exploring creative mobilities
I have created a new blog at blogs.ed.ac.uk/lenziemoss
100 Circles is a new project for Lenzie Moss in Scotland. I am walking round the site 100 times, each time with a different person from the local community, or a visiting artist or researcher. As I share these encounters on this blog, I hope that a co-authored text will emerge, bringing a series of walked dialogues to a wider readership, and perhaps finding a way for the Moss to tell its stories.
This text was written as we attempted to follow Karen Barad (2007) in ‘diffracting’ the contemporary city for an academic article (Cullen et al. 2024). This fragmented narrative is comprised of diverse intra-actions that occurred in the process of learning and teaching on Creating Edinburgh: The interdisciplinary city – an undergraduate course at the University of Edinburgh – including creative responses written by students during the course, photographs of spaces in Edinburgh, which are the focus of course assignments, excerpts from the researchers’ reflections during the research process. Following Barad’s example, we have provided explanatory footnotes, which give context for each fragment.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely facing the screen
Or page
Head on [1]
But if you were standing
On Princes Street in Edinburgh
At the bottom of Lothian Road
Facing East
You’d find the high street on your left
And the gardens on your right
With Edinburgh Castle looming above
There are tourists taking photos
And a group of students exploring the grounds together
You emerge from the bowels
Of Waverley,
Adjusting to the brilliant blue,
The crisp autumnal air,
The majesty of Castle Rock,
The dynamism of Edinburgh
Laid out before you
In all her splendour.
A student’s creative response to a prompt to conceptualise ‘interdisciplinarity’. This work is openly licensed via CC BY 4.0. Permission granted for reuse © 2024.
On Waverley Bridge,
Behind you,
Laughter erupts sporadically,
Punctuating the comings and goings…
To your right,
A circle of students,
Bundled up against the October chill.
A researcher among them.
Beyond, the commercial aorta:
Princes Street abuzz, tram bells, busses, totes.
To your left,
A couple poses,
One click to capture,
To immortalise the moment.
One tap to transport,
To digitise a vista.
But for you,
Immersed as you are,
This is no two-dimensional plane.
This is your reality.
Stimulating activity in the same motor-neurological regions as physically enacted movements (Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005), reading is an embodied experience which invites not only visual representation, but a broad range of multimodal responses, including any, or a combination of, the five senses, interoceptive reactions, proprioceptive responses and kinaesthetic sensations (Rokotnitz, 2017). In reading the multimodal imagery contained in these fragments the past experiences of research participants, course tutors and researchers with(in) the city ‘flash up’, diffracting spacetimes and “de(con)struct[ing]… the continuum of history… [to bring] the energetics of the past into the present and vice versa” (Barad, 2017, p. 23). The reader is as phenomenologically immersed and materially connected — as entangled – as the participants and researchers.
You walk through the city, across Princes Street, to the New Town.
The infamous statue of Henry Dundas – 1st Viscount Melville – stands 150 feet above St Andrew Square. Between 1791 and 1805, Dundas was Home Secretary, Minister for War and Colonies and First Lord of the Admiralty. He is also argued to have significantly delayed the abolition of slavery.
To begin the Decolonising Edinburgh field week, students are invited to watch a film of Sir Geoff Palmer, interviewed for Edinburgh Futures Institute (2020). Palmer introduces this controversial figure and reflects on strategies of decolonising public monuments. Palmer is Scotland’s first Black professor. He is now Professor Emeritus in the School of Life Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
As a result of campaigning by Palmer and others, a new plaque has now been installed at the site. Students visit the monument together to read the new inscription and to critically reflect on the text.
The plaque at Melville Monument. The plaque was replaced in March 2024 after its removal by a group led by a descendant of Henry Dundas (BBC 2024). This work is openly licensed via CC BY 4.0. Image by David Overend © 2024.
Does the plaque go far enough? Do you feel that the statue should be removed? If so, should something else be put in its place?
The Researcher [2]
You arrive.
Waverly North Bridge.
Unable to discern the students
From other passers-by.
An approach:
Are you…?
Yes!
Smiles.
Introductions.
Research Ethics.
Expectations.
Invitations.
Phones out.
Recorders on.
You follow,
Neither a part
Nor apart.
Liminal.
Present.
You observe.
You reflect.
You diffract,
Becoming
Complicit
And in doing so
You are irrevocably
Entangled,
Altering the experience
Fundamentally.
What does it mean
To be here?
To inhabit,
To embody,
To be of
A city,
And for a city
To be of you?
Questions structure the discussion in the seminar room. Tutors facilitate the exchange of ideas between students, drawing out tensions and contradictions, prompting intra-action. The ‘tools’ that tutors use might be understood in Baradian terms, although they have yet to be framed explicitly in this way. Students share the documents and outputs of their field work, which are then explored by students in other groups. Questions are invited to turn experiences over and over, troubling binaries and opening up reflections into new, generative responses. This includes the creation of new field topics, which are submitted for assessment as digital portfolios comprising images, maps, tasks and questions. As Karen Spector argues, ‘If nothing new that matters is produced, then diffraction hasn’t occurred’ (2015, 449). With a topic as contested and emotive as decolonising monuments, diffraction might be utilised more explicitly as a way to read meanings through each other, without the pressure to move towards resolution. The ethics of diffractive pedagogy are informed by feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway, who argues that ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’ (2016, 12). Creating Edinburgh emphasises the ways in which learning and teaching matters to the city and its continual creation through stories, journeys and intra-actions.
