tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45485231029930678512024-02-19T08:44:06.039+00:00skyingUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-23489456364289330802015-10-27T13:52:00.000+00:002015-10-27T14:31:08.162+00:00Duttonia: framed wilderness<div style="color: white;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>‘making this garden is writing a poem, and walking the paths, reading it’</i></span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">– G. F. Dutton, <i>harvesting the edge</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhErt-07gxdKAzlMWu-bATu0PjGiW-kNg6xl5lAxVNbUqQJLgzVOBdVBo671tFMOITH94rTeMMt7DLNd0MSeQlF4C0Itm87Bclrp8BTqAtUwwDMa_10OItHYCbzzUyZwZ_e0l7haQaceWM/s1600/some+branches.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhErt-07gxdKAzlMWu-bATu0PjGiW-kNg6xl5lAxVNbUqQJLgzVOBdVBo671tFMOITH94rTeMMt7DLNd0MSeQlF4C0Itm87Bclrp8BTqAtUwwDMa_10OItHYCbzzUyZwZ_e0l7haQaceWM/s320/some+branches.jpg" width="239" /> </a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011<b> </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>of <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTjMKhtRYRphj06_KN7GBKm3c5HXJnvLpBt6RuMIsznDpg3SPSbH3WMdPjmOVWQEDpijjVQCSL17etyL-OrgaHOaSsPrYSHXQRkH3QJGauIZ9llHHg60xlchsg_os0ux_6NqYqyXcdRtA/s1600/AT+Knock+of+Balmyle.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTjMKhtRYRphj06_KN7GBKm3c5HXJnvLpBt6RuMIsznDpg3SPSbH3WMdPjmOVWQEDpijjVQCSL17etyL-OrgaHOaSsPrYSHXQRkH3QJGauIZ9llHHg60xlchsg_os0ux_6NqYqyXcdRtA/s320/AT+Knock+of+Balmyle.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">word-mntn (Knock of Balmyle)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">We visited in Winter. The sun a low yellow foglight on the skyline. There were no flowers. It didn't matter. There are no inscribed words. They were not needed. We opened the unlocked gate with care and left only a few poem-labels as thanks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Duttonia</i>, as I have named the garden for the purposes of this account, in order to preserve its secrecy, lies on the fringes of the Forest of Alyth, east of the Knock of Balmyle, nor-nor-west of Hill of Kingseat. I am leaving its location vague as its author, the poet Geoffrey Dutton, preferred that it should remain a private garden.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The family still maintain the garden and they ask that anyone interested in visiting contacts them at the address given below.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>locating <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKKhnvL3z5Aaj2dXWZY-5xkoViu7lb8EE2MIkknkv5DULDGFeyPXLjBfSdonWlKrel-z8MSPFR-CVnNHc8ns0EjQYAqDTBqmYYVgfDhSv1_7wG0yfaBRMA6pxFPzj_2wxZ33NUNQpyZS0/s1600/KC+some+branch.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKKhnvL3z5Aaj2dXWZY-5xkoViu7lb8EE2MIkknkv5DULDGFeyPXLjBfSdonWlKrel-z8MSPFR-CVnNHc8ns0EjQYAqDTBqmYYVgfDhSv1_7wG0yfaBRMA6pxFPzj_2wxZ33NUNQpyZS0/s320/KC+some+branch.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Ken Cockburn, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Within a few miles of <i>Duttonia</i> there are mountain passes – the spittal of Glenshee – and rich Mains farmland. South lie the berry fields around Blair, where the bare December soil is covered with rows of metal hoops. Hamish Henderson used to say how, in the old song-collecting days, he’d only to turn his tape recorder on and it became a bucket filling with ballads and tales from the tap of the traveler's fireside.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP1x7do9krWAm2Yz9H3_cJPxywGc8EW8iLQRokWmYzKTBy3BnlU-v3R9ckSe9UJwZ5neOUWD_ptdL7esYuM1NBitNOYm9P3MQoa8AsMrNMrgc9w3g1auJsRBMCJR1Tc_jqn9eS3OP681Ce/s400/Berries.jpg" style="margin-left: 0f em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP1x7do9krWAm2Yz9H3_cJPxywGc8EW8iLQRokWmYzKTBy3BnlU-v3R9ckSe9UJwZ5neOUWD_ptdL7esYuM1NBitNOYm9P3MQoa8AsMrNMrgc9w3g1auJsRBMCJR1Tc_jqn9eS3OP681Ce/s320/Berries.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">THE BANDED CANES OF THE BERRY FIELDS</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> <i>rasp & lyric</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">To the north the Grampian foothills grip tight to a rolling band of freezing cloud. We take the turning past Bridge of Cally, breathing in names. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Heatheryhaugh</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Rochalie</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Drimmie</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Smyrna</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Creuchies</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Rannagulzion</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Solizarie</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Pitewan</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There’s hoar on some of the fields. It’s nearly snow-cold. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Highland woodland follows along the Black Water, half hiding green hanks of juniper. A little higher – 400m – and the land is turned over to peat-bog hummocks and hollows. Sphagnum rich, the Alyth Moss hints at the Celtic rainforest within the shelter of the trees. </span></div>
