,
40,000 years of sediment,
Layered timescales,
Rapidly shifting climates
Levelling out
To a fossilised archive of lifeworlds.
Material encounters:
Passing round a segment of hyena jaw –
Several teeth still in place –
Weighed in hand
(A momentary connection to
A distant, deeper, aspect of this world);
Standing in the rain in a car park in Somerset,
A car boot cave.
But we went on a long journey to get here.
Walk underground,
train connecting to train connecting to train,
A hire car to drive through the dark
And a final 45 minutes on foot
To join the others for dinner.
Travelling through time.
And one time scale closes in
While another opens up.
And then our group sets off,
A waterproof parade
Across the valley and up muddy steps;
Cutting off through the trees
Along a well-worn path.
A road taken before
By hyena, auroch, arctic fox,
Lemming, vole and mouse;
Reindeer, wolf and wild cat,
Mammoth, perhaps,
And a Quaternary scientist.
All drawn into the cave –
Dragged, seeking shelter, returning home,
Multiple routes converging.
And all these journeys come to an end here.
Or rather, a temporary pause
Tens of thousands of years
Locked in layers of limestone.
Dug up, sifted, boxed and bagged,
And carried away to be cleared up, identified, dated, displayed.
This unassuming
Out-of-the-way opening
In the rockface.
Gully cave.
Tarpaulin covering the floor
And scaffolding lent against the wall –
A work site between its summer liveliness
Are we to imagine how much it holds?
You need to breathe in.
Future fossils.
The tarpaulin will outlast us:
Polymers with ponies; canvas with corvus.
The excavation will continue
And we will be folded into it.
Who knows for how long – a year?
Til they hit the cave floor.
Or more, if time continues to deepen.
And it does.
For this work will leave its own traces:
Artworks, film, articles,
Stories, memories, more.
Adding to the layers
Exhaled into the indifferent passing of time.
Lives, layers, landscape.
As we travel on
Deeper and deeper
Into Gully Cave.
RCS: Climate Portals Festival: Hope Street Walk Photos by Ingrid Mur
A walk for Hope Street in Glasgow. Available as an audio walk here. Full text below.
1. Please use your own mobile device with headphones to experience this walk.
2. The audio track is available on Soundcloud. The app can be downloaded in advance and the track is available at the link above.
3. The starting point is on the steps outside the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on Renfrew Street. The route heads down through the city and follows the length of Hope Street arriving under the bridge on Argyle Street.
4. The track can also be listened to elsewhere at other times.
5. Nobody will be left behind.
Hope Street Walk
1.
A walk down Hope Street.
In a moment, we invite you to walk down Hope Street towards Glasgow’s Central Station, then underneath the railway bridge to the Argyle Street Arches.
If you are walking this route elsewhere, find a place you would like to go – a street, or a track, a desire path maybe, and, when prompted, we invite you to begin.
The walk will take around fifteen minutes, depending on your pace.
Wherever you are, make sure you are safe, and that you take care underfoot.
We are going on a journey now, for this place, but also for other places.
On this walk, you are invited to look, to listen, and to pause.
You are invited to reflect on the precarity of this place, of everywhere right now.
You are invited to hope.
2.
Stand on Renfrew Street, in front of the Conservatoire, and face the city.
On the corner to the left, a bike shelter. A node between vectors. Busses, taxis, cars…
And for those cyclists whose vehicles are left in one piece, a lighter and more sustainable way of moving at pace through the city. But we make our journey on foot.
If you look past the bikes and up towards the end of Hope Street, you will see the Theatre Royal. Nearby is the New Atheneum and the Chandler Theatre. Peeking up over the buildings along Renfrew Street is Cineworld. You are surrounded by theatre spaces, by stages, by screens.
But the streets of this city can also be experienced as a site for performance. The pavements of Hope Street can be a place to witness, to connect, to notice, to care.
Here you can see the performances of the everyday: the stories, the people, the lives – human and more-than-human – that inhabit this place.
Set off down hill at your own pace.
3.
Hope Street has been at the top of the list of Scotland’s most polluted streets for many years. It has the highest levels of nitrogen dioxide – a pollutant from diesel vehicles – to be found anywhere in the country.
In Islands of Abandonment, Cal Flyn rejects the doomsday scenarios for our planet:
“I cannot accept their conclusions. To do so is to abandon hope, to accept the inevitability of a fallen world, a ruinous future. And yet everywhere I have looked, everywhere I have been – places bent and broken, despoiled and desolate, polluted and poisoned – I have found new life springing from the wreckage of the old, life all the stronger and more valuable for its resilience”
4.
We are walking against the flow of traffic.
Intersecting this route at right angles are Sauchiehall Street, Bath Street, West Regent Street, West George Street, St Vincent Street.
Glasgow city centre is laid out in a grid pattern.
One of the things that people say, so it might be true, is that New York’s grid was modelled on Glasgow.
So let’s walk down a street in New York.
Past Candy Corner and USA Beauty and further into the grid.
5.
We are moving now. Head past the recently defunct Watt Brothers department store, the place where Glasgow aunties would get their crystal and dinner sets…
A casualty of the pandemic closures on the high street.
6.
The restaurants and food outlets on this street tell the stories of migration, of globalisation, of fast food and convenience food and lunchbreaks and unrecyclable coffee cups that will end up in landfill.
