(*Intrigued by this one. You can still see plenty of bricked up window spaces in Edinburgh New Town, often attributed to window taxes imposed in the 1700s, although see comment from Calum Storie below. This one looks like a cast has been taken, delineating the fan light and window frames. The inside reversed to the outside. Shades of Rachel Whiteread?)
I’m guessing that most people in the audience will be familiar with Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s film A Field in England. So, to kick off this talk, I’d like to invite you on a journey and imagine if you will:
A Field in Fife:
SLIDE
The commuters scurrying down the stairs at Rosyth Halt railway station, are unlikely to give much thought, if any, to the field on their left as they descend to the platform below. Some may notice subtle changes in colour throughout the year. The recent appearance of yellow broom blossom; the overhead sun creating a dappled patchwork of greens, sandy browns and heathery purple. In a few weeks, the hawthorn blossom will sit like scented snow on the ancient hedge.
Standing at a certain part of the station platform, it is possible to hear the gentle purr of the Whinny Burn tracing its route through the field on its way to the River Forth at Inverkeithing Bay. Magpies, rooks and collared doves appear to take a curious interest in the arrivals and departures of station commuters whilst overhead, the sun splinters around the extended wings of a buzzard soaring like Icarus ever higher into the blue.
The field is now bounded on all sides by a motorway spur, a dual carriageway and the railway line. An almost sealed off and severed island of abandoned agricultural land cast adrift with no easy public access.
At the top of the halt steps, there are no particularly distinguishing visual features as we look out over the land which we are going to walk through. As a train arrives on the platform below, a late flurry of commuters hurl themselves past us and down the stairs to squeeze into the carriages before the doors close.
Most are unlikely to be aware that there may be as many as 2,000 bodies buried somewhere in the vicinity.
July 1651
It was during the night or early morning of 16th /17th July 1651 that the troops of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army landed on the north shore of the River Forth at Inverkeithing Bay. Whilst they had inflicted a heavy defeat on the Scottish army at Dunbar on 3rd September 1650, they had been thwarted by attempts to advance further into Scotland.
Cromwell had concluded that Fife was strategically key and by 20th July 4,500 of his troops were dug in on Ferry Hills, whilst a Scottish force of a similar size had grouped at Castland Hill. Both locations just outside present-day Rosyth. The threat of Scottish reinforcements coming from Stirling provoked Cromwell’s army to attack and force the Scottish infantry to retreat northwards. On land close to Pitreavie Castle, the Scottish infantry made a final stand but were soon overwhelmed by the more experienced Parliamentarian army who had the additional advantage of cavalry. The Scots suffered heavy losses. This became known as The Battle of Inverkeithing (sometimes The Battle of Pitreavie) and was the last major battle of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in Scotland. From 1652, Scotland was wholly under control of Cromwell’s Protectorate.
The casualties on the Scots side were certainly heavy. Most sources agree that around 2,000 people were killed and around 1,500 taken prisoner.
It is said that the burn in the field ran red with blood for three days.
SLIDE
Entering the field is not too difficult. Not far from the station steps there is a locked gate but a little further along we find a gap in the hedgerow. If you are prepared to navigate, or slide down a steep slope, this will deposit you amongst the heap of discarded plastic bottles and assorted rubbish tossed from the stairs above. At ground level, the topography of the field is much more apparent. Pronounced undulations ahead of us, sloping off to the right towards marshy ground around the Whinny Burn. Ground cover is a mix of meadow type grasses, whin bushes, dandelions and what look like dock leaf plants gone to seed.
You only have to look towards the perimeter of the field to be aware that you are surrounded by human presence. The rooftops of Rosyth to the right and the hum of traffic a constant, low-level signal. Yet on the actual land we are walking, it is rare to find an almost complete lack of evidence that humans have recently passed. No litter, no discarded cans or bottles. No burnt out barbecues.
There are hints of desire lines traversing the space, possibly made by committed dog walkers, who have found a hidden access point, or could they be made by something else? It is only as we move further and deeper into the field, that there is a clear sense that we are being watched.
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At first, we wonder if it is a dog but it soon becomes apparent that it is the eyes of a tiny deer, a tiny roe deer fixed on our movements. We are both probably equally surprised by this encounter. This is not an area where you would typically expect to see deer. Where on earth has it come from? How has it accessed the sealed off field? We lock into that non-time state of reciprocal, motionless, staring.
Eventually the deer decides to break for it. Great elongated leaps for something so small – as if bouncing off the air itself, not really touching the ground. I manage to retrieve the camera and fire off some random shots in the hope that we obtain some record of this having happened.
SLIDE
We notice our presence is also alarming a number of skylarks which appear to have made the field their own. Their nervous, vertical flight and fluted song a mix of terror and beauty as we try to avoid what must be their nesting areas. It is us who have made this land strange. We are the other.
The field separates in two at a ridge of hawthorn bushes.
On the other side:
SLIDE
A field of time
history layered
on geography.
Transparent globes
of wind held tension
time scattered
yellow flowerings
of the eternal return
The field eventually tapers to a point where we can go no further, blocked off by the railway and the smooth, solid concrete structure carrying the A823 motorway spur.
We walk around the northern perimeter with only a thin hedgerow between us and the spur traffic. Such a slight threshold separating us from our field of time, skylarks and deer. On the other side, the surveillance cameras, crash barriers, lay-bys and signs – all the material apparatus of the modern motorway.
SLIDE
A footbridge takes us over this strangely empty vista, conjuring up something from Ballard, and into the relatively new ‘non-place’ of Carnegie Campus. As Marc Augé has said:
Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed . . .
SLIDE
We know from the old maps and records that this land was also once part of ‘the field’. Being a Sunday, the ‘campus’ is completely deserted as we wander amongst the new-build office blocks, many of which still look unoccupied. Roundabouts appear to have been built in hope of a time still to come as roads abruptly end.
Where the manicured non-place runs out, there is a sense of encroaching wildness, biding its time. An explosive wild bouquet of whin sits amongst a covering of red campion:
SLIDE
And yet amongst all the shiny new sheen of this place, older voices intrude. A hexagonal brick structure whose original purpose is unclear:
SLIDE
time stacked textures
brick and concrete
Nestled at the side of the main road into the campus we come across the cairn. As far as we are aware it is the only explicit acknowledgement of what happened on this land.
SLIDE
the Scots were driven back to the level ground between Hillfield and Pitreavie. Here, in one of the most famous episodes of the Battle of Inverkeithing, the Clan Maclean of Mull commanded by their chief, Sir Hector, found themselves surrounded by superior enemy forces. The clansmen fought fiercely in defence of their chief, calling out, [“Fear eile airson Eachainn!” ] “Another for Hector!” as they sacrificed themselves.
This cairn was only erected in 2001 by the Clan MacLean Heritage Trust. It is thought that the McLean dead are likely to have been buried in a mass grave somewhere within the field.
Nearby, stands another material presence in the layered history of this land. Peering over a substantial stone wall allows us a view of the Doocot in the grounds of Pitreavie Castle.
SLIDE
Pitreavie Castle was originally built in the early 17th century by Henry Wardlaw of Balmule. We pass the doocot, turn left and walk past the front doors of the Castle where the initials of another Henry – Henry Beveridge are recorded. Beveridge purchased the Castle in 1883 and extensively re-modelled it in 1885.
SLIDE
Beveridge was a wealthy mill-owner, philanthropist and educator from Dunfermline. He was an associate of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes having attended Geddes’s summer meetings in Edinburgh. Geddes also introduced Beveridge to the artists John Duncan and Charles Mackie who painted murals in the castle illustrating the legends of Orpheus and, due to the local historical connection, the famous ballad of Sir Patrick Spens.
“The king sits in Dunfermline toune drinking the blude reid wine, “O whar will I get a guid sailor, To sail this schip of mine?”
[It has been claimed that Elizabeth Wardlaw, the granddaughter-in-law of Henry Wardlaw was the author of Sir Patrick Spens, although the evidence appears to be somewhat tenuous].
It is believed that the Castle murals may now be at best over-painted and at worst destroyed but a good example of John Duncan’s Symbolist style can be seen in his famous work, The Riders of the Sidhe:
Walking past Pitreavie Castle today, now converted into flats and apartments, offers no clue as to another more recent past life. It was bought by the Ministry of Defence in 1938 and after the second world war, deep in a basement bunker, became the headquarters of NATO’s Northern Maritime Region. During the Cold War, all Soviet ships and submarines on exercise in the North Sea were monitored from here. The base only closed in 1996 and operations moved to RAF Kinloss. There is little or no outward trace of this today, although some photographs of its past life exist:
SLIDE
The first picture shows access to the underground bunker
And the second is the teleprinter room from 1944.