If you had been in this exact spot some years ago, a PPE (personal protective equipment) mask may have obstructed your peripheral view
Students on the inaugural version of Creating Edinburgh sat in cold seminar rooms (windows open for air circulation even in the winter). Pandemic Edinburgh has never been a popular field topic.[3]
‘I’ was teaching two seminars that year
Each week, I greeted students as they filtered in, sitting in their groups
“How was your fieldwork?”
“Where did you go?”
“What did you see?”[4]
Years later Creating Edinburgh found its way into my PhD Manuscript:
The figure of the witch has been a constant companion to my PhD process. In my final semester of teaching at the University of Edinburgh, I was working on a brand-new course called ‘Creating Edinburgh’.[5] The course design loosely mimics a ‘choose your own adventure’ novel, wherein the students opt for certain topics from a list of offerings at the beginning of the semester. The course is an interdisciplinary approach to the city of Edinburgh itself and engages with themes like, ‘Decolonising Edinburgh’, ‘Digital Edinburgh’, ‘Literary Edinburgh’, ‘Deep Time Edinburgh’ etc. The main assessment for the course is for students to create their own theme to be added to the cache for future cohorts. One of my groups chose to pursue Witchcraft Edinburgh, and it is to them I owe much of my knowledge about witch hunts in Scotland. Thank you, Eleanor, Aimee, Sadie, and Andrew. It is because of them that I learned that the Mercat Cross located in the market centre of Medieval Edinburgh served as an execution site for accused witches. According to a plaque at The Witches Well, a memorial to those accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563-1736, hundreds of witches were publicly executed during this time. The plaque was placed in 1912, and states,
This fountain, erected by John Duncan, R.S.A., is near the site on which many witches were burned at the stake. The wicked head and serene head signify that some used their exceptional knowledge for evil purposes while others were misunderstood and wished their kind nothing but good. The serpent has the dual significance of evil and wisdom.
Witches then, were condemned regardless of which direction they aimed their powers; ‘the “good witch”, who made sorcery her career, was also punished, often more severely’ (Federici, 2004, 200). This lack of discrimination concerning the morality of witches is perplexing; if witches were not hunted and killed for their wickedness, what were they persecuted for?
The situatedness of this knowledge struck me, as I had been working with the text, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation for years and had not investigated the history of witch trials in Edinburgh, the city in which I lived and studied in.
Witchcraft Edinburgh [6]
Artistic Edinburgh
Literary Edinburgh
Music Edinburgh
Deadinburgh
Eatinburgh
Haunted Edinburgh
Legendary Edinburgh
Queer Edinburgh
For their final assessment, students work in groups to create their own field topic. These are then made available as an open educational resource on the University’s website so that they can be accessed publicly and used by students on subsequent years of the course, as a re-turning of practice. The course avoids closing down the experience into interpretive or analytical assignments. Rather, new experiences are generated, new paths are followed, new questions are raised. The questions that students have asked through this assessment task exemplify the kind of diffractive approach that we are advocating in this article. Barad’s argument about the inseparability of entangled phenomena tells us that ‘separability is not taken for granted and this means that all phenomena—all the entanglements—are open to analysis and questioning’ (Barad & Gandorfer 2021, 51). Applying this principle to an educational experience in the city suggests that the questions that are asked (which includes the prior questions that structure the fieldwork on the course) matter to Edinburgh. This is because active questioning ensures that multiple components are kept open, malleable, subject to change. This is the meaning of the course subtitle, ‘the interdisciplinary city’.
Does the surrounding area reflect what we have learned about Edinburgh and its level of safety for the LQBTQ community?
How are educational institutions and their buildings important for a city other than just as classrooms?
How does food serve as a social tool in this community?
Why are ghost stories ingrained in Edinburgh, and how might they add to the culture of the city?
Because diffraction is an ongoing process, these questions are not only about a specific encounter with the city of Edinburgh: they also have the potential to shape ways of being, thinking, relating in other contexts.
The majority of students on the course are exchange or international visiting students [7]
After weeks of oscillating between seminar room and fieldwork, they would return to their country of study or home
What did they bring with them? What did they leave behind?
Were they changed by Edinburgh? Is Edinburgh changed by them?
Perhaps they did not return. They re-turned.
There are things about which
We educators and researchers
Have no knowledge,
No control.
What was happening
In the ‘margins’ of the students’
Lives?
Living as they were
Beyond the parameters of
This ‘Creating Edinburgh’.
Learning as they were
Beyond the boundaries of
This ‘Education’.
How to divest oneself
Of the assumed responsibility
Of the learning and knowing
Of others?
Vital contemplation.
You peer down a nearby close (those narrow, steep alleyways branching off the Royal Mile)
And you feel the wind rush through it, over you
It’s particles and physics
[1] These fragments were co-created in the spring of 2024 by authors Clare Cullen and M Winter, each drawing on their own experiences with the city of Edinburgh and the course. The latter fragments specifically refer to Cullen’s walking intraview with students on their field work.