Take a peek down the lanes you pass as you walk. These are the spaces in between, the city’s crevices, its wrinkles.
7.
Walk down Hope Street
8.
Walk down Hope Street
9.
On your left you will soon see the Lion Chambers, one of the many buildings in the city centre which is derelict, no longer used, no longer functioning, eroding and abandoned, unviable and perhaps unfixable, but still standing.
As “Glasgow’s Forgotten Skyscraper” this building has many common local features:
Corner turrets and a pair of steep gables on the roof.
Romanesque arches and gothic style pointed windows.
Today, the building waits for either renovation or demolition. These chambers were constructed using a system designed by French Engineer, François Hennebique:
Reinforced concrete: an alternative to steel frames, making the building fireproof.
Before steel frames there were wooden frames, even more of a fire risk.
Glasgow: Tinderbox city, city of fires.
Someone once said of this city, “look up”. When you are walking through the grid of streets, cast your eyes upwards. Raise your chin and gaze skyward. Glasgow at eye level, at street level, is retail, offices, bus stops, bins. It is any high street anywhere. If you set your sights higher, if you look up beyond the ground level shop fronts, another Glasgow is revealed.
10.
There are more stories in the upper storeys. Travelling through these streets on the top deck of a bus reveals more intricately adorned facades – architectural styles jostling together and a cast of stoney characters reaching out from their stages to draw you into their worlds of pigeons and buddleia.
At the bottom of Hope Street, on the right, is Atlantic Chambers, the earliest example of several New York-style elevator buildings. The height of the buildings here, along with the perpendicular streets, makes this part of town a favoured film location for recreating American cities.
11.
Walk down Hope Street.
Our journeys have been curtailed, prohibited, realigned with a global pandemic. There is now a precedent for staying at home, which is something we should probably have been doing more often regardless. Travelling like we have done at times over the last ten years has been reckless and destructive. The planet burns and we fly round the world to make art.
Walking down Hope Street takes us further than might be assumed.
They filmed Indiana Jones here in the summer of 2021. Just as the post lockdown streets reopened and pedestrians retuned. They closed a large section of Hope Street to film car chases and a garish float parade. A giant moon on the back of a lorry. Harrison Ford, presumably. The whole area was full of stars and stripes and yellow taxis.
Place performing place.
Glasgow connecting to the world.
12.
Alternate architectures ancient and modern, juxtaposed and jumbled up, contemporary glass next to Edwardian red sandstone next to brutalist building next to boarded up mansion. Glasgow’s revisions and renovations and regenerations, successful and failed, all stark against the skyline.
The city’s history is written on the buildings, these street names, these architectures. Coal, colonialism, climate change. All part of the same story.
13.
Keep walking. You may be able to see Central Station now, the sweeping curves of the Grand Central Hotel. The world’s first long-distance television pictures were transmitted here on 24 May 1927 by John Logie Baird. Glasgow connecting to the world.
Not too far away from here, the famous Glasgow School of Art designed by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh has suffered not one, but two recent fires.
The ABC on Sauchiehall Street was also destroyed, and in May 2021, the Old College Bar, one of the oldest pubs in Glasgow was ravished by fire and has been demolished.
Tinderbox city.
14.
The village of Grahamston once stood in the place now occupied by Central Station. The Duncan’s Hotel building on the west side of Union Street, and the Grant Arms pub on Argyle Street are all that remain, but Alston Street – once running parallel to Union Street and Hope Street – was demolished along with the rest of the village to make way for the station. Bear that in mind as we move through this place. We’re walking through Grahamston as well, as we walk down Hope Street.
15.
As you approach Central Station, there is a statue, a sculpture called Citizen Firefighter, a figure made of bronze, wearing firefighting gear and breathing apparatus.
Less than three months after it was unveiled, Citizen Firefighter became a focal point for the people of Glasgow after the events of September 11th in New York. The statue seemed to many to be the right place to leave flowers and tributes to the firefighters who died in those events.
At this moment, wild fires rage around the world.
“Our house is still on fire.”
16.
One of the station’s most famous architectural features is the large glass-walled bridge that extends the station building over Argyle Street, nicknamed the ‘Hielanman’s Umbrella’ because it was used as a meeting place for those from the highlands of Scotland to gather in the city
17.
Walk down Hope Street
And perhaps Hope Street can take us elsewhere.
Past the cafes, takeaways and bars.- Japanese, Lebanese, Indian and Irish.
Past the ensemble of buildings
And through the various time periods they nod to, or capture.
Past the intersecting and converging routes of private and public transport:
Mobility scooters and wheelchairs, cyclists, walkers and joggers.
Past Sunset Beach, which you will see on the corner as you come to the end of the road.
Head under the ‘umbrella’ and find the entrance to the Argyle Street Arches,
where we will reconvene.
The arches have been here for over a century now.
There used to be a theatre here.
18.
We are close now, under the bridge, underneath the arches.
Pause before you cross Argyle Street. Look back up Hope Street, the path you have just walked.
Hope Street is a microcosm: Pollution, abandonment, climate change, precarity.
‘And yet, everywhere I have looked…’
19.
The buddleia, the butterfly bush, growing out of windows and along ledges, silhouetted on the skyline, whisper of hope.
The pigeons nestled in loft spaces, biding their time, murmur of hope.
The grasses poking through pavements, seeking the sunlight, hum of hope.
The seabirds hovering high above the urban landscape, shriek of hope.