As we head along Castle Drive, we notice that a small housing estate also has a story embedded in the landscape, hidden amongst the street names:
SLIDE
Covenanters Rise: The Scottish army that fought against Cromwell was a Covenanter army, acting under allegiance to Charles II.
Then there is MacLean Walk: a reference to Sir Hector Maclean.
Sir John Brown Place is named after the commander of the Scottish lowland infantry and
Overton Crescent: refers to Colonel Robert Overton who led the assault party of New Model Army troops that landed in Fife on that night in July.
Our final part of the walk will take us along Castle Drive where we will loop around to return us to where we entered the field by the station. Despite the changes over the centuries, we have walked the area of the field as it was in 1651. A shifting terrain of presence and absence only partly represented on the maps. As the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska says:
I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
…
they spread before me a world
not of this world.
And we continue to ponder our mysterious encounter with the solitary roe deer. How did it access the field and why was it there? Perhaps, a glimpse of the eerie leaking into the everyday. We think of ghostly highlanders, adrift in their field with only the skylarks for company.
As we walk down Castle Drive we pass another new addition to the landscape on the left. A customer contact centre for Rupert Murdoch’s Sky empire.
On the other side of the road, a magpie picks at the carcass of a dead squirrel.
SLIDE
So, I hope that gave you a bit of a flavour of what could be described as a psychogeographic approach to landscape and how it can interact with the past, the present and the everyday. The key point is that this is not, let’s say, a destination landscape. It is literally embedded in the material fabric of the everyday. People traveling to work, actual places of human activity, arteries of transport infrastructure and housing. You don’t have to travel to London to do psychogeography. Why not Rosyth or Lochgelly? It can be on your doorstep or in very close proximity and is one way of becoming engaged in your local environment wherever that may be.
SLIDE
So What is Psychogeography?
Now the term psychogeography may be unfamiliar to some people in the audience but I would guess that most of you will have experienced it. To adapt Joseph Beuys – who incidentally stalks the corridors of this building – Everyone is a Psychogeographer.
Think back to when you were a child. You had little interest in moving through space in a linear fashion from place A to place B. Time was much more fluid. You would encounter playful distractions in the landscape – a tree to climb, or in my case, a concrete hippo or toadstool in the New Town of Glenrothes. You may have unwittingly performed part of Yoko Ono’s City Piece
Step in all the Puddles in the City
You might find sticks to pick up; objects to poke with a stick. You might sit down to observe a line of ants crawling across the pavement. Following the sound of a distant ice-cream van may lead you through new routes in familiar streets. You may have pondered questions such as why does that building have such a large fence around it? Why does that sign say ‘Keep Out’?
Fast forward to walking through an unfamiliar city. It is likely that you will encounter different zones of feeling as you move through the environment. You may end up in an area that for whatever reason makes you feel uncomfortable and you want to walk away quickly. Conversely, the particular ambiance of an area may make you feel relaxed or even carnivalesque. At other times a particular city environment may make you feel literally ‘out of place’.
Contemporary psychogeography has many different strands which makes it difficult to pin down precisely, but from the above we can pull out certain common characteristics:
It usually requires walking or moving through space;
there is some form of subjective engagement with the environment and
probably some form of implicit questioning as to why the environment is the way it is.
The follow-on question, may be, does the environment have to be like this and how could it be changed (or even preserved)?
SLIDE
In the history of ideas, most of the literature about psychogeography refers back to the Lettrists and the Situationists who defined and developed their psychogeographic activities, such as the dérive – or drift – in Paris during the 1950s. (Most of it within that triangle I’ve mapped out on the slide).
Guy Debord’s definition of psychogeography is commonly cited:
Psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.
[Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, (1955)]
(Mmm – I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the ‘precise laws aspect of that definition’. I very much doubt that psychogeography can ever be subject to precise laws. Another cognac required for Guy perhaps.
Our own research has uncovered that the term was used much earlier by an American anthropologist, J. Walter Fewkes in a non-urban context in the early 1900s:
SLIDE
There it is … “psychogeography, deals with the influence of geographical environment on the human mind”.
Fewkes wrote this in 1905 and was using the term to examine the Native American Hopi people’s strong connection with their landscape. The arid conditions led them to develop a set of beliefs, practices and folk rituals, such as the rain dance, to appeal to the sky gods for water.
We have yet to see any mention of Fewkes in the psychogeographic literature but firmly embrace the idea of an expansive psychogeography: the influence of the geographical environment on the human mind in both urban and non-urban contexts. This also recognizes the presence of the non-human world in our landscapes. In this respect, we are probably more influenced by Patrick Geddes than anything else. Indeed, the name of our book From Hill to Sea is a nod towards Geddes’s concept of the Valley Section (basically – “it takes a whole region to make the city”) which was adapted from the ideas of the anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus.
I personally, like this comment on psychogeography from Alan Moore:
SLIDE
So, all of the above definitions kind of pull at the same strings but what about doing it in practice? As a starting point, I think you could do worse than consider this piece Open Field from Pauline Oliveros, the pioneering, American composer and proponent of Deep Listening. I like how this emphasises being present, engaged and attentive in the everyday. A succinct manifesto for being-in-the-world.
SLIDE
SLIDE
So, moving on to the final part of this talk, I want to try to link three elements together: psychogeography, folk horror and the everyday. Here are some short extracts of walks undertaken which show how elements of the uncanny, folk tales, and horror are all there – embedded in the landscape of the everyday.
This image was taken up on the Fife Coast Near Largo Law (or Hill for anyone unfamiliar with the term).
We soon encounter the talisman lying in the dunes. It’s protective, synthetic membrane, perished long ago by wind and water. Now crusted with sand and water-logged, it has transmuted into a living entity. Green tendrils sprout from the surface. It appears to be an auspicious omen, a process of alchemy worthy of the legendary Wizard of Balwearie, Michael Scot, (1175 – c.1232), reputed to have form in these parts.
Local legend has it that Scot summoned his three imp familiars, Prig, Prim and Pricker to Largo Law with a view to levelling it. A sort of job creation scheme for hyper-active familiars. As they began to dig, Scot had a change of plan and the imps were hurriedly dispatched to Kirkcaldy to make ropes out of sand. This was to assist Scot in his showdown with the devil on Kirkcaldy beach. Scot appears to have triumphed in the encounter as evidenced by a local saying: “The devil’s dead and buried in Kirkcaldy”. Due to the ‘Kirkcaldy interruption’, only a single shovelful of earth was thrown from Largo Law to create the cairn of Norrie’s Law at the wonderfully named farm of Baldastard. There are also local folk tales about an abundant goldmine that supposedly exists underneath Largo Law and that sheep have returned from grazing on the foothills with golden fleeces.
Balwearie, Kirkcaldy
Moving down the coast to Kirkcaldy itself, you will find plenty more everyday references to our wizard Michael Scot. As a historical person, he most certainly existed although like many similar figures it is difficult to untangle history and myth. He studied, maths, philosophy and theology at Oxford, translated Eastern and Arabic texts and developed a strong interest in alchemy, astrology and sorcery. He was appointed as personal astrologer to Frederick II, the holy Roman emperor and pops up in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, where he is consigned to the Eighth Circle of Hell reserved for astrologers and sorcerers.
Every school day, the young people of local Balwearie High School wear the school badge depicting Lions Heads, stars and crescent moons of the Scot family coat of arms. In local Beveridge Park you can find a wizard’s trail to follow which claims that Michael Scot lived in nearby Balwearie Castle and recounts the afore-mentioned story of him fighting Lucifer on Kirkcaldy beach and also managing to travel to France in one evening on a magical black steed. (Take that Harry Potter).
You can still walk to the ruins of Balwearie Castle today. It is fair to say that it manages to conjure up a certain atmosphere worthy of a practitioner of the dark arts.
SLIDE
Moving on to a short walk between Crombie Point and Torryburn
SLIDE
Ink etched blue silence.
Cold harbour spires, sketched over cubist sails.
Thorn pinned birds still tethered.
Wings opening, sensing the sky
SLIDE
We pass the ruined pier at Crombie Point where Jules Verne arrived on 30th August 1859 following a three-day exploration of Edinburgh.
SLIDE
Beyond the door-less door. An invitation to enter? What lies beyond the threshold, the scattering of leaves and crouched shadows?
On the ancient, whispering walls, the faces start to appear.
Language of the stones, silent tongues ….
And on this short stretch of coastal path, the receding tide and dying light coats Torry Bay in an emulsion of gun-metal grey. A vista of colour-bleached beauty with a tangible undertow of concealed violence bleeding over the mudflats.