[2] This fragment, written by Clare Cullen, captures her experience accompanying students on their field work in the autumn of 2023. The researcher’s presence-participation in students’ fieldwork with(in) the city was an integral part of our methodology. Weaving an autoethnographic fragment of the researcher’s fieldwork experiences into the tapestry of this entanglement reveals the messy liveliness of diffractive research. It does not obscure the essential administrative, ethical and logistical elements that might bookend a data collection intervention — those research protocols that exist beyond the boundaries of the data and yet fundamentally influence the experiences captured within those recordings. It acknowledges what is gained through researcher presence-participation, and what is sacrificed: a firsthand, embodied understanding of the multisensory phenomena that coalesce to create a city at the cost of influencing the students’ experiences by introducing a factor that would otherwise not have been present.
[3] Barad follows Walter Benjamin in exploring the disruptive potential of ‘a superposition of times – moments from the past – existing in the thick-now of the present moment’ (2017, 33). For Barad, this is understood through the notion of temporal diffraction, noting how an electron can co-exist at different temporal, as well as spatial, locations. While the Pandemic Edinburgh topic is not a popular choice (perhaps because this is not a temporal location that students have any desire to re-turn to), Creating Edinburgh was designed and developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic time is therefore superimposed in the present moment through a troubling of digital/physical binaries and the traces of the disrupted learning experience that characterised the inaugural year of the course. Deeper time is also superimposed on the present, as students are invited to encounter the city at a geological scale. Searching for evidence of geological processes in the city, students are asked to identify traces in the materials and shapes of the urban landscape.
[4] This section, written by M Winter, describes their experience teaching on the inaugural version of Creating Edinburgh in 2021.
[5] This is an excerpt from M Winter’s PhD thesis.
[6] A list of topics added to the cache by students over the past few years.
[7] This section was co-created by Clare Cullen and M Winter, diffracting their varied experiences as researcher and teacher.
References
Barad, K (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, Durham.
Barad, K. (2017) What Flashes Up: Theological-Political-Scientific Fragments. In: Keller, C and Rubenstein M-J (eds) Entangled Worlds. Fordham University Press, New York pp. 21–88.
Barad K, Gandorfer D (2021) Political Desirings: Yearnings for mattering (,) differently. Theory & Event, 24(1), 14-66.
Barsalou LW, Wiemer-Hastings K (2005) “Situating Abstract Concepts.” In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, edited by Diana Pecher D, Zwaan RA. 129 – 63 (New York: Cambridge University Press).
BBC (2024) Council installs new slavery plaque at Edinburgh’s Melville Monument, 18 March 2024. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-68597359. Accessed 28 Mar 2024.
Cullen, C., Jay, D., Overend, D. et al. (2024) Creating Edinburgh: diffracting interdisciplinary learning and teaching in the contemporary city. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 1151.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (2020) Shadow on the street: Edinburgh’s links with the slave trade. Film by McFall L and AWED (Goss S, McFall L, Umney D, Moats D). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrx5yQnx6QM. Accessed 28/03/24.
Federici S (2004) Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY
Haraway D (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham.
Rokotnitz N (2017) “Goosebumps, Shivers, Visualization, and Embodied Resonance in the Reading Experience: The God of Small Things”, Poetics Today 38:2. DOI 10.1215/03335372-3868603.
Spector K (2015) Meeting pedagogical encounters halfway. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 58(6): 447–450.
This text was written between 7th and 11th May 2024 as a group of artists and scientists followed salmon down the River Spey in Scotland.
1. Nursery
First activity
Moments of vitality
Possible futures
We are at Ballintean Mountain Lodge in the Cairngorms. An interdisciplinary collective, comprised of scientists, artists and artist-scientists, working together for the first time. For the next four days we will follow salmon as they make their first careful movements away from the redds – the matrix of eggs and gravel, where they have spent the winter. In these nurturing waters, the fry sense their environment from a place of stony sanctuary: moving up through the sediment as they seek the light. And, as the water warms in the springtime sunshine, they begin to tentatively look around, seek out new territories, and interact with their neighbours.
2. Refuge
The changing strata
Enclaves of time, for dwelling
Necessary space
The lodge and its grounds are immaculate. It takes time to bed in – to feel comfortable enough to sink into the upholstered sofas to sink into the deep, cold water and find space to hide. There is an alternative sense of time and place here: that which Michel Foucault called a heterotopia – a place, other. Other than the habitual routines of everyday life. How can we use this space? As we moved down the River Feshie, we encountered a radical shift in the waterway: from wide and dynamic to deep and constrained. This location is important for returning salmon. There is less of a surface for the sun to heat the water, so large, tired fish can wait down in the dark and the cold. Waiting for the right time to resume their homeward journey.
3. Holding Bays
Risky strategy
Suddenly changed behaviour
With no reference points
After an evening of introductions and exchanges, after a day or two of acclimatising and absorbing, there is a shift in our activity. I ask the group to create a response to the site or the salmon or the story-so-far. This feels like a different way of working, which is at once a small thing – a simple thing – but also a journey into unknown territories without the same way-markers or signposts. Loch Insh is small and poses fewer challenges than larger bodies of water. Nevertheless, in these places of pike and perch and trout, the newly silvered smolts are vulnerable. They will find safety in numbers, and shoaling behaviour begins. Weaving together experiences, movements, senses, words, ideas, hopes. We might get somewhere like this.
4. Flow
Real sense of movement
Just let the journey take place
And stop holding on
We are on our way now. Sometimes, we will be moved along in fast sections. There will be waterfalls, dams. They don’t turn and actively swim: they let the water take them. Sometimes, the river will move slower, and we will push on. What will that effort cost us? And along the way, we smolts – cryptic critters – will never stop feeding. Ingesting everything that we encounter as this flow moves us on. On towards wider, wilder waters. On towards salty seas. We will grow fat. We will travel vast distances. We will live through all this, only if we are very, very lucky. And then, one day, we will turn. And we will return. Over and over for as long as you will allow.
