Fife Psychogeography – Page 9 – Murdo Eason

Following the Falling Water

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Images taken from a short walk on the Water of Leith, between the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Stockbridge on 27th June 2015.

Now playing: Kevin Drumm – Reverse Osmosis

Found Art: Andre / Mondrian / Scully

How many times have we walked up Free School Close, a narrow pedestrian thoroughfare that connects Canmore Street to Dunfermline High Street?

Perhaps it was the way the sun reflected off the pinks and greys.

Possibly we were more attuned to notice this

chance framing of brickwork, stone and harling.

Found a Tate Modern mash-up:

Carl Andre Piet Mondrian Sean Scully …

Now playing: Louis Andriessen – De Stijl

Thanks to @stphn

10 x Time Placed Sketches

Under a silent sky

the breathing forest.

Walk in

Devilla Forest, Fife.

Another shadow

of time passes.

Seasons come

seasons go.

.

Tuilyies standing stones (Bronze Age). Near Torryburn, Fife.

III

Ephemeral time:

a dragon’s breath

blown across

the sky?

“Time Cuts Down all

Both Great and Small”

Anticipated time

never arrives.

2 ROOMS available

1 taken, 1850.

Dunfermline Abbey Churchyard, Dunfermline, Fife.

Only traces of

thresholds passed

time closed

arrested flows

Merchant City, Glasgow.

Disruptive time

tears the tongue

of Ouroboros

New York City

VII

Wood and water

time stored flows

Storage vessels

of city dreaming?

New York City

VIII

Time passed

time remembered

the time of now

a time to come

Bench outside St Marks in the Bowery Church, New York. In memory of Greta C. Ghee

Elemental time

a quiet creation;

In process

a living roof.

Devilla Forest, Fife.

Time stacked

seasons circles.

Stored memories – of

sun

the wind

rain

the saw.

Devilla Forest, Fife.

Now playing: Marilyn Crispell / Gary Peacock / Paul Motion – Nothing ever was, anyway. Music of Annette Peacock.

Tracing the Cut: On the Path of Sleeping Sleepers

On the path of sleeping sleepers

as it looked

on the last day of 2014.

Time to return

and follow the line.

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The small part of the track that we had walked at the end of last year was overgrown but easily passable. The rails and sleepers still intact. We returned a few weeks ago on a day heralding early intimations of another spring to come. That change in light, the soft drone of an awakening insect world and pointillistic bursts of unseen and unidentified bird calls.

The paradox of being off the well-trodden path and yet only following a line to wherever it may eventually lead. We are not sure how far it goes and whether it will be entirely passable.

We almost fail immediately as we soon encounter impenetrable thickets of bramble bushes. (noted for autumn). This leaves no option but to take a slight detour and pick up the line again by sliding down an embankment beside a small road bridge. This looks more promising. The line stretches out ahead. Blue pools trap the sky whilst shadow branches sweep across the cut in the light breeze.

This incision through the landscape is just another example of a history of human activity that leaves its traces and stories embedded in the earth. Field enclosures, drystane dykes, managed woodlands, roads and a network of railways have all left enduring marks on the landscape from the pre-agrarian to the post-industrial.

Prior to construction of this railway line, ox-drawn wagons delivered coal from the Dunfermline pits to the nearest harbour at Brucehaven a distance of around five miles on primitive roads. By the end of the 18th century, growth of the lime industry at Charlestown – which relied on large amounts of coal – led to the construction of the Elgin Wagonway which laid down wooden and then, in 1812, iron rails on which heavy horses pulled coal wagons. By 1852 a fully functioning steam railway carrying freight and passengers connected Dunfermline and Charlestown. Passenger trains continued to run up until 1938 (with a break in continuity between 1863 and 1894). The line was apparently maintained and kept usable to service the Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Crombie, if required, but it is clear from our walk that no train has passed this way for a very long time.

Whilst not the smoothest of conditions underfoot, many stretches offer pleasant walking. The iron rails guiding us under abandoned bridges and then on to long straight tracks that disappear into the horizon.

But this is no isolated rural idyll. To the north, the line runs parallel to the A985, one of the busiest trunk roads in Scotland and the white-noise throb of passing traffic is our soundtrack for a mile or so. To the south, the views are over agricultural land, recently ploughed. In the foreground a suggestion of trees:

Occasionally we have to navigate over, under or through some obstacles:

and traverse abandoned level crossings:

Forgotten mileage markers barely stand upright as we walk high over earth-piled embankments:

A rooftop eyrie. What creature could inhabit this green island in an ocean of blue?