SLIDE
In the middle of Torry Bay you will see witches rock. This rock was used to tie-up and restrain anyone suspected of witchcraft. Here the witches were judged and simultaneously sentenced as the tide rose. If they drowned, they were absolved of being a witch, but if they survived they were deemed to be a witch and burned at the stake.
(that is actually from one of the heritage interpretation boards located on Torry Bay)
More on the dark history of this short stretch of Fife coastline emerged from the Tales for Travellers Project which we participated in last year which included a social walk following a journey originally undertaken by Ben Jonson from Culross to Dunfermline in 1618.
On Torry Bay the sky appears to expand to a grey cloak as we experience a brief rain shower. It’s a suitable backdrop for Kate Walker to tell us of the dark history of witch hunting along this coast in the seventeenth century. Zealous, self-appointed witch-finders, usually being local clergymen searching for those who had ‘danced with the devil’. They used an armoury of pseudo-scientific techniques to prey on poor, elderly, and vulnerable women, with their use of witch pricking and searching for the devil’s mark. The familiar power structures embedded in organised religion and misogyny. Kate recounted the tragic story of local woman Lilias Adie, buried face down in the mud on the beach, between the high tide and low tide marks as it was outside consecrated ground. Buried neither on land or at sea, huge stone slabs were placed on top of her; a folk remedy for revenants who were suspected of returning from the grave to torment the living.
SLIDE
Up in the village of Menstrie in Clackmannanshire we find the silent contemplation of Fox Boy. A sculpture inspired by the now-extinct practice of children keeping foxes as pets”.
SLIDE
Devilla Forest, near Kincardine is an area with a long history of land use. Prehistoric coffins, stone circles and Roman urns have all been found here together with more recent structures such as the remains of a World War II explosives research establishment. There is a stone which local legend says is marked by the grooves from a witch’s apron string and there is a history of numerous big black cat sightings in the area. There is also the rather unsettling setting of the Plague Graves where trinkets and offerings are still left and hung on nearby trees.
SLIDE
Windylaw
Just outside Pattiesmuir, you can find a quite inviting path leading up to a crest of trees.
SLIDE
I wonder if your perception may change if I tell you that this is Windylaw, an extremely old coffin track leading down to the long-abandoned churchyard of Rosyth. I would also add that from the crest of the hill you can look over to Rosyth dockyard where seven, decommissioned Polaris nuclear submarines, lie rusting in storage. A real example of horror embedded in the landscape.
At the very least, the psychogeographer can reverse the panoptical gaze of the modern political machine. Standing here we can use landscape as a mirror to reflect back. We can see the war machines, the entropic processors of fossil fuels, how the local is connected to the global. On this spot we can be the watchers. We can see what you are up to and imagine and enact alternative possibilities. (Such as going for a walk!).
Sometimes the everyday world can be made strange in an instant, when you alight on an unexpected object in the landscape, awaiting a story to be told.
SLIDE
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
And finally:
SLIDE
He’s back!
I must admit that this extends the concept of the everyday somewhat as it happened last year whilst on holiday in Istria, Croatia.
A visit to a small hilltop town called Motovun which had only a handful of people walking around, to the extent that the labyrinth of tiny curving, cobbled streets were mostly deserted, creating its own sense of the eerie.
You can perhaps imagine how this was compounded upon turning a corner and being confronted with this straw giant staring us out with his silent gaze. I reckon he must have been over twenty feet tall and at his feet a band of acolytes engaged in some folk ritual or dance, arms thrown open to embrace the sun. There was a distinct feeling of something of the Wicker Man about it all.
As far as I could find out, his name is Veli Jože, a giant who lived (or lives?) in a nearby truffle-rich forest. Local stories suggest that he has been known to enter the town and physically shake the church tower to sound the bell.
Ending
And so that brings me to the end of my talk. I hope it has given you some flavor of potential linkages between Psychogeography, Folk Horror and the Everyday. I’ll be around for the rest of the day and this evening if you want a chat. There are also a couple of books available on the goodies table if you are at all interested. From Hill to Sea which I’ve mentioned before and Language of Objects which has just been released and is a collaboration between myself and the sound artist Brian Lavelle who is in the audience somewhere. (Book includes a CD of Brian’s sound piece).
And just to mention that when you do leave this evening, look up at the skies over the Old Town of Edinburgh. You may be surprised at what you see:
SLIDE
Witches over The Outlook Tower
[Endpiece from Dramatizations’ of History: The Masque of Ancient Learning and Its Many Meanings by Patrick Geddes, Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, (1923)].
Thank you for listening.
and as you head for lunch – a final thought to leave you with:
≈≈≈
Many thanks to the Folk Horror Revival team for the invite to talk and for putting on such a great day and evening of words and music. A special thanks also to Chris Lambert for stepping in to manage the slide show after the slide pointer appeared to give up the ghost. (May well have been operator error!).
The commuters scurrying down the stairs at Rosyth Halt railway station, are unlikely to give much thought, if any, to the field on their left as they descend to the platform below. Some may notice subtle changes in colour throughout the year. The recent appearance of yellow broom blossom; the overhead sun creating a dappled patchwork of greens, sandy browns and heathery purple. In a few weeks, the hawthorn blossom will sit like scented snow on the ancient hedge.
Standing at a certain part of the station platform, it is possible to hear the gentle purr of the Whinny Burn tracing its route through the field on its way to the River Forth at Inverkeithing Bay. Magpies, rooks and collared doves appear to take a curious interest in the arrivals and departures of station commuters whilst overhead, the sun splinters around the extended wings of a buzzard soaring like Icarus ever higher into the blue.
The field is now bounded on all sides by motorway, dual carriageway and the railway line. A severed island of abandoned agricultural land cast adrift with no easy public access. At the top of the halt steps, there are no particularly distinguishing visual features as we look over the land which we are going to walk through. As a train arrives at the platform below, a late flurry of commuters hurl themselves past us and down the stairs to squeeze into the carriages before the doors close. Most are unlikely to be aware that there may be as many as 2,000 bodies buried somewhere in the vicinity.
The fields between the railway and the A823 (were) where the last and bloodiest part of the battle took place … it is likely to be where the majority of the killing took place. (Historic Scotland).
it is said that the burn ran red with blood for three days.
The casualties on the Scots side were certainly heavy. Most sources agree that about 2,000 were killed and around 1,500 taken prisoner, although various figures are reported for the casualties of the Highland regiments. Cromwell in his letter immediately after the battle reported at least two thousand dead.
July 1651
It was during the night or early morning of 16th /17th July 1651 that the troops of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army landed on the north shore of the Forth in the vicinity of Inverkeithing Bay. Whilst they had inflicted a heavy defeat on the Scottish army at Dunbar on 3rd September 1650, they had been thwarted by attempts to advance further into Scotland. Cromwell came to the conclusion that Fife was the key and by 20th July, 4,500 of Cromwell’s Parliamentarian force were dug in on Ferry Hills, whilst a Scottish force of a similar size had grouped at Castland Hill. The threat of Scottish reinforcements coming from Stirling provoked Cromwell’s Parliamentarians to attack and force the Scottish infantry to retreat north towards Pitreavie Castle. On land close to Pitreavie Castle, the Scottish infantry made a final stand but were soon overwhelmed by the more experienced Parliamentarians who had the additional advantage of cavalry. The Scots suffered heavy losses. This became known as The Battle of Inverkeithing (sometimes The Battle of Pitreavie) and was the last major battle of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in Scotland. From 1652, Scotland was wholly under control of Cromwell’s Protectorate.
Entering the field is not too difficult. Not far from the station steps there is a locked gate but a little further along we find a gap in the hedgerow. If you are prepared to navigate or slide down a steep slope, this will deposit you amongst the discarded plastic bottles and assorted rubbish tossed from the stairs above. At ground level, the topography of the field is much more apparent. Pronounced undulations ahead of us, sloping off to the right towards marshy ground around the Whinny Burn. Ground cover is a mix of meadow type grasses, whin bushes, dandelions and what look like dock leaf plants gone to seed.
You only have to look towards the perimeter of the field to be aware that you are surrounded by human presence. The rooftops of Rosyth to the right and the hum of motorway traffic a constant low-level signal. Yet on the actual land we are walking, it is rare to find an almost complete lack of evidence that humans have recently passed. No litter, no discarded cans or bottles or burnt out barbecues. There are hints of desire lines traversing the space, perhaps made by committed dog walkers or something else. It is only as we move further into the field, that there is a clear sense that we are being watched.