5. The Beat
Onto the highway
Something of a rhythm now
Nocturnal drifters
We are in a drastically different environment today. Moving downstream at varying paces, just as others (who are further on in their journeys) pass us, going the other way. Is there any interaction between the wee smolts and the sea-hardened veterans? A passing glance, perhaps? At this point in the river, the banks are fixed and manicured. Anglers’ nets hang at intervals; well-stocked huts for high-price spots. But this is not management of the waterway. It is riparian gardening. A little further up, where the water runs a little faster, unruly flora cling to natural islets and the pathway needs greater care and surer foot. Smolts and brown trout jostle for position, snatching the stonefly from the space between the elements.
6. Detour
A cul-de-sac turn
This can only go so far
Fall back to go on
Turning away from the Spey, we follow a new path as it winds through riverwoods to the falls. Here, the salmon drop back to spawn. They might make the initial leap, if they cared to attempt it. But the second would outdo them. Better to recognise the limits of our ambitions. Salmon have been known to travel miles, only to rethink, retreat – even past the salt wedge – to try another route. No point putting good money after bad. And after all this, if there is somewhere else that we want to go on to, something else that we want to achieve, then it might be helpful to remember that there are other ways to get there. There are other routes to take.
7. Estuary
Productive places
For those who survived this far
Silvery speed run
As they approach this threshold, up to 40% are lost. Three of our group have travelled south by the time we reach Spey Bay. An ecotone – a meeting point between two ecosystems – represented by the wedge of salt water that cuts underneath the fresh. As the winds and tides churn away, one world collapses into the other. The confident hold of the osprey, the oily squeak of the terns, the ostentatious landing of the swans. The smolts wait for the right time – the night time – to become post smolts. And they make a break for it, riding the ebbing tide and escaping their riverworld. Where will this trajectory take us?
8. Sea
A shift in scale, now
On past continental shelf
Futures possible
Actively swimming. Seeking deeper worlds and distant feeding grounds. Somewhere in the south Norwegian sea, at the edge of the shelf, others join the journey. From green to blue, Britain to Greenland. What are the reference points when we can only look out and imagine? How do we find our way? Currents affording speed and suggesting direction; river water slowly giving way to salinity; depth; magnetism. These piscine psychogeographers can follow flow. Can we flow with them?
Waterways was conceived as a group of artists and scientists interested in the interconnected and entangled existence of various species. Our starting point was the Atlantic salmon, described by Dr Colin Bull as ‘in crisis’ due to multiple factors including deterioration of its habitat, warming waters, and risks of predators in both river and marine environments. The salmon as both fish and cultural symbol is key to many Scottish communities and Waterways initial residency sought to try to understand this through focusing on specific parts of the journey, the River Feshie and River Spey then on to Spey Bay on the North East coast of Scotland. Initial questions included: How can we foster interdisciplinary approaches to salmon conservation? How can creative methods respond to migratory journeys, tracing, tracking and as far as possible, travelling with wild salmon? In order to understand these questions we looked to the salmon life cycle, and to the salmon themselves. What were the stories of the salmon? How could we understand them through their connection to place and their epic journey?
It’s a story of:
birth
growth
resilience
change
shapeshifting
leaping
return
In the fastmoving flow of the River Feshie, islands of stones crafted by trees puncture the water.
It’s a story of:
behaviour
physiology
environment
ecology
hormones
chemicals
instinct
Light and oxygen, sand, algae, a moving environment, dynamic, the gravel provides a trap, a home, a refuge, a nest. Sight of the first salmon, an inch in length.
It’s a story of:
stones
redds
gravel
freshwater
seawater
shallows
depths
In and out the gravel, up and down the stream, camouflaged, they move in the nighttime.
It’s a story of:
stillness
standing
darting
swimming
drifting
falling
leaping
A deep crevasse between two walls of rock, they hide in the depths, at the bottom, the bedrock.
It’s a story of:
stonefly
beavers
mayfly
kingfishers
herons
osprey
freshwater pearl mussels
When they are bigger, they are more vulnerable, more likely to be found, there is safety in this zone.
It’s a story of:
Autumn
Winter
Spring
Summer
Autumns
Winters
Springs
The grassy tufts are trying to become the gravel shelves, the eggs are trying to become alevin, the alevin are trying to become parr, the parr are trying to become smolt, the smolts are trying to become adults, the adults are trying to spawn. Resistance and surrender, becoming and unbecoming under the water, unseen.
It’s a story of:
precarity
scarcity
crisis
barriers
predators
warming
demise
Some drop down into the main river. There is a coastal stream of food into this new environment, new reference points, new risks. Smoltification begins, silvering fish group together, there is safety in numbers.
It’s a body of:
scales
otolith
adipose
dorsal
pectoral
swim bladder
ovaries
Losing the ability to hold their station, losing the will, dropping back, drifting then dropping down down down the falls.
It’s the colour of:
silver
white
pink
green
grey
brown
salmon
It happens at nighttime, got to try to find a way out, fast moving river, complex currents, drawing on an inner compass.
It’s a symbol of:
passage
abundance
resilience
homecoming
tenacity
fertility
renewal
A tiny fin called the adipose, a minuscule fat store, no structure, clipped off as its function was unknown. A longing, a loss.