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lagged with rags<br />
of lichen<br />
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speckled with gloss<br />
fluted fungi</blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidMWaBk2S3z6SvHbdxQaduGNq1xfDJmLWy_vz9rx8t2bYPuaXu7uSzyJXLxrO7kONlQERPbFYChklImH78SLp0LPJKEcjhTW6HJd5ngzzQOsmvlC_FXxxFh0k9Eyh5xmMlGHSKk9pBAfw/s1600/Hill+of+Kingseat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidMWaBk2S3z6SvHbdxQaduGNq1xfDJmLWy_vz9rx8t2bYPuaXu7uSzyJXLxrO7kONlQERPbFYChklImH78SLp0LPJKEcjhTW6HJd5ngzzQOsmvlC_FXxxFh0k9Eyh5xmMlGHSKk9pBAfw/s320/Hill+of+Kingseat.jpg" width="239" /></a> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">word-mntn (Hill of Kingseat)<b> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The foundations of the wind-towers of Drumderg are sunk into the Mire. This is not the weather to let us see them from afar.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>approaching <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI-AWY-b9yJBzpNz4MHOdnttHtxVAsWEBp2Y1XCLSHnmBLrRCNS6MV8qvsKemV2lgXx2sAbuldX5TzyqzY2_i8XMZw7jrbnHlHBqhE9lQQzKvqspuTsazxnv0fhL7NDVChPYd8b8OMz2Y/s1600/GC+portrait+of+dutton1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI-AWY-b9yJBzpNz4MHOdnttHtxVAsWEBp2Y1XCLSHnmBLrRCNS6MV8qvsKemV2lgXx2sAbuldX5TzyqzY2_i8XMZw7jrbnHlHBqhE9lQQzKvqspuTsazxnv0fhL7NDVChPYd8b8OMz2Y/s320/GC+portrait+of+dutton1.jpg" width="209" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">G. F. Dutton</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">photograph by Gerry Cambridge, 2004</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I was first drawn to <i>Duttonia</i> by Drumderg's windmills brisk in the faraway on the June day that Ken & I visited <a href="http://the-road-north.blogspot.com/2010/07/25-shiogama-myojin.html" target="_blank">Dunsinane</a>, on last year’s hosomichi. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Looking from the Sidlaw’s, over Blair, the wind-farm was the farthest distinguishable landmark. The towers stood out as a strange and colossal kin of the armed branches that Malcolm’s band marched over the moor from Birnam. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">War hews</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">down boughs</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Poetry plants roots</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">flourishes branches</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">More recently, <a href="http://amytodman.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Amy Todman</a>, another of our <i>skying</i> crew, saw some smaller, nearer turbines at Collace, from the Dunsinane cairn.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTbnu7IhTruA7KTsczqm4vVV6YxCb7ehWEXRdxQsw7xKXUS1nOVIkNKchDW5xGENgaOUBi4MEqkWJvhbs6ODtV8TGDXW3bX1Vujq7dHV7yQJpHXhhIvGDgOah8R3ICqN62e_QvavD__p4/s1600/Amy_039.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTbnu7IhTruA7KTsczqm4vVV6YxCb7ehWEXRdxQsw7xKXUS1nOVIkNKchDW5xGENgaOUBi4MEqkWJvhbs6ODtV8TGDXW3bX1Vujq7dHV7yQJpHXhhIvGDgOah8R3ICqN62e_QvavD__p4/s1600/Amy_039.JPG" /></a> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Amy waxing on Dunsinane, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">To the towers mark, I added a vague notion that the poet G. F Dutton’s wilderness garden was somewhere in the same region. When I finally tracked down <i>Duttonia</i>, with the help of poet <a href="http://v/" target="_blank">Gerry Cambridge</a>, it transpired Drumderg was only a field and bog away from the poet’s woodland.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The synergy of the locations put me in mind of an idea that another contributor to <i>skying</i> Alistair Peebles had proposed, which is the connection between gardens and renewables. I’d considered this connection myself when we visited the birch-lined pool of the <a href="http://skying-blog.blogspot.com/2011/09/dalchonzie.html" target="_blank">Dalchnozie</a> hydro scheme, Comrie’s Giverny.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Today, at <i>Duttonia</i>, the motif of the birch grove will be reiterated. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">And so, out of these ideas another <i>skying</i> field-trip began to form in my mind, to compass the poet's 9 acres.<b> </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>bordering <i>Duttonia </i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtkHYaoaxslN38BJwSIrOhRxzbvB3t6BVCnUDYgnE53vpsh5fneb3F9Q-w0fe0CFD3ZQm6R4yU5JxAQ2zv6uWue3_HlXLBo_A183ewebY57btgC289pXjnjdxncYgT7S0Lkds0VWJ9LWs/s1600/AT+garden+view.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtkHYaoaxslN38BJwSIrOhRxzbvB3t6BVCnUDYgnE53vpsh5fneb3F9Q-w0fe0CFD3ZQm6R4yU5JxAQ2zv6uWue3_HlXLBo_A183ewebY57btgC289pXjnjdxncYgT7S0Lkds0VWJ9LWs/s320/AT+garden+view.JPG" width="285" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dutton pictured himself living at the edge, between the wilderness that he loved – mountains to climb, hillside to garden, rivers, lochs and bays for wild swimming – and the Estuarine city of Dundee, where he practiced science. Days in the laboratory tracing glucuronide biosynthetic pathways and processes of detoxification; summer evenings pruning and strimming paths through the thriving wood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">A rounded man, who saw gardening as a combination of craft, art and science; the garden was Dutton’s second laboratory, an arena suited to his ideal, <i>synthesis</i>. Only a few steps to be taken, from the ecological complexity of a wilderness garden, where species compete for scant resources, to the complexities of environmental toxicity and the task of rendering medicines acceptable to our natural biosystem. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In gardening terms he was a poet of pathways and gentle transitions. There are no words in this garden; the benches, rude & true, remain unadorned. Poetics is implicit in the sagacity of his tree planting. To give roots to a tree was, in his words, a way in which you could plant time, a way you could watch <i>time unwind</i> in your own back garden.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In the same spirit, wild-swimming is an embodiment of the creative act; waving good-bye to physical and mental norms. Dutton’s preference was to wear no wet-suit; he let the hairs on his body source information and perform sensory amplifications – as a poem can, in and with language.<b> </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>field-trip team: <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglGm9JYekGYofoQ1pNfMk0ZRdAOv_KArBSF5ESulK-I_GuHME7i835mvr5xTWQr-gNYimGgUdA-vefvZ5izVCDONuL_wavBnolholR3sTn7lYoH8TogAnkWx928Oyw3aqvzvZJexgXMiQ/s1600/KC+team.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglGm9JYekGYofoQ1pNfMk0ZRdAOv_KArBSF5ESulK-I_GuHME7i835mvr5xTWQr-gNYimGgUdA-vefvZ5izVCDONuL_wavBnolholR3sTn7lYoH8TogAnkWx928Oyw3aqvzvZJexgXMiQ/s320/KC+team.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, Morven Gregor, Gerry Loose, AF; photograph Ken Cockburn, 2011</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The full team, each with their own reasons for sharing in the ploy:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Gerry</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">wilderness gardener & poet</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Morven</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">forager & photographer</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Amy</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">artist, who reflects on gardens, where they end and begin</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Ken</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">poet, because of our shared Perthshire Basho trips on<i> the road north</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdBQaCQ3Xn3jg2OnhnGfMwaWM2D2J1Xj6etk1OjJBSnLHFarEichVx14_X__6Ysw7gnppaIm0GS_VkKA7arNBeoW0xfRDs_4Jv57iuaJ1wjaPJWzgRQmf-ixG3qA8LQL7_Ls_fq0A6vvA/s1600/KC+team+skyline.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdBQaCQ3Xn3jg2OnhnGfMwaWM2D2J1Xj6etk1OjJBSnLHFarEichVx14_X__6Ysw7gnppaIm0GS_VkKA7arNBeoW0xfRDs_4Jv57iuaJ1wjaPJWzgRQmf-ixG3qA8LQL7_Ls_fq0A6vvA/s320/KC+team+skyline.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Ken Cockburn, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Our primary resource were Dutton’s books – which I have only rambled along the edges of, wishing this to be a response to the place, and having a task he did not foresee, of viewing Drumderg from <i>Duttonia</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/1353255-M.