At first, we wonder if it is a dog but it soon becomes apparent that it is the eyes of a tiny roe deer that are fixed on our movements. We are both probably equally surprised to encounter each other. This is not an area where you would typically expect to see deer. Where on earth has it come from? We lock into that non-time state of reciprocal, motionless, staring. Eventually the deer decides to break for it. Great elongated leaps for something so small; as if bouncing off the air itself, not really touching the ground. I manage to retrieve the camera and fire off some random shots in the hope that we obtain some record of this actually having happened.
as if bouncing off the air itself
We notice our presence is also alarming a number of skylarks which appear to have made the field their own. Their nervous, vertical flight and fluted song a mix of terror and beauty as we try to avoid what must be their nesting areas.
The field separates in two at a ridge of hawthorn bushes. On the other side:
From a distance
criss-cross
to new horizons
A field of time
history layered
on geography.
Transparent globes
of wind held tension
time scattered
yellow flowerings
of the eternal return
The field eventually tapers to a point where we can go no further, blocked off by the railway and the smooth, solid concrete structure carrying the A823 motorway spur.
We know that beyond the A823 another field will take us to a concrete flyover of the M90 motorway. We work out a way to access the field and head off on a detour. Our serendipitous findings are recorded in a separate blog: Cartographies of Chance – Underneath the M90 (II).
Returning to the field, we walk close to the northern perimeter with only a thin hedgerow between us and the A823. Such a slight threshold separating us from our field of time, skylarks and deer. On the other side, the surveillance cameras, crash barriers, lay-bys and signs – all the material apparatus of the modern motorway.
We are quite surprised to come across a footbridge over the motorway that enters the field only to stop at a complete dead-end. The proximity of this easier access results in the usual heaps of fly tipping, something that is hard to understand. It must be much more difficult to dump this stuff here than take it to the municipal waste recycling.
Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed . . . But non-places are the real measure of our time.
Marc Augé
The footbridge takes us over the A823, (Why does an empty motorway always evoke a Ballardian descriptor?) and into the relatively new ‘non-place’ of Carnegie Campus. We know from the old maps and records that this land was also once part of ‘the field’. Being a Sunday, the ‘campus’ is completely deserted as we wander amongst the new build office blocks, many of which still look unoccupied. Roundabouts appear to have been built in hope of a time still to come as roads come to an abrupt end. Rab’s Little Kitchen snack van is closed.
Where the manicured non-space runs out, an explosive wild bouquet of whin sits amongst a covering of red campion:
And yet amongst all the shiny new sheen of this place, older voices intrude. A hexagonal brick structure whose original purpose is unclear:
time stacked textures
brick and concrete
.
Nestled in at the side of the main road into the campus we come across the cairn. As far as we are aware it is the only explicit acknowledgement of what happened on this land.
the Scots were driven back to the level ground between Hillfield and Pitreavie. Here, in one of the most famous episodes of the Battle of Inverkeithing, the Clan Maclean of Mull regiment, commanded by their chief, Sir Hector, found themselves surrounded by superior enemy forces. The clansmen fought fiercely in defence of their chief, calling out, “Fear eile airson Eachainn!” (Another for Hector!), as they sacrificed themselves.
The battle involved musketry, cavalry, pikes, swords and even archery on the Scottish side, with considerable hand to hand fighting
Near here, Sir Hector MacLean of Duart was killed
at the Battle of Inverkeithing
along with some 760 of his men
20th July 1651
“Another for Hector”
Nearby to the cairn, stands another material presence in the layered history of the field. Peering over a substantial stone wall allows us a view of the Dovecot in the grounds of Pitreavie Castle.
Pitreavie Castle was originally built in the early 17th century by Henry Wardlaw of Balmule, later Sir Henry Wardlaw, 1st Baronet of Pitreavie. Wardlaw was Chamberlain to Queen Anne, wife of James VI of Scotland.
The Battle of Inverkeithing/Pitreavie was fought nearby on 20 July 1651, between an English force commanded by Colonel Robert Overton and a Scottish force, including some 800 Highlanders from the Clan Maclean. After the battle, which was a decisive victory for the Cromwellian forces (contemporary reports speak of 2,000 Scots killed and 1,600 captured, all for the loss of 8 of Overton’s troops), a group of Macleans sought refuge in Pitreavie Castle. The Wardlaw family refused them sanctuary and the Macleans were likely to have been captured or killed.
The Maclean dead … are more likely to have been buried in a mass grave.
We pass the old dovecot of the castle, turn left and past the front door where the initials of Henry Beveridge are recorded. Beveridge purchased the Castle in 1883 and extensively remodelled it in 1885.
Henry Beveridge was a wealthy mill-owner, philanthropist and educator from Dunfermline. He was an associate of Patrick Geddes having attended Geddes’s summer meetings in Edinburgh. He subsequently became one of the Directors of Geddes’s Edinburgh Town and Gown Association in 1896. As a member of the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust, Beveridge was also partly responsible for arguably Geddes’s greatest work – City Development: a study of parks, gardens and culture institutes. A report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. Geddes also introduced Beveridge to the artists John Duncan and Charles Mackie who painted murals in the castle illustrating the legend of Orpheus and Sir Patrick Spens.
International Studio, 1897
It is believed that these murals may now be at best over-painted and at worst destroyed. A good example of John Duncan’s Symbolist style can be seen in his famous work, The Riders of the Sidhe:
As noted above, Henry Wardlaw’s granddaughter-in-law, Elizabeth Wardlaw, is claimed to be the author of Sir Patrick Spens. (Although the evidence appears somewhat tenuous).
“The king sits in Dunfermline toune drinking the blude reid wine, “O whar will I get a guid sailor, To sail this schip of mine?”
…
Walking past Pitreavie Castle today, it has now been converted into flats and apartments and offers no clue as to another more recent past life. It was bought by the Ministry of Defence in 1938 and after the second world war, deep in a basement bunker became the headquarters of NATO’s Northern Maritime Region. During the Cold War, all Soviet ships and submarines on exercise in the North Sea were monitored from here. The base closed in 1996 and operations moved to RAF Kinloss. There is little or no outward trace of this today, although some photographs of its past life exist:
Access to the underground bunker
(c) Subterranea Britannica
The teleprinter room 1944
(c) Subterranea Britannica
As we head along Castle Drive, we notice that a small housing estate has a story hidden in the street names:
Covenanters Rise: The Scottish army was a Covenanter army, acting under allegiance to Charles II.
MacLean Walk: the aforementioned Sir Hector Maclean of Duart, commander of the Scottish Highland infantry.
Sir John Brown Place: Sir John Brown, commander of the Scottish lowland infantry.
Overton Crescent: – Colonel Robert Overton led the assault party of New Model Army troops that landed in Fife on the night of 16th/17th July.
Our final part of the walk will take us along Castle Drive where we will loop around to bring us back to where we entered the field. Despite the changes over the centuries, we have walked the area of the field as it was in 1657. We continue to ponder our mysterious encounter with the roe deer. Perhaps a manifestation of “only shadows here”?
Four days after the Battle, Cromwell crossed to Fife in person. For him the victory was “an unspeakable mercy”.
As we walk down Castle Drive we pass another new addition to the landscape on the left. A customer contact centre for Rupert Murdoch’s Sky empire.
On the other side of the road, a magpie picks at the carcass of a dead squirrel.
≈≈≈
Appendix
Present day map showing the boundary lines and key sites of the Battle of Inverkeithing. (Historic Scotland/Ordnance Survey).
Now playing: June Tabor – ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ from An Echo of Hooves.
or a more jaunty version: Fairport Convention – ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ from Full House.
References:
Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London and New York: Verso, 1995).
Charles Holme (ed), The International Style, Vol. 1 No. 1 (New York: The Bodley Head, March 1897).
Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
Wisława Szymborska, Map: Collected Poems and Last Poems (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).
Ben Wheatley Dir. A Field in England (Film4, 2013). Film.
Area Combined HQ Rosyth – Pitreavie Castle (Flag Officer, Rosyth, RN & AOC No 18 Group, RAF Coastal Command) on Subterranea Britannica
The Inventory of Historic Battlefields – Battle of Inverkeithing, Historic Scotland, 14th December, 2012.
a flower expresses itself by flowering, not by being labelled
Patrick Geddes
That blue
There – beyond the iris heads.
As if a grey tarpaulin
has been peeled back
across the eyeball of the sky.
.
Spring light, a different light.
.
Colours made strange,
as smears of white heat
dab at fold-gathered shadows.
.
The spooling thread of a blackbird’s raga, weaves through a chitter-chatter tapestry of blue tit and sparrow song as we lie under the flowers, observing a line of marching ants. A posse of advance troops, jolted into collective industry after winter’s hibernation. Out, once again, to prospect and survey the land.