It’s a map of:
a journey
migration
landscapes
rivers
seas
scent
a lifecycle
The smell of water, the otolith, an olfactory map, heightened sense, thyroid throbbing. The Insh is calling, cross the fleshy bridge.
It’s a story of:
stillness
standing
swimming
drifting
dropping
falling
leaping
Barriers, hydrodams, track and truck means losing the thread of the smell. How to remember where you have not been? How to trace scent where you have not travelled? Working to find a way out, tail first into the white foam.
It’s a story of:
eggs
alevin
fry
parr
smolt
adult
spawning
At the coast they stop feeding, stomach’s empty, but body memory remains. The stress of the mother seeps into her eggs, her trauma their legacy.
It’s a story of:
birth
growth
resilience
change
shapeshifting
leaping
return
Waterways, 7-11 May 2024, Emma’s journal
Upper catchment: River Feshie (Spey tributary) & Loch Insh
Day 1. I wake early and run with Colin down the river to Feshiebridge. After breakfast, we walk down through blackthorn and birch to the braided channels and shingle of the River Feshie. Laura leads an “orientation exercise”, something unfamiliar to me – eyes closed, moving and stretching the body, grounding the feet, awareness of sounds, smells, sensations – that leaves me feeling vulnerable and awkward. I wonder how the others feel and where this discomfort comes from. I focus on the feeling of airflow around my hand and wonder if water flow feels similar over the skin of salmon parr holding station against the river current. The fry and parr face into the current, beating their fast little lives against it. When they smolt, they cede the battle, turn and face downstream, drift and swim. This image strikes deep; it is painful to consider the possibility of turn and release from the struggle to be enough.
We discuss the early life stages of the salmon and explore the shingle, side pools and river. We scoop with a net and turn pebbles to uncover stonefly, mayfly, beetles. I find a dried-out log with a salmon’s hooked jaw. I try to just be and feel but can’t escape the urge to catalogue, to name and list the wildlife, the sensations. [sand martins, dipper, pied wagtail, crow, buzzard]
We walk on to Feshiebridge with its deep pools for adult salmon to sink into. [orange tip butterfly, newt]
After lunch we go to Loch Insch. Salmon entering this wide loch must find their way out through the narrow exit at Kincraig. A kilometre further down is where the Feshie flows into the Spey. [osprey on nest, goldeneye, mallard, sandpiper, greylag geese, crow, buzzard, pigeon, wigeon, orange tip butterfly, peacock butterfly] How do they find their way out? How do they know when and how to smolt? In a way, they reinvent anew with every generation what it means to be salmon because they don’t have a cultural map. They find their way in the way that feels right. We have expectations of our future through knowledge imparted to us by others who have already gone this way. Salmon experience expectation in a totally different way, through urges and instinct. Does this mean they are freer and more adaptable than humans? Do they have a greater capacity for reimagining? Unguided but also unconstrained and unburdened by social knowledge and expectations? What does this mean for us, now, when we have to reimagine how to be human in a world whose ecological integrity is starting to unravel?
In the evening, we share our thoughts and words from the day. This is again uncomfortable, and I wonder how much of myself I have hidden that this feels so exposing.
Day 2. Again I run to Feshiebridge, being happy to stay by the river rather than seek out a new route. The river is silver and the fringing birch trees luminous in the early morning light. I startle a hare drinking at a shallow pool. I want to run fast but the narrow, foot-worn path forces me into an awkward gait. I briefly wonder if the rewilded future will contain any smooth ways. I move off the track and realise the grassy overgrowth itself better holds my feet.
[cuckoo, willow warbler, siskin, chaffinch, crow, song thrush]
Middle course: Aberlour
Day 3. I dream vividly and wake to the dawn chorus, needing more sleep but reluctant to shut the window. I walk to the Feshie and enjoy the colours in the early morning light but don’t scramble down the bank to peer into the water or lift stones.
After breakfast we go to Aberlour where the Spey has become something very different – wide, manicured and very appealing to anglers. Down at the river, we speak about angling, catch and release, knotless nets, the ambiguous status of trout, river gardening and the constrained flow. I feel detached – from the river, from the day. We discuss climate change, warming rivers, smolt run phenology and the potential uncoupling of evolved migration cues from encountered marine conditions. [crows, jackdaw, yellow wagtail, magpie, mallards]
We walk upstream to the suspension bring and watch a rotating dance of anglers. Someone asks, why do they fish for salmon? I am struck by this ubiquitous question of the outsider, that can only be asked of anything by someone from a nonintersecting world, and wonder how the anglers themselves would respond. They aren’t detached. They have quite literal lines of communication with the river, with the salmon.
We trail through wild garlic scented woodland to a rocky perch above the river and watch the dark swirling surface. I enjoy the shedding of tiny eddies from larger ones. Fish keep surfacing with a plop but are gone by the time to turn to look and I don’t stare at any one patch of water long enough to see them. Matthew does, and sees several; he also films underwater. In scientific observation, how do we know when we’ve watched for long enough?
I feel like I can’t find a way in, to the river, to the salmon, to the day. Detached. Is this why people fish, to pluck the unknowable out of the darkness and force it to “shake hands” with us, confront, see and know us? Is this why we are uncomfortable with rewilding? The new wilderness might give nonhumans too many places to elude us. The water feels impenetrable compared with the clear shallows of yesterday’s Feshie where we could see fully to the bottom, turn stones and glimpse the inhabitants. If we can’t find a way in, a way of seeing in, do we believe there’s anything there, do we care?