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/1353255-M.jpg" height="320" width="227" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">G. F. Dutton, <i>Some Branch Against the Sky</i> (1997)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The night before the field-trip I note down a few phrases from <i>Some Branch Against the Sky</i>, as poems to tie and leave, written on labels, replanting the poet’s words.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">One phrase came to illuminate the day, shining as much light on the wind-towers of Drumderg as the garden which prompted the thought.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">in gardens</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">wilderness</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">must be framed<i> </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>AF, after GFD</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmyjRDmFfR7tSvnI4HBdAUo_mRlEMraeV1t_Jab2bYXgN9RRy_PR1mA7gbPy-0myTNiZgq2Ikh0NI4LEjtyvcD_4X2YjJ9uQ-DUE525znFE0lbA5miMvw51Ha4x0MjiWIn2pheRtLs2Aw/s1600/frame+0.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmyjRDmFfR7tSvnI4HBdAUo_mRlEMraeV1t_Jab2bYXgN9RRy_PR1mA7gbPy-0myTNiZgq2Ikh0NI4LEjtyvcD_4X2YjJ9uQ-DUE525znFE0lbA5miMvw51Ha4x0MjiWIn2pheRtLs2Aw/s320/frame+0.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011<b> </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>finding <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjktWF3o-9MGdrzFNELE-1RUo9z8TNS_XDobJcG9Im96bmT0ZNrXRxtPQqIEL7w25fxREymaYFrFLY25dyutzEkdbdGMJhGr_i45butdcodE564t2Xu_0YJNMz2AhiFJCNjpVQN2puOvRQ/s1600/AT+Duttonia+gorge.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjktWF3o-9MGdrzFNELE-1RUo9z8TNS_XDobJcG9Im96bmT0ZNrXRxtPQqIEL7w25fxREymaYFrFLY25dyutzEkdbdGMJhGr_i45butdcodE564t2Xu_0YJNMz2AhiFJCNjpVQN2puOvRQ/s320/AT+Duttonia+gorge.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Sunset sets in with our picnic lunch. Bitter cold. We huddle around the thermos, wondering where the winter garden is. The blue dot on the iphone map says we’re <i>here</i>, calculating by postcode, but we have to ask at 2 doors and look into the gardens of 3 different houses to make 'here' become a way in. Dutton’s map sketched what had been: we don’t know whether we will find a ruined garden or well-preserved domain.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCT29bxoby1prbLh19NyYYHpR4v7S3rhKW51sotBG-tQeDFW37JFK7YyIciw8WtC5IOEaP_dAPGze0IDxkch26CAUqjRA9LLMss-s-cITM-SqdxGj9y77lvtT8-SamidsbKURERqv51Oo/s1600/dutton+map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCT29bxoby1prbLh19NyYYHpR4v7S3rhKW51sotBG-tQeDFW37JFK7YyIciw8WtC5IOEaP_dAPGze0IDxkch26CAUqjRA9LLMss-s-cITM-SqdxGj9y77lvtT8-SamidsbKURERqv51Oo/s400/dutton+map.jpg" width="261" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">map, <i>Some Branch Against the Sky</i> (1997)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There was some difficulty in plotting the poet’s map onto the OS – as he preferred to give his scheme without giving away its precise location, Dutton gives the natural features which surround his garden a generic name. What we need to do, it turns out, is exchange Black Water for a burn. This takes us the necessary bridge further. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">At Dubh Hall Farm the new owner’s warming himself over the gas stove in his caravan. The house isn’t yet readied for winter, and it is winter. Recently arrived here, he replies to my enquiry:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>yes, there was a man before and he did make a garden for trees; it’s just over that dyke there, but you need to walk back down the road the way you came in by, to get in – you won’t see the house, it’s hidden by trees.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">If invited, the way to find <i>Duttonia</i> is to stop looking for a garden. The entrance, when we found it, was a small wooden gate, the house entirely hidden was built by Geoffrey & Elizabeth in the late 1950s. Home and garden were built on gifted land. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">This poet belonged among the band of arch-pruners and his domain hides behind a tight screen of foliage. Call the pathway that leads in a vein; as we walk the hillside it will become vascular, and the burn a nerve, throbbing with spate.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The OS map loses some authority where it puts the blue line of the burn on the wrong side of the black line of the old dyke, beyond the real trees we are looking through, which conceal it from view. The wood of <i>Duttonia</i> has not yet been surveyed by official cartography.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">It is not so common, after all, for a man to plant a wood of his own these days.