Here. Now. All of us. Feeling the natural cycles turn.
Looking up to the sky from underneath the flowers.
An ant’s world view invoking vague memories of Land of the Giants, and of this place before the flowers arrived.
Across the road, jump the fence and head towards what turns out to be a picture frame.
Walking into the frame and down an avenue of young trees, we are lured by the vanishing point of reflecting silver.
.
Flocks of daffodils gather around the rotunda, a yellow flecked congregation. Heads nodding, as if worshipping the filigree forms of a newly descended alien god. Bringer of light and heat.
A turn into mature woodland and a network of tracks and paths. A sense of water running close-by but which we cannot see – yet. Tree animism.
.
You will have to move closer,
to hear,
the guttural whispers
of the tree maw
.
.
With spring sunshine, woodland, birdsong and the sense of water, this feels like ‘the countryside’ but it doesn’t take long to be reminded how close we are to the centre of this New Town. We look up at the polished concrete belly of transport entrails as the low thrum of traffic passes overhead.
In the last photograph, on the left hand side, you can see what turns out to be a rather incongruous plinth nestling under the concrete flyover. We discover that it is displaying a 16th century stone-carved coat of arms, of the Leslie family. The stone originally came from an old building in the nearby policies (grounds) of Leslie House, the ancestral home of the Earls of Rothes. It bears the griffins and motto of the Leslie family: Grip Fast
From Kinross, I came to Lessley, where I had a full view of the palace of Rothess, both inside and outside … The house is the glory of the place and indeed of the whole province of Fife.
Daniel Defoe, 1724
Sir Norman Leslie acquired Fythkil, the original name of this parish, around 1282 and renamed it after the Rothes family lands in Aberdeenshire. The Leslies became the Earls of Rothes in 1457. The earliest evidence of a house on this site is 1667 which was destroyed by fire in December 1763. A much smaller house was subsequently built, supposedly restoring the least damaged Western side.
The Earls of Rothes, obviously didn’t Grip Fast enough as we soon alight on the ancestral home, now sealed off with iron spiked fencing. It’s not too difficult to find a way in to have a quick look. The building looks fairly structurally sound but is minus a roof and much of the interior, creating the effect of being able to see right through the facade to the other side.
One part of the fabric that has clearly survived intact is the flagpole which we can see through various windows:
.
In.
Spring light
No flags fly
≈
To the left of the house are a tiered set of south-facing terraces, although now denuded of any plant life other than the carefully manicured grass. Like the grounds in front of the house it shows that some care and maintenance is obviously still taking place …
.
Whilst, in the conservatory, the buddleia appears to be thriving:
.
We are just about to scale the wall that will take us to the front of the house when we hear voices on the other side and decide to exit the grounds quietly by the way we came in.
We subsequently learn that the house had been acquired by Sir Robert Spencer Nairn in 1919 who, supposedly, as he saw the advancing development of the New Town, gifted it to the Church of Scotland in 1952 for use as an Eventide Home. After falling into disuse, the house was sold for property development in 2005. Little appears to have happened until December 2009 when an unexplained ‘raging inferno’ reduced the property to its present state.
(c) Mike Brailsford
≈
We head down towards the River Leven, thinking of its flowing waters coursing through the Fife landscape from Loch Leven near Kinross all the way to joining the Firth of Forth at Leven. What memory does this water hold? Of powering linen mills and the local paper mills of Tullis Russell and Smith Anderson. Of sustaining the tadpoles and sticklebacks in the pond where we used to peer into the depths searching for those tiny flickering tails. The webbed feet of the white swans gliding through the water today.
Before heading down to the riverside, we stop to listen to the bridge. The wind plucked treble of the harp like strings:
.
… and the deep base drones of the underside sound box. We expect the huge columnar legs to start lumbering forward at any time:
.
.
As always, the eaves of the bridge have been tagged.
Power and capital, enabled The Leslie family to appropriate, name and tag these lands. Our graffiti artist(s) tag is of a more existentialist nature. “I am here, in this place”.
.
.
Following the course of the river, this world becomes a little stranger when we encounter the hippos traversing their water hole:
.
.
A familiar encounter in this town. If Proust had his madeleine to kick him into paroxysms of involuntary memory, then the image of a hippo should do the trick for anyone who grew up in this town.
.
(c) Douglas A McIntosh
It’s not just the hippos. It’s also the dinosaurs, henges, flying saucers, pipe tunnels, giant hands, the toadstools and other curios which all ‘do something’ to social space for those who stumble across them.
Two bin bags murmur in agreement as they huddle in the shade, underneath the clatter of skateboards, waiting for the sun to come around.
.
Ascending the hill to the town centre, we are reminded that every place needs its temples
.
And what would any New Town be without its Brutalist municipal buildings? Guaranteed to be derided as ‘plooks’, ‘carbuncles’ and in this case, contributing to its award as ‘the most dismal town in Britain 2009’.
Well, perhaps it’s all a matter of perspective and the warm fingers of spring weather but the buildings are looking far from dismal today.
Tactile, concrete carpets, frame frozen flight and light.
.
Frozen flight – open sky
The original Brutalist grey cube of Fife House with its newer postmodern counterpart. It has to be a grandfather clock?
Green detailing can soften even the most austere facade:
.
Whilst brutalist windows, can dream of trees and sky
.
.T
Nearby, North facing Rothesay house hasn’t weathered quite as well.
.
After a walk back down to the public park, with vistas to the Paps of Fife we almost return to our starting point. Layers of place intersecting with past present and future in the returning bright light of Spring.
We nod to the defenceless one as we pass.
.
..
Comforted that the Good Samaritan is looking on from not too far away
.
And, as we leave town, how can we not stop to take delight in the toadstools. Vibrant and colourful, they look as if they have just (re)emerged, stretching into the returning Spring light.
Their months quietly growing in winter darkness appear to have passed.
≈
Now Playing: Motorpsycho – Behind the Sun.
Note:
The New Town is Glenrothes in Fife. Planned in the late 1940s as one of Scotland’s first post-second world war new towns, its original purpose was to house miners who were to work at a newly established state-of the-art coal mine, the Rothes Colliery. The mine never opened commercially and the town subsequently became an important part of Scotland’s emerging electronics industry ‘Silicon Glen’. It is now the administrative capital of Fife.
Glenrothes was the first town in the UK to appoint a town artist in 1968. This is now recognised as playing a significant role, both in a Scottish and in an international context, in helping to create the idea of art being a key factor in creating a sense of place. Two town artists, David Harding (1968–78) and Malcolm Roberston (1978–91), were employed supported by a number of assistants, including Stan Bonnar who created the hippos. A large variety of artworks and sculptures were created and are scattered throughout the town, some of which are shown above. David Harding went on to found the Department of Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art whose alumni include: Douglas Gordon, David Shrigley, Nathan Coley, Christine Borland and Martin Boyce.
References:
Daniel Defoe, (1724), A Tour Through the Whole Islands of Great Britain, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991 edition), (p.346).
Our research unit hasn’t exactly excelled itself. A scribbled address on a torn piece of paper is all that we have:
Communist Literature Depot, 128 Perth Road, Cowdenbeath.
This is the only material link we have to Storione and even then we are not exactly sure of its provenance. Why does Goggle never come up with the really interesting stuff? It’s a good job we still have some real libraries but further research can wait until our walk is over. We want to be open to the signs and an address is enough to get started…
~
We are taking a walk today from Lochgelly, via Lumphinnans, to Cowdenbeath in search of Lawrence Storione, founder of the Anarchist Communist League in 1908. We also intend our drift to act as a ritual exorcism of an article that ‘British travel writer and humorist’ Tim Moore wrote for the Daily Telegraph last year. His piece on Lochgelly and Cowdenbeath subsequently appeared in his book You are Awful (but I Like You). What is curious about Moore’s article is an almost complete lack of engagement with the actual materiality of this specific place. His encounters in pubs, hotels and fast food shops could have happened almost anywhere. (Just change the accents and place names).
Like anyone, Moore is entitled to respond to a place as he sees fit and after all he had a book to flog with a specific agenda: to visit the towns of ‘unloved Britain’. Alongside Lochgelly and Cowdenbeath, Moore turns his c-list, Bill Bryson wit on the likes of Hull, Middlesbrough, Merthyr Tydfil, Nottingham and Rhyl amongst others. The fact that this profound tome ended up in Richard Littlejohn’s ‘Best of 2012’ year end list is probably all you need to know. “A laugh out loud pilgrimage to the most hideous places in modern Britain” says Littlejohn.