We wonder how long it has been since anyone has walked the entire line. You are not actively encouraged to walk it with each entry and exit point fenced off. Not surprisingly we encounter no-one. Our only constant companions are the buzzards who circle high in the sky and the occasional explosion of displaying pheasants. We guess they are escapees from the nearby Elgin Estate where they are bred and shot by corporate middle managers who like to go ‘hunting’.

Tuning forks

sounding out

vibrations

of the sun

As the line curves northwards towards Dunfermline, we approach the bridge which crosses the A985:

Echoes of a painted relief by Ben Nicholson?

Shadows and rust:

Old branch line

new branches

Tracing the cut northwards, we become submerged within the landscape as if walking through a post-industrial holloway. A waterlogged, sodden stretch with tumbled trees conjures up visions of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Our views of the surrounding land obscured as we walk into The Zone, following the rusting red rails.

And when we walk, we stroll alongside retrieved memories but also construct new ones. Small pebbles collected and stored: the sun warmed lichen; that particular apparition of trees; the smell of an emerging spring; laces in boots being shredded by brambles.

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The sun reflects from the elegant curve of bleached white bone amongst a bed of grey feathers. Ribs sparkle like some primitive xylophone and still attached to the leg, a small dark hoof. The sweep of bones and sinew appear to retain some residue of movement; of a life-force that has been so abruptly arrested. Who knows what happened to this (we guess) young deer?

Detached and slightly further away lies the white skull, stripped and pecked clean. The downy feather bed suggests that some of the birds who came to feast on the carcass ended up being part of someone else’s meal.

Fur, feather, rib, bone

Old Nature Writing

We eventually come to the end of the track alongside a well maintained and clearly operational train line. We later find out that this is Elbowend Junction where the track to Charlestown branched off from the Dunfermline and Alloa line.

The connection is now clearly severed.

Another mark, a cut, embedded in the landscape, made by human activity and reflecting the ebb and flow of industry and capital. Slowly merging back into the earth a corridor of memory and potential new futures. An incision slowly being repurposed by nature once again.

Now playing: Andrew Chalk – Blue Eye of the March

Reference:

Norman Fotheringham, Charlestown, Built on Lime (Charlestown: Charlestown Lime Heritage Trust, 1997).

At the highest point

kaah………….k

aah.. k a a h

..kaah .. .kaah

… k a a h

….kaah….k….kaah

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at the highest point,

a building? a parliament?

a clamour of rooks?

Coryphaeus, chorus, and

huddled conversations

Corvus chants

beak and feather

chatter, songs of

earth and sky

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“Out of all of them, it has been the corvids, the rook, magpie and crow, who have altered for ever my relationship to the rest of the world, altered my view of a hierarchy of form, intellect, ability; my concept of time”.

Esther Woolfson, Corvus: A Life with Birds

Now playing: Bert Jansch – Twa Corbies

Lost Voices

lost voices:

…………………………whispers

of building

……………dwelling

…………………………departing

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Now playing: Robin Williamson: Trusting in the Rising Light

Crows, Crowns and a Curious Landscape

Like animated clods of black earth suspended in the branches. A murder of crows.

We can feel their collective beady gaze following us as we walk down the single-track road that leads into the hamlet of Pattiesmuir. A fluttering of wings and more descend. It is hard not to think of the gathering flocks in Hitchcock’s The Birds.

For no apparent reason, they suddenly take flight. A spiralling vortex of wing, beak and claw, ascending, then wind-blown towards the white crosses in Douglas Bank Cemetery. Only four return to the upper branches, no longer interested in us. One looks west whilst three gaze towards the east indicating our direction of travel.

Three craws …

The old car at the entrance to Pattiesmuir evokes a sense of time travel as we walk through an agricultural hamlet whose physical fabric has changed very little over the past 150 years. A collection of low-level whitewashed cottages line a single street that provides both entrance and exit with no through road.

Pattiesmuir has been recorded on maps as Patiemuir, Peattie Muir, Pettymuir and a number of other variants. An early map from 1654 records it as Pettimuir, although the origin of the name remains obscure. Local folklore suggests that the area was once a focus of Romany activity and even that The King of the Gypsies once had a ‘palace’ nearby. The 1896 Ordnance Survey map does refer to an area of trees to the west of the settlement as “Egyptian Clump”, and a neighbouring field is also noted as “Egypt Field”.