I watch sandpipers. One, pipping, zips a straight line upstream. Three, pipping more so, chase each other in zigzags. They don’t seem to want a way in. (I later look up how sandpipers feed: they hunt prickly bugs by sight on the ground or in shallow water, so indeed they don’t need a way into the deeper water.)
Sitting at the edge of conversation, I hear warblers on the opposite bank. Unsure which, I ask BirdNet, a machine learning bird song recognition app. Black cap, it tells me, then wavers – Whitethroat? These birds sound very different. Has the incursion of even gentle respectful human voices into the recording made the song cryptic to BirdNet, or is the whitethroat there too and cryptic to me? I am restless to move on and find some attachment to this day.
[sandpipers, red kite, magpie, yellow wagtail, black cap]
We walk up the Burn of Aberlour to waterfalls. Salmon come this way but may not make it up the highest fall. Marie and I discuss the definition and etymology of the word “matrix” and I feel the need to understand how the mathematical definition fits in. My research involves finding a salmon post-smolt’s path through n-dimensional matrices of biophysical ocean model data. I wonder what questions an artist would ask of my data.
I want to swim but feel awkward and settle for dangling my feet in the peaty water, enjoying the different textures (turbulent, laminar, bubbly, still) on my toes. The cold water is refreshing but still doesn’t connect me to the day.
Laura and I wonder what the human equivalents are of salmon’s unlearnt knowledge (instincts, gut feelings, innate responses). Are we such a social species that we’ve lost all our useful instincts, downloaded them to the cultural cannon? (I think about cultures and yoghurt cultures and how cultured things are easier to digest).
I think about how our salmon population “box” models map onto this multifaceted riverine landscape. They seem such an inadequate representation. Our smooth-sided boxes leave nowhere for the salmon to hide. Lack of complexity hinders accurate representation of processes, e.g. coexistence theory. We need to recognise the right level of complexity – the number of niches or modes of being that the landscape wants to split into, the number of boxes needed to catch the salmon. Rewilding is about allowing mess and complexity.
River mouth: Spey Bay
Day 4. On the last day at Ballintean we head outside to trace, draw and map. I trace the surroundings of Ballintean from the OS map – braided river, roads, forest – and add all our wildlife observations.
We spend a beautiful couple of hours back at the braided Feshie. (Is this the Feshie, or is that the Feshie? It’s all the Feshie.) I enjoy eddy dimples shedding off an exposed boulder and fish tail-like hazy green fronds flicking in the flow. All that complex motion – eddying surface, undulating weed fronds, river riffles – is mesmerising and satisfying. Today I am connected. There’s a small salmonid, impossible to say whether salmon or trout, nestled against its Favourite Rock. It’s still but with fast beating gills. How long will it patiently stay there and is it aware of being observed?
We drive off down the Spey. Satnav tries to persuade us to divert but we stick with the Speyside road for our journey to the river mouth. Spey Bay is at its finest in the sunshine. We wander up to the Garmouth viaduct, usually so magical, but it feels like we are all dragging our heels and yearning for the sea – we are heading in the wrong direction. We turn round and go out onto the shingle. Neil and I wonder what processes made and maintain this massive shingle bed; I suspect a combination of relict and active. We all feel this site is a world of danger for the smolts. How can they rush past all the hazards, like the fleet of sawbill ducks currently lurking in the river mouth, for their shot at marine life? When they smolt, are they aware of the dangers ahead?
[terns, osprey, eider, diver, greater black backed gulls, other gulls, a fleet of mergansers in the river mouth, small flitty waders, crows, orange tip butterflies]
Day 5. We meet again at Spey Bay, me with family in tow. We sit looking out at the narrow river mouth and wide sea and try to imagine the post-smolts’ ongoing journey – migration paths, cues, salinity gradients, shelf and shelf edge and beyond. The complexity and completeness of Spey Bay’s multifaceted environment, of our journey, are satisfying. And yet the journey is unfinished. How do we follow the salmon further?
As we leave Spey Bay, I realise that today I am attached and calm in a slow unphilosophical way. Later, I think about how the journey and life stages of the salmon are so varied in pace. Metabolism doesn’t always match with their pace of life. Eggs. Slow swelling, oxygen washed, stuck patient. Fry. Fast beating, rock attached. Parr. Station-holding, current-facing. Smolts. River racing, danger evading, urgent travelling. Post-smolts. Release seeking, frantic bursting out into salt water.
A walk with Elaine Rainey (Scottish Badgers), Glen Cousquer (University of Edinburgh) and others at Boghall Burn by the University’s Easter Bush Campus, by the Pentlands. We are working towards a paper on ‘Embracing the 30×30 biodiversity challenge on veterinary campuses’.
We encounter various barriers this morning.
The entrance to the Vet School is locked, so I wait for someone to access the building with their card and surreptitiously follow them inside. Already a trespasser.
A travelling community had moved their caravans into the overflow carpark and, as they had begun to enter the building, a heavy-handed lockdown was in place.
I thought about this policing of space as we walked towards the burn.
We pass a hedgerow and peer into its tangled branches to see the plastic guards and chicken wire. This hedge was not so hedgehog friendly, but Elaine suggested that badgers could probably pass over the metal barriers without much bother.