So, with regard to Cowdenbeath and Lochgelly, we can understand why he bothered to come, or did he? (How can you not find the football ground in Cowdenbeath?). There is just a slight suspicion that his article may have been written before he even arrived, just looking for some local colour to flesh out his prejudices. Not surprisingly, he ‘found’ what he was looking for which revolves around the fact that Lochgelly is routinely trotted out as the town having the cheapest housing prices in the UK.
The roads were lined with cramped little semis and 1960s bungalows, Britain’s cheapest houses in their flimsy, pebbledashed glory.
All had the kind of scuffed and anonymous front door you could imagine a TV interviewer knocking upon at the end of a quest to track down some forgotten star of yesteryear.
“The Beirut of Fife”
Admittedly, Lochgelly, a mining town that has waxed and waned with the fortunes of the Fife coalfield may be quite a contrast to Mr Moore’s birth town of Chipping Norton. Situated in the parliametary constituency of Witney, it is represented by one Mr David Cameron MP. (This is the stuff you can find on Google). Lochgelly’s housing may also appear relatively cheap in comparison to the cost of Mr Moore’s public school education. At 2012 prices a mere £16,035 per year per student. However, let’s not be too harsh. A mildly humourous hack, hawking cheap laughs at the expense of a place ravaged by industrial decline is hardly worth fretting over. Oh and the word community is not mentioned once in Moore’s article so he must be correct. The value of a place must be correlated to its house prices.
So we are off to take a walk and find out what this area says to us. As with any place we know that there will be stories embedded into the materiality of the buildings, spaces and the ground we walk on. They are out there in the sensory field and we are hopeful some of them may reveal themselves. This is an area that once returned Willie Gallacher as a Communist MP in the House of Commons from 1935 – 1950 and we have already mentioned Storione. Are all of these radical traces gone? Perhaps the ghosts of Little Moscow will reveal themselves to us. Will they have anything relevant to say to us in our present predicament? What of the future? Any insights will be gratefully received.
We convene at The Lochgelly Centre car park and it is a radiant, sun washed morning to set out. On a day like this Mr Moore could have taken himself down the road to experience one of Fife’s outdoor gems: Lochore Meadows Country Park, or The Meedies as it is known locally. A fabulous public space and Outdoor Environmental Education Centre. Not being great respecters of chronological time our own despatch from the Meedies at an uncertain point in time can be found here.
The Lochgelly Centre, reopened last year after a major refurbishment. It’s a fantastic community resource hosting a cafe, art exhibitions, various workshops and classes and a small theatre which hosts travelling companies and facilitates community arts projects . It also programmes film screenings, author readings such as Ian Rankin and Iain Banks and regularly hosts the perennials of the music gigging circuit. We can recall a slightly surreal chat one evening with Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent discussing The Zombies Odyssey and Oracle. We also saw a snarling Hugh Cornwall delivering one of his best post-Stranglers appearances that we’ve seen. These events happen in Lochgelly.
Anyway, we have barely stumbled a few steps from the car park when the ghosts start to whisper in our ears. Also located in the Lochgelly Centre is the Jennie Lee Library, named after one of Lochgelly’s famous daughters. Jennie is keen to tell us two things: How a bursary helped a working class woman go to University and how open access was enshrined in her greatest achievement as Minister of the Arts, The Open University. At the time it was a genuinely radical idea that people could study for a university degree without having any initial qualifications at entry.
“The heroine of the whole story of the OU is Jennie Lee. The idea of it being called the Open University was very much hers”
Lord Asa Briggs.
Jennie Lee was elected as an MP in 1929, becoming the youngest member of the House of Commons. Her maiden speech attacked Churchill’s budget proposals which impressed him so much that he offered her his congratulations after their spirited exchange. Jennie maintained her independence of spirit and mind throughout her life clashing with her husband, Nye Bevan, on several policy issues, notably Bevan’s support of the UK acquiring a nuclear deterrent which Jennie was firmly against.
Our encounter with Jennie Lee and the material presence of a library has already raised our spirits and by word association we recall another notable Lochgelly daughter Jennie Erdal, author of the fascinating memoir Ghosting.
Ghosting combines an account of her early childhood in Lochgelly and of her time employed as the ghostwriter for ‘Tiger’ a charismatic London-based publisher. Her ghostwriting assignments begin with personal letters, business correspondence and newspaper columns but, over time, eventually expand into novels and non-fiction titles. Whilst never named in Erdal’s book, it is clear that ‘Tiger’ is Naim Attallah, owner of Quartet Books, and for many years owner of The Wire – a music magazine dear to the hearts of the FPC. Our library also contains many fine Quartet titles including Arthur Taylor’s Notes and Tones and Val Wilmer’s As Serious as Your Life a ground breaking work on the post-Coltrane, jazz avant-garde. Funny how a walk in Lochgelly (not really even started yet!) has already taken us on a journey from Jennie Lee to Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and The AACM.
So with the sounds of saxophones ringing in our ears we can also eavesdrop in on a young, 14-year-old, miners son picking up a sax for the first time. A birthday gift from an older brother, who played the trumpet.
Joe Temperley, places his fingers tentatively on the keys and blows to make his first sound. A sound that will initiate a journey that leads from Lochgelly to London, with Humphrey Lyttelton, and eventually over the Atlantic to New York and a stint with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
With all this music ringing in our ears, we better be on our way and commence our drift up Bank Street. However, there must be something in the air today as we are soon distracted by a street sign. Could this be the definitive evidence that confirms Marc Bolan’s debt to Chuck Berry? Get it On was supposedly adapted from Berry’s Little Queenie and here is the evidence: Berry straight to Bolan square(d).
Can you square a riff? We would like to think so.
As an aside, we had previously posted this photo on Twitter and off it went into the virtual ether. It soon returned like a digital boomerang with a note from T.Rextasy – The World’s Only Official Tribute to Marc Bolan and T Rex. They have played Lochgelly Centre a number of times and had also noticed the sign but had never managed to take a photo.
Lochgelly’s Bank Street/Main Street is the sort of place which capital has forgotten. In some ways this makes a refreshing change from the identikit, cloned high streets of more ‘prosperous’ towns full of the same old chain stores. There is a range of independent shops and a Co-op supermarket, which, despite its ethical credentials has been the subject of some disgruntled comments in the local press about high prices and abuse of their monopoly position. The buildings of Bank Street are solid and redolent of more prosperous days. The Cinema De-Luxe building, now a shop/office, retains a faded art-deco charm and you can transport yourself back to its luminous glory, offering up enticing wares of cinema, wrestling and dancing.
Around the corner, in Main Street stands the recently restored and still magnificent Miners Institute.
This building is now used as the Fife Women’s Technology Centre, an award winning community based learning centre that has been providing training in new technology to unemployed women since 1990.
Next door is the new Ore Valley Business Centre a state-of-the-art business centre aimed at helping start-up businesses in Fife to grow. The building has been designed to be highly energy-efficient, maximising solar gain and environmental management technology to keep the building’s energy requirements to a minimum.
In these two buildings alone is evidence of some of the good work going on to improve Lochgelly today and build towards the future. Like many of the towns and villages around this area, they prospered with the deep mining of the Fife coalfield but suffered disproportionately when the industry began to decline and was eventually delivered a terminal bullet from the Thatcher government. We are reminded of Patrick Geddes’s inter-linked triad of Place Work and Folk. Is it any wonder that when ‘work’ is withdrawn, almost wholesale from an area, that Place and Folk suffer?
At the side of the Miners Institute is a sculpture called The Prop by the celebrated artist David Annand. Annand’s other many notable works includes the statue of poet Robert Fergusson, outside the Canongate Church in Edinburgh, and Turfman, a collaboration with Seamus Heaney.
The Prop portrays a lone miner propping up, or holding on, to six stainless steel forms, representing pit props? A reminder of the town’s mining heritage but an addition to a new sense of place in its own right. This is not monumental art. It quietly invites you to spend time with it. Walk around the space to catch the light fracturing off of the shining stainless forms and it’s then you notice that each column has a line of poetry engraved in to it. We subsequently learn that the poem God is a Miner is by local poet William Hershaw.
The miner looks as if he has just emerged from a coal seam, rough-hewn from deep time. Absorbing light into solid form in contrast to the sleek, reflective stainless steel.
~
“The radicalism of Little Moscow developed out of a struggle to maintain and improve the basic conditions of life.”
Stuart MacIntyre
We now heading down the long ribbon strip that connects Lochgelly with Cowdenbeath but is actually called Lumphinnans. There is housing down the north side of the road and an impressive cryptoforest to the south with a golf course beyond. Were you to pass through this area today it may not be immediately apparent that this was once the beating heart of Little Moscow. An area that elected Willie Gallagher, a Communist, as Member of Parliament for West Fife from the period 1935 – 1950.