In the early 18th Century a small community of hand-loom weavers formed in Pattiesmuir to help supply the Dunfermline linen industry. By 1841,there was a population of 130 which supported a school – attended by 34 pupils – an Inn, a blacksmith and three public wells. By 1857 the population was 190. However, the introduction of the power-loom meant a slow decline in the fortunes of hand-loom weavers and by 1870 almost all weaving activity had ceased.

There are no schools or Inns in Pattiesmuir these days but a building called The College remains. It’s origins lie in a fraternity of radical weavers who set up the ‘college’ so that weavers and agricultural workers could meet for self-improvement classes in politics, philosophy, economics and theology. They subscribed to the Edinburgh Political and Literary Journal and pooled funds to buy the works of Burns and the new Waverley novels of Walter Scott. One notable member and self-proclaimed ‘professor’ of the College was Andrew Carnegie, grandfather to a Dunfermline born grandson of the same name. Young ‘Andra’ would travel to America in 1848 and eventually consolidate the US steel industry to become the ‘richest man in the world’.

You cannot drive through Pattiesmuir, but if you walk you can take a left where the road stops and walk into a curious area of landscape. Neither edgeland nor particularly rural it is bounded by Dunfermline, only a few miles away, to the north and Rosyth to the East. A rarely walked mix of hedgerows, old woodland, farm tracks and tenanted agricultural land. On Google maps it is an area that is deemed ‘featureless’. However, we already know that it hosts a coffin road and the wild wood. Today’s walk will reveal a few more surprises …

We stand and watch the weather arrive. A huge palm of grey sky that threatens to smother us with rain but growls quickly past. Underfoot, attention is diverted to the heroic efforts of a slug traversing the rough stone path. The intensity of existence revealed in this waltzing fuselage of seal-smooth skin and striated hand-painted detail. Eventually it reaches more hospitable looking terrain and we can walk on.

We are intrigued by the sign on a set of ruined agricultural buildings. Clearly, it has been a long time since they were operational. Part of the roof is missing and internal vegetation is now stretching for the sun.

Minimal Disease Pigs – it could either be the name of an undiscovered hardcore punk band or a fragment from a Mark E. Smith lyric:

Beware of Guard – uh

Minimal Disease Pigs

No Entry

No Entry – uh

Of course, after the walk we had to find out what minimal disease pigs were:

Many infectious diseases are transferred from the sow to her offspring after birth and breaking this cycle of transference is the basis of the minimal disease concept. If piglets are reared in total isolation from their mother and all other pigs that are not minimal disease pigs (that is they never come in contact with or even breathe the same air as other pigs), they will not become infected with certain disease-causing organisms (pathogens) that are normally present in pigs. Thus the cycle of transfer of many organisms from one generation (the sow) to the next (her offspring) is broken.

There is an almost chilling bio-technocratic language behind this concept. A section on ‘Breaking the Cycle‘ becomes even more so with descriptions of ‘snatch farrowing’, ‘hysterectomy procurement techniques’, ‘euthanased sows’ and ‘total isolation rearing’. It would appear that the minimal disease nomenclature died out, in the UK, in the 1970s to be replaced by ‘High Health Status‘.

It is unclear what happened to the fortunes of this particular pig farm that is now being slowly reclaimed back into the landscape. An agricultural ruin that has given us a partial glimpse into the bio-technic world of the animal husbandry practices that deliver up packets of bacon and pork on to the supermarket shelves. Another connection that illustrates that the urban and rural, local and global can never be viewed in isolation when we consider such basic questions as to how and where do we get our food.

As we head northwards towards the distant spires of Dunfermline, we encounter another relic of the agricultural past.

Crowned by thorns

an elegy

from the future?

An old petrol pump, presumably used at one time for filling up farm vehicles. Crowned by thorns, nature’s brittle fingers have enveloped the head and spiraled down the structure. Any message that was once conveyed by the sign on the wall is completely effaced. At one level the image perhaps conveys a narrative of decline of the tenant farmer or small farmer in general. As food production becomes increasingly industrialised, the small farmer finds it uneconomic to compete. Like the pig-farm, the infrastructure is slowly being reclaimed by the natural world.

However, is there another narrative? The petrol pump as a potent symbol of the global petrochemical and energy industries that exploit non-renewable resources that will one day inevitably run out. What will the cost be to planet Earth and its lifeforms? Is a crown of thorns awaiting the petrochemical plants, power stations, cars, aeroplanes …?

All questions to ponder as we head over the fields, nodding to the strange, silent wind poetry of Spinner. Just another story layered upon this ‘featureless’ curious landscape.