Glen asks us to pause before we cross the threshold into the site and reads ‘Walk Slowly’ by Danna Faulds:
The harsh voice
of judgment drops to a whisper and I
remember again that life isn’t a relay
race; that we will all cross the finish
line; that waking up to life is what we
were born for.
We follow the path through the mixed woodland and note how the new birch trees are still bound in plastic.
Other saplings are surviving the roe deer’s passage without the need for such protection.
The inaccessibility of this muddy, steep winding path, which crosses the burn over rickety bridges, means that we need to be mobile as we negotiate the shifting terrain.
Not everybody would be able to come with us.
The whole site is a lesson in inclusions and exclusions: we need to protect this place and prevent the new housing development from bringing too many people into a fragile ecology.
But welcoming in, rather than keeping out, sits better with our aspirations and ethos.
Can this site be an enclosure and an exclosure at the same time?
As the geographer Doreen Massey has suggested, ‘multiplicity, antagonisms and contrasting temporalities are the stuff of all places’ (2005, 159). There are therefore no hard and fast rules, and universal politics are not possible:
The issue is one of power and politics as refracted through, and often actively manipulating space and place, not one of general ‘rules’ of space and place. For there are no such rules, in the sense of a universal politics of abstract spatial forms; of topographic categories. Rather, there are spatialised social practices and relations, and social power. (…) It is a genuinely political position-taking not the application of a formula about space and place. (166)
Opening or closing space is not necessarily good and bad respectively, and the same arguments have been used by the Left for protecting the territories of small tribes (closing space) and accepting immigrants through a freer border control (opening space). Likewise, unequal power relations can result in both openness and closure of space by a complex interplay of ‘settledness and flow’ (174). So, ‘simply saying “no” to nation, home, boundaries and so forth is not in itself a political advance (it is spatial fetishism to think it will be)’ (174).
As we walk back through the wood and return to the campus, we have passed multiple barriers.
But we need to leave many in place, to maintain them, to create them.
After all, life is not a race. We can be slowed, prevented from progressing, stopped…
In the end, ‘we will all cross the finish line’
References:
Faulds, Danna, ‘Walk Slowly’, in Go In and In: Poems from the Heart of Yoga, Peaceable Kingdom Books, 2002.
Massey, Doreen, For Space, London: SAGE Publications, 2005
This text was performed in August and October 2023 at the Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh as part of the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas. It is an argument for interdisciplinary collaboration, with some stories of Making Routes fieldwork at Knepp Castle Estate and Gully Cave.
Hi. I’d like to start with a joke. Seems appropriate…
A scientist, a geographer and an artist walk into a bar…
The barman asks them what they want and:
And the barman looks at them all blankly for a moment, then says ‘so that’ll be three pints of beer, then?’
Ok, so it wasn’t a funny joke. But if you’re here expecting an hour of comedy, you’ve maybe misread the blurb…
And something comedians never do is analyse their own jokes (unless you’re Stewart Lee). But my background is in theatre and performance studies, so I can’t help it.
I want to note that moment when the barman looks at these disciplinary characters ‘blankly’.
[Some of you are looking at me quite blankly right now]
That moment of blankness is what often happens when specialists forget that they spend most of their time up their own arses.
But I want to suggest that this space of not quite getting each other – of misunderstandings and miscommunications, between people who don’t usually talk to each other – holds tremendous potential for transformational change.
When we generate, organise, categorise, and share knowledge, so much of our efforts go into eliminating those spaces of perplexed bafflement from our work.
My suggestion is that we actually need to embrace them and cultivate them. This talk is going to tell you how to do that.
I’m standing in a field in West Sussex.
There is a gentle rain creating ripples in a dark pond. Oak trees shed their acorns. A herd of cows – long horned mega beasts – stare at us from afar. Purple emperor butterflies flit about the tangled wildflowers. A cacophony of birdsong – blue tits, robins, blackcaps. Rabbits bound through the hedgerow. Buzzards circle overhead.
And the reason I’m standing in this field is that I’ve invited a group of scientists, geographers, and artists to work together for a couple of days at an experimental rewilding site.
My idea is that if these people spend some time together, exploring their different takes on nature and conservation – then something else will emerge. Something that we don’t yet understand or recognise. Something that might change the way we think about the world and our place within it.
And one of the group – a Quaternary Scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London – looks at me blankly for a moment and says ‘What do you actually want us to do?’
Can I have a volunteer to play the part of this scientist?
You don’t have to do much – just join me up here and read aloud from this short script, so only come up if you’re comfortable doing that in front of all these people!
Scientist: What do you actually want us to do?
David: Um… well, I’m hoping that will emerge as we work together here.
Scientist: How are we going to do that, though?
David: Well, I thought we could use some of the methods from my training as a theatre director and collaborative performance-maker to – you know – explore the more-than-human world here and kind of… create an assemblage of ecological practice…
Scientist: Right.
David: So, maybe we could start by just finding a place to sit and writing a little response to the things you observe there – like, the sounds and the feeling of being here – that sort of thing.
Scientist: Ok. How many words?
David: Well, there’s no word limit as such.
Scientist: So we can just write whatever we want?
David: Yes. And then, if you’re comfortable to do so, we might read those to each other and then see if we can weave them together somehow – create a kind of multi-authored text from our time here? It could even include some movement if you wanted.
Scientist: Yep.
David: Does that sound ok?