Little Moscow was a term applied to a small number of towns and villages in the UK that appeared to hold extreme left-wing political values. In Scotland there was Lumphinnans and Vale of Leven, England had Chopwell and there was Maredy in Wales. The term was initially used as a term of disparagement by the popular press but then reclaimed as a ‘badge of honour’ by the local communities. Many of the areas that would later be dubbed ‘Little Moscows’ had earlier in the century attempted to find alternatives to the state sanctioned capitalist system.
In Lumphinnans, one of the key instigators was Lawrence Storione who arrived in the village in 1908. Storione was born in Italy in 1867 in the French-speaking area of Valle d’Aosta and later worked as a miner. It appears that he was introduced to anarchism by the noted French geographer and anarchist Élisée Reclus, who was lecturing at the University of Brussels. (Incidentally, Elisee and his brother Élie were friends of Patrick Geddes and attended Geddes’s International Summer Schools in Edinburgh, as did Peter Kropotkin). Due to his anarchist activities, Storione was forced to flee France disguised as a woman and he arrived in Scotland in 1897, working in the mines of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire. After an aborted trip to Canada he returned to Scotland in 1908 where he settled in Lumphinnans and took up employment at the No 1 pit. His arrival at Lumphinnans had consequences for revolutionary ideas among the miners in that area and he soon set up the Anarchist Communist League which, according to Stuart MacIntyre: “preached a heady mixture of De Leonist Marxism and the anarchist teachings of Kropotkin and Stirner.” Among those who appeared to have joined the League were the miners Abe and Jim Moffat and Robert (Bob) Selkirk. All three were to join the Communist Party in 1922, Abe Moffat having an important position within it and Selkirk serving as a Communist Party town councillor in Cowdenbeath for 24 years. The League set up a bookshop in 1916 in nearby Cowdenbeath at 128 Perth Road – which is where we are headed today. It sold titles such as Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, and De Leon’s Two Pages From Roman History and other anarchist literature.
Storione married Annie Cowan in 1900 and their children could only grow into their names: Armonie, Anarchie, Autonomie, Germinal and Libertie! The sole exception to these revolutionary appellations was his daughter Annie who was a leading light in a Proletarian Sunday School in Cowdenbeath. Sunday evening meetings were held at which notable activists such as Willie Gallagher, John McLean, and Jack Leckie came to speak.
It’s an enjoyable walk in the sunshine and it looks like a straight road towards Cowdenbeath, unbroken by housing when as if out of nowhere we are forced to drift from the main road by a sign:
A small road leads off to the right and in seconds, our landscape has completely changed. An open road stretches out ahead with spectacular vistas over to Benarty Hill and The Bishop. Old style telegraph poles whistling in the light wind appear to be humming a chorus of Wichita Lineman and we wonder whether we have stepped through a portal to the American mid-west.
Our thoughts of Franco-Italian anarchists are derailed for a while until we recall the high correlation between anarchists and geographers. The land has always been important to the anarchist.
We subsequently come across the story of Lumphinnans NoXI mine which we guess was North West from here and was called the Peeweep pit as the miners could always hear the sound of Lapwings as they walked to work.
We also add to our collection of single-item, lost footwear.
After our detour we are looking for any signs that remain of Little Moscow. The most obvious traces are to be found in the street signs: Gagarin Way and Gallacher Place.
Named after Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, the first human to journey into outer space and hero of the Soviet Union:
This street also gave the name to Gregory Burke’s debut play which is perhaps a useful corrective to avoid becoming too nostalgic and romantic about institutionalised, political rhetoric of any persuasion.
We invoke the ghosts to tell us anything that may be of use to us. Rather than deliver any political sloganeering Willie Gallagher tells us a story, or more like a scene from a play. It concerns the incident of a 12 year old girl brought before the Communist baillie, Jimmie Stewart for stealing a bag of coal:
Stewart: How auld are ye lassie?
Girl: Just twal sir
Stewart: How auld is yer wee brother?
Girl: He’s eight
Stewart: It was gey cauld last week?
Girl: Aye, it was gey cauld
Stewart: Did ye take the coal hen?
Girl: Aye
Stewart: Muckle?
Girl: Just a bucketful
Stewart: Did ye take the coal to make a fire for your wee brother?
Girl: Aye
Stewart: What ye did was richt. Charge dismissed. (1)
A more postmodern take on street names can be found with Robert Smith Court. Anyone spending time in the towns an villages of West Fife will notice that there a large number of pubs called The Goth. (after The Gothenburg System). It therefore only appears fitting that there should exist a commemoration of the uber-goth himself in this street sign. We are surprised that it has not become more of a shrine. Perhaps a few stuffed, cuddly Love Cats would be appropriate although, there is the small beginnings of A Forest.*
We have almost reached Cowdenbeath, when another sign whispers to us:
The WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) was founded in 1903 and is the UK’s largest voluntary sector provider of adult education. In many ways it was a forerunner of the Open University.
We are transported to last years summer holiday when we visited the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield. Showing alongside Richard Long’s artist room was Luke Fowler’s film: The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Johanna Southcott.
Fowler’s film focuses on the work of historian E.P. Thompson, who was employed by the WEA to teach literature and social history to adults in the industrial towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Like the Open University this was an opportunity to provide classes to people who had historically been unable to access a university education.
The film uses archive and contemporary footage to portray a moment of optimism in which E.P Thompson’s ideas for progressive education came together with a West Riding tradition of political resistance and activism. In many ways you can feel the bonds of solidarity stretching from the Little Moscow of Fife to the West Riding of Yorkshire.
And so we reach Cowdenbeath and it’s not too difficult to locate Perth Road. 128 is what our scribbled piece of paper says. Will there be any sign from Storione?
It’s not looking too hopeful as it soon becomes clear that the buildings are residential terraced houses probably built in the 1960s/70s. We soon track down No 128 although there is no obvious trace of The Communist Literature Depot having existed.
The calendars does not measure time as clocks do. They are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in the past hundred years.
A historian […] stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
Perhaps it is enough to know that Storione’s bookshop may have once existed here and now resides within this little collective of numbers. A radiating form of energy that once rippled through the ether of Little Moscow and now lies awaiting its Messianic moment.
Tim who?
~~~
Now Playing: Dick Gaughan – A Handful of Earth
(1) This is an actual transcript recorded in Stuart MacIntyre’s book.
* The real Robert Smith was also a Communist councillor and appears to have suggested the proposal to name Gagarin Way.
References:
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 1940, in Tasmin Spargo, (ed), Reading the Past (London: Palgrave, 2000).
The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places.
Mary Shelley
at the cusp of light and darkness
through veil of in-world and out-world
they arrive.
~~~
And if in Edinburgh look to the skies:
Witches over Edinburgh (1923).
Endpiece from Dramatisations of History: The Masque of Ancient Learning and Its Many Meanings by Patrick Geddes, Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, (1923).
Now Playing: Rhys Chatham – A Rite for Samhain (From The Bern Project).
If I actually make it, no one will know what this journey means.
I’m following a direct imaginary line.
Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice is arguably one of the great texts of existential walking and pilgrimage. A short diary, never intended for publication, all is reduced to the (a)lone figure of Herzog moving through a landscape, trying to cope with a litany of physical discomforts and atrocious weather conditions which write themselves on his body. If psychogeography is an increasingly used, abused, and slippery signifier, it is clearly absent from Herzog’s practice. There are no dérives here. This is walking as an act of resistance against the ultimate inevitability of death and as a process to absorb and internalise the landscape rather than make any attempt to open up and engage with it. This is an immersion into the mind and soul of the “I” pitted against malevolent nature that cares little for humankind.
I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides I wanted to be alone with myself.
In November 1974, Herzog received a telephone call from a friend advising him that the German film critic Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would ‘probably die’. She was 78 years old. Herzog responds: “I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death”. As an act of secular faith, he decides to walk from Munich to Paris and strides out on what turns out to be a three-week odyssey. Armed only with a jacket, compass, duffel bag, new boots (!) and some survival money, Herzog sets out from Munich on 23rd November and eventually arrives in Paris on 14th December. Along the way, he endures increasingly intense levels of physical discomfort, shelters from the hostile weather in chapels and farm buildings, breaks into unoccupied houses to sleep and gradually withdraws and tries to avoid any prospect of human contact:
Then snow, snow, rainy snow, snowy rain; I curse Creation. What for? I’m so utterly soaked that I avoid people by crossing sodden meadows, in order to save myself from facing them.
Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, only rain, I can’t recall anything more. It’s become a steady, even drizzle and the roads become endless.
The soles burn from the red-hot core in the earths interior.
In spite of all the physical ailments that Herzog endures, I find the book strangely uplifting as it is clear that the process of walking is an almost shamanic ritual that allows access to what he has described, in other interviews, as ‘ecstatic truth’. It is as if the repeated act of placing one foot after another gradually opens up the mind to a transcendent dream state where fact and fiction merge and new ideas are born:
Traveling on foot has nothing to do with exercise. I spoke earlier about daydreaming and that I do not dream at nights. Yet when I am walking I fall deep into dreams. I float through fantasies and find myself inside unbelievable stories. I literally walk through whole novels and films, and football matches. I do not even look at where I am stepping, but I never lose my direction.
It is not difficult to imagine how Herzog’s obsessive, driven characters may have been dreamt into being during this process of walking pilgrimage.
In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit makes the point that by going on a pilgrimage, one has left behind the complications of one’s place in the world – family, hierarchy, and duty and the pilgrim enters a truly liminal state. A state of being-in-the-world on the cusp of past and future personal identity – a state of possibility. Solnit also reminds us that liminality is derived from the Latin limin, a threshold. As the pilgrim steps over the line, symbolically and physically, s/he is stripped of status and authority, removed from a social structure, maintained and sanctioned by power and force, and levelled to a homogenous state of being with fellow pilgrims through discipline and ordeal. However, if the sacred pilgrim is bound by a sense of comradeship and communion with fellow travellers, there is no such comfort for Herzog and nor is any sought.
Herzog’s existential, shamanic, pilgrimage also reminds me of the great Franco-Scottish poet, essayist and geopoetician Kenneth White whose work is also centred on walking as a means of ‘opening a world’ and, in particular, establishing a fundamental relationship with planet Earth. White was involved with Alexander Trocchi’s Project Sigma in the 1960s and took part in the Paris évenements of 1968. This lost him his university teaching post which led to him going ‘on a long walk in the Basque Country’. White is inspired by what he calls ‘intellectual nomads’ such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Henry Thoreau and Patrick Geddes (all keen walkers) who he views as having wandered from the ‘motorway of Western civilisation’ in order to find new ways of thinking and living. (As an aside Giles Deleuze was one of the panel who judged White’s doctoral thesis on intellectual nomadism). White has undertaken numerous long walks and geopoetic pilgrimages such as his travels in Asia which are collected in the volume Pilgrim of the Void. (the title says it all!)This includes an account of White walking in the footsteps of Basho from Tokyo to Hokkaido:
All alone with an old crow in unfamiliar country
which reminds me of one of the rare occasions in Herzog’s book where he achieves some form of solace and communion with the natural world:
A nuthatch was tapping on a tree andI stood there a while,listening to him, as it soothed me.
Off course, as Herzog arrives in Paris, the question has to be asked. What happened to Lotte Eisner? She is tired and weak, but still alive and given that she manages to push a chair over to Herzog, is possibly in better shape than he is:
Someone must have told her on the phone that I had come on foot – I didn’t want to mention it. I was embarrassed and placed my smarting legs up on a second armchair which she pushed over to me. In the embarrassment a thought passed through my head and, since the situation was strange anyway, I told it to her. Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish. Then she looked at me and smiled very delicately, and since she knew that I was someone on foot and therefore unprotected, she understood me. For one splendid, fleeting moment, something mellow flowed through my deadly tired body. I said to her, “Open the window. From these last days onward, I can fly.”
Lotte Eisner lived for another nine years and died in 1983.
Now Playing: Thomas Köner – Permafrost
References:
Paul Cronin, ed, (2003), Herzog on Herzog, (London, Faber & Faber).
Werner Herzog, (1978), Of Walking in Ice, (Delf, Free Association, English translation 2008).
Michael Gardiner, (2006), From Trocchi to Trainspotting, Scottish Critical Theory since 1960 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press).
Rebecca Solnit, (2001) Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London, Verso).
Kenneth White, (1992), Pilgrim of the Void (Edinburgh, Mainstream).
Dipping into The Gary Snyder Reader and Jim Dodge’s excellent introduction:
[Snyder] views his work as inhabiting “the mythopoeic interface of society, ecology and language.”
He enlarges one’s delight in existence and amplifies the élan vital, the life force coursing through it all. And if so doing he also, as Freeman House put it, “gives you the permission to use your senses and offers tools to take on the more destructive aspects of Western Civilization,” all the better.
The sense of work centred in place, of addressing a community that includes plants and animals as well as people.
The nature of imagination tends towards integration, inclusion and intimacy and as such is inimical to the alienation and homogeneity of corporate global capitalism, centralised government and the other forces of darkness that regard the planet as dominion rather than domicile, markets instead of hearths.
As his essays prove and his poems embody, Gary Snyder is among the most ferociously imaginative proponents of the bio-centric (“life-centred) view over the egocentric (self-centred) model.
Foreword by Jim Dodge, The Gary Snyder Reader, (New York: Counterpoint, 1999).
All of this also highly resonant with some of the key ideas of Patrick Geddes:
This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.”
Patrick Geddes final lecture to students at University College Dundee in 1918.
Everything I have done”, he once said at Le College des Ecossais, “has been biocentric; for and in terms of life, both individual and collective; whereas all the machinery of the state, public instruction, finance and industry ignore life, when indeed it does not destroy it. The only thing that amazes me, therefore, as I look back over my experiences is that I was not caught and hung many years ago.”
Rob Cowan quoting Hugh MacDiarmid and Geddes in Town and Country Planning, September 1979.
Now Playing: Ben Frost & Daniel Bjarnason – Solaris
In a previous post, I wrote of being haunted by the cup and ring symbol. In this wired, digital world, these cross-cultural, cross-geographic ciphers are all around us. Infiltrating our consciousness and yet remaining elusive and enigmatic. Tune in and they will reveal themselves in many unexpected places – from iPods to the X Factor, to packets of washing up powder.
How exciting to discover that some well-preserved marks exist on the north side of The Binn (Hill), the volcanic plug that overlooks Burntisland. It’s unlikely that you would stumble across them without having been tipped a nod as to where they are – they have protected themselves well for over 4000 years.
Lets just say that when you find them, the setting makes perfect sense. Vistas out over the Forth, high ground but sheltered. The heavens and stars open above. A place to capture energies of earth, wood, wind and sun; a place to inscribe these enigmas upon stone. Make a mark. An image of transmission; of energy radiating outwards, of ripples on the surface of consciousness being picked up by the tuned in antenna. Perhaps our ancient forebears were also receptive to this idea, way before the discovery of radio waves begat such an adaptable and iconic image.
It’s a pleasant walk to the stones. Up through a sheltered path, heady aromas of rain drenched wood bark, soft underfoot. Off to the left the sound of falling water. At the end of the path a steep scramble and over the stile. A pause for breath and across the butterfly strewn meadow, until you pick up the path that heads up to the summit of the Binn. A couple of ducks, glide aimlessly amongst the reeds in the pond on the left. Dragonflies hover like winged shards of stained glass and suddenly they are gone as if dissolved in sunlight. As you commence the climb up the Binn, the rocks are up on the right hand side. A scramble over some rough ground and fallen trees and once you are in the vicinity, you will feel the pull of the rocks and there they are.
There are two key marks. One is a fully complete cup and ring, perfectly preserved. Another smaller one has been started but remains unfinished. I wonder why? It’s a blast to close your eyes and think that around 4,000 years ago someone had taken the time – many many hours – to carve these marks into this rock. This rock here – now! We can still only guess why and perhaps it is better that way. Do we want to know that it may have only been for some dull utilitarian purpose? No! Here it remains today something quite beautiful and powerful, expressive human poetry. Materially tangible but elusive and meaning slips away, like grains of sand through the fingers, if we try to wring out its mystery in theories and guesswork.
Carrying on up to the summit of the Binn. There is a ‘top of the world’ sensation. Burntisland lies, directly below. Once home to Mary Somerville, pioneering mathematician and astronomer and the Reverend Thomas Chalmers, radical, social reformer and founder of the Free Church of Scotland. Once described by Patrick Geddes as ‘an anarchist economist beside whom Kropotkin and Reclus are mere amateurs’.
Glinters of sunlight on the Forth to East and West as the wind whips up a frenzy of pebbledash rain. We are forced to take cover in a small natural alcove on the hillside. Sheltering from the elements, thinking of pioneering radicals just as our stone carving friends would have done 4,000 years ago.
Murdo Eason - From Hill to Sea 