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Now playing: Hacker Farm – UHF

References:

Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Queensland Government, Minimal Disease Pigs

Fife Council Enterprise Planning and Protective Services Pattiesmuir Conservation Area Appraisal and Conservation Area Management Plan, October 2011.

Raymond Lamont-Brown, Carnegie: The Richest Man in the World (Stroud: The History Press, 2006).

Addendum: Into the Void – A Field Trip

We have previously entered the Zone-like territory of The Void which was documented in a previous post here:

We have just been sent this wonderful photo by Stray Seal which captures the uncanny, submerged world of The Void. It also confirms that the pike rumoured to patrol the waters is clearly swimming in the depths:

Underwater Chair and Pike ©strayseal — ©strayseal

Stray Seal is Lindsay Brown, a cinematographer specialising in underwater film and photography for both drama and documentary, including natural history. There are some more of her quarry pictures here and check out her website and facebook albums.

Now playing: Mothlite – ‘The One in the Water’ from Flax of Reverie

Plants, potters, webs: On forms, usefulness and emptiness

With the clocks about to go back this weekend, autumnal hues cloak the body and seep into the skin. The piercing light of summer is almost emptied out. Weak threads of sunlight dissolve amongst russet, ochre and blanket skies of grey.

Here then, some small cups of blue:

inked

……………upon the sky

blue

……………cupped

time

……………held

in a breath

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The potter makes the earthen pitcher out of earth selected and prepared specifically for it. The potter … shapes the clay. No – he shapes the emptiness.

Martin Heidegger

When posting the above image on twitter, I received, by return, a digital echo from Andrew Male, (@AndrewMaleMojo). A fragile image, of the same unknown plant, etched in glaze and fire; ‘cupped’ and bleeding into blue.

The bowl was made by the potter Beresford Pealing who ran a studio-pottery at Harnham Mill, West Harnham, Salisbury, Wiltshire from 1966-1972. Pealing created hand-thrown domestic stoneware оf а type pioneered by Bernard Leach working іn аn Arts & Crafts tradition.

The image of Pealing’s bowl resonated with the image of that flower cupping light, sky and time and somehow reminded me of Martin Heidegger’s late thought, particularly his Bremen Lecture of 1949, Insight into That Which Is:

When we fill the pitcher, the liquid flows into the empty pitcher … The thingness of the container in no way rests in the material that it is made of, but in the emptiness that [it?] contains.

I’m not sure if Heidegger ever acknowledged it, but it seems too much of a coincidence if this passage was not influenced by the arguably more poetic rendering in the Tao Te Ching:

Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.

(Tao Te Ching: Chapter 11, translated by Stephen Mitchell, 1988)

or in an alternative translation:

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.

(Tao Te Ching: Chapter 11, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1998)

A random moment this week threaded together that plant inked against the sky and Beresford Pealing’s bowl. Opening the front door, an empty form cupping the autumn light:

Overnight, a dweller on the threshold had constructed possibly the perfect form of useful emptiness. A filigree construction allowing the world to pass through and bring whatever bounty may stick on the way…

And of the unknown plant?

When the photograph was taken, I had no idea what it was, although A, who is the gardener, told me that it would soon ‘explode’. She didn’t know the name either.

Fraser MacDonald @JAFMacDonald kindly identified it as Agapanthus and sent a link to this stunning time-lapse film. Enjoy the white stars exploding in all their glory. All within fifteen seconds:

But there is one final act of synchronicity. Re-watching the film clip today and revisiting Heidegger’s lecture, I come across his thinking on the emerging technologies of 1949 (for example film) and specifically, their ability to collapse time and space. An example that he gives is:

the sprouting and flourishing of plants which remained hidden throughout the seasons is now openly displayed on film within a minute…

We can only imagine what his response may have been to the webs spun by modern technologies. Lots of un-useful emptiness? Perhaps we can learn from the spider. Spin the web, shape the emptiness and see what sticks.

Many thanks go to Andrew Male and Fraser MacDonald for their invaluable contributions to this post.

Now playing: Brian Lavelle – Empty Transmissions.

References:

Martin Heidegger, Insight into That Which Is, Bremen Lecture, 1949 (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2012)

Lao Tzu. The Tao Te Ching, various translations.

the last sound of an echo

somewhere between Charlestown and Dunfermline

t h e l a s t s o u n d o f a n e c h o

t h e l a s t s o u n d o f an e c h o

t h e l a s t s o u n d o f a n e c h o

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Now playing: Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis – Deep Listening