Scientist: … I think I’m going to need an aqueous solution of ethanol, sugars, amino acids, minerals, flavonoids, and other organic compounds, resulting from the chemical reactions of mashing, boiling, and fermentation.
Rewilding requires a willingness to let go of some of the things that we think we know.
I was drawn to it because it offers a new way of working that moves us into a radical space of possibility, in which we don’t know how to behave, we have no language to explain what is happening, and we just have to trust in messy, unpredictable processes.
That is not how most of us currently work.
But I do think things are changing.
There’s a word that has surreptitiously infiltrated the modern university: sneaking its way along dusty, book-lined corridors; slipping into shiny new research laboratories; and even cementing itself into renovation and construction projects across campuses. It is a word that threatens the very foundations of higher education. It demands new ways of working and raises difficult questions about how we should work together, share ideas, and respond to the big challenges facing our world today.
That word is… [any guesses?]… ‘interdisciplinary’.
I want to take up the offer of interdisciplinarity and suggest that we all need to become less disciplined – that’s my dangerous idea.
Shaking off the mantle of traditional, discipline-bound knowledge, I want to suggest that the only way to respond to an increasingly complex and challenging world is to stop playing by the rules. We need creative, experimental, and messy spaces where new approaches can be developed.
I’m going to take you into another of these messy spaces now.
You’re in a cave in the Mendips in Somerset. The cave mouth faces west with far-reaching views over a gorge and westwards across the flat floodplain of a river. The ground is covered in bright blue tarpaulin. You are at an excavation site, where the scientists have discovered bones, teeth, and fragments from tens of thousands of mammals and birds. It is raining. Wild pony, auroch, arctic fox, wolf, and hyena all lived here once. Your encounter with deep time makes you feel sick.
When I visited this place in November 2021, I brought some of the same collaborators with me, who worked together in the field in West Sussex.
It was encouraging that they had come back.
What made this place quite different from the rewilding site was absence.
In the field, we had seen the pigs, cows, butterflies, and oaks.
Here we encountered an unassuming opening in a cliff face that had been hollowed out over a decade of careful excavation work.
I really needed to understand more about what I was seeing.
Ok, now I need another volunteer – same deal, you’re playing the part of a geographer.
Geographer: The cave was filled with a red, limestone-rich deposit, which accumulated through the inwashing of material down the gully above and through a large fissure feature within the cave roof. This was then capped by a densely-cemented carbonate flowstone, sealing the deposits below. That essentially created a deep time memory box for us to discover…
David: … Wow!
Geographer: The breccia has proved to be richer with fossils than we ever could have imagined. So much evidence of past inhabitation and clues to their behaviours, which can inform our understanding of future conservation possibilities.
David: Amazing!
Geographer: What we’re seeing here is a window into the Quaternary. I’m sure you’ll have loads of thoughts about how we can work together to understand all this.
David: Just… Wow. It’s er… vast, isn’t it?
Geographer: What’s your initial response? To what you’re seeing here?
David: … er… Wow. It makes me think… um… It’s amazing.
Geographer: … I’m going to need the product of the skilled labour of farmers and artisan brewers, who cultivate local and global ingredients deriving from diverse environmental factors.
Thank you to our geographer. Thank you to our scientist.
And that leaves me, I suppose. The artist.
On the walk back from this cave through the gorge, I shared my worries with one of the participants, Helen.
I said that I felt a bit overwhelmed by the scale of what we had just encountered.
I said that this didn’t feel like the right time for our usual methods and experiments.
And Helen replied: ‘You have to breathe in to breathe out’.
I think that’s the most difficult part of all this: spending time together, sharing ideas and experiences, learning from each other, and then very slowly starting to find ways to collaborate.
We need to resist the urge to know everything and control everything.
We need to let a little more wildness into the process.
And that’s where I think art and creativity have a lot to offer.
Entering into these unknown and perhaps unknowable spaces, I have felt challenged, bewildered, moved, and inspired.
What I was able to do was then channel those experiences into very small scale, tentative responses…
Creative writing, performed actions, makeshift films, and installations – these offered me ways to bring together the disparate perspectives and responses of the participants.
Art became a glue holding it all together. Or rather, a thread, weaving things together.
For me, it unlocked something quite profound – an insight into a wilder, messier, unpredictable world that exists outside the academy, and of which we are all a part.
That doesn’t need discipline.
Perhaps we can talk about that for a bit.
Then you can join me for a liquid celebration, a symphony of flavours that dance upon the tongue, a frothy masterpiece that delights the senses and elevates the spirit.
Thank you.
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.
Glasgow Women’s Library Heritage Walk 3rd June at 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm Women of the Merchant City Heritage Walk
Holme, Chris. 2015. https://historycompany.co.uk/2015/11/16/the-wee-glasgow-women-and-the-birth-of-caesarian/ accessed 0/06/23.
Jamie, Kathleen. 2021. Foreword to Andrews, Kerri. 2021. Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. London: Reaktion Books.
Kern, Leslie. 2020. The Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. London: Verso.
Massey, Doreen and Pat Jess. 1995. A Place in the World? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Overend, David. 2023. Performance in the Field: Interdisciplinary Practice-as-Research. Palgrave Macmillan.
Sheridan, Sara. 2021. Where are the Women?: A Guide to an Imagined Scotland. Edinburgh: Historic Environment Scotland.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2001. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso.
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.
You need to breathe in to breathe out…
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.