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidnA3O6MP6hbDvTfP5ApgYDM0JwIquvLyg9l6lhQC7BHPYvIOA4ed4uO3D-zF7YtGE238gkJsv2BAM4fW1Ak4tuIaKtjep_G2NbSi3xVQ32pZOH4hFuQGOUzOkrSpZ8-2QSKZ_bUhIBZ4/s1600/stonypath+OS+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidnA3O6MP6hbDvTfP5ApgYDM0JwIquvLyg9l6lhQC7BHPYvIOA4ed4uO3D-zF7YtGE238gkJsv2BAM4fW1Ak4tuIaKtjep_G2NbSi3xVQ32pZOH4hFuQGOUzOkrSpZ8-2QSKZ_bUhIBZ4/s320/stonypath+OS+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Later, when I get home, I look up the map of Dunsyre, to see if Stonypath (Little Sparta) has been recognized as ‘wood’. The trees my mother and father planted are in their third or fourth decade, but the OS doesn’t have a symbol delineating sylvan ‘grove’; nor have the trees been symbolized. However, I see that the composition has been awarded a garden symbol, kissing cousin of the cherry-blossom on a kimono.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Will Dutton’s wood gain that symbolic recognition, or will it fade back into the hillside wildness, as was perhaps his wish, before any official map records it?<b> </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>announcing <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Green as it sounds, I want to begin by thanking the poet for making such a remarkable and thoughtfully conceived garden. As I write this acknowledgement, to a poet who I never had the chance to hear read, I cannot help imagining myself back there again, standing at the back of the house.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I am in the open glade where the first paths reveal themselves and, once again, I sense the character of <i>Duttonia</i> announcing itself, l</span>ess as a memorial to the poet’s passing than an emblem of careful composition, husbandry and ingenuity.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJcR6EsC6KXThX36YiYaR2Q-2Ulycgfp6LDh_qB_Iv3kQ15jOrXl-nIY0mftn_zLHZKZneFelQCBxmqvDebtUDze3-CqtCrHZNXVJaH_uv88RQtyX11W_STTH8vzMHareGUPOxL999Q4g/s1600/bench.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJcR6EsC6KXThX36YiYaR2Q-2Ulycgfp6LDh_qB_Iv3kQ15jOrXl-nIY0mftn_zLHZKZneFelQCBxmqvDebtUDze3-CqtCrHZNXVJaH_uv88RQtyX11W_STTH8vzMHareGUPOxL999Q4g/s320/bench.JPG" width="320" /></a> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The invitation to sit and reflect is repeated, episodically; as if each height that the visitor reaches is suited to a different quality of musing. The benches aren't situated for show. They don’t claim spectacular views or commanding conspectus. Tucked away in nooks & bowers, the garden seating is designed for pausing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dutton was determined to make a marginal garden: within <i>the limits of what one man can do in the spare of his spare time</i>. Part of the point of making it was was that there should be a further portion of spare time, to sit and think, or perhaps exercise a poem.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCqUfj4eMk_0Ewm4U7CRzTt28krLGPXTB3OQImnt6JDANNtYrMCCf-V-H5r3v3maIsvLP41OpzAF0WaryWNu67nwMvG5Tu80x4NihdFt_b1KKqfkgY1IFe1b0oFoCHVL83AZinU9Ez5GQ/s1600/frame+1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCqUfj4eMk_0Ewm4U7CRzTt28krLGPXTB3OQImnt6JDANNtYrMCCf-V-H5r3v3maIsvLP41OpzAF0WaryWNu67nwMvG5Tu80x4NihdFt_b1KKqfkgY1IFe1b0oFoCHVL83AZinU9Ez5GQ/s320/frame+1.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">(‘in gardens /wilderness / must be framed’, AF, after GFD)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>revealing <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dutton describes the practice of gardening as a (largely unintentional) form of self-revelation. Speaking out as he did against all forms of compartmentalization, there is a door being held open here, by which we may translate garden thoughts so that they bear on the act of poetry. Composition is the ideal means to discover one’s own <i>idea of order</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Without the distraction of ornament and exotica, the highlights and fussinesses of <i>gardeny</i> gardens, marginal gardens were, to Dutton, all the more revealing – more clearly a realisation of one’s <i>own idiom</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There is no hiding behind <i>hebe</i> or <i>delphinium</i> here and, to an untrained eye such as mine, it feels as if the rich native flora represents everything that could grow on a Perthshire hillside. The delight lies in the way each species seems to have been given it’s rightful place. Nothing flowery shouts for our attention. It all just<i> is</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkCW2zXSpW4ftrSQOK51SQlYrYRDIhaAzhiQpZ8aY1-4Yu3WlXKOnk85NyazSrziKmStQM2whW2LOr9QHBlTizWVfRQtM8ox2V5HVDv4DdQXc5By9jO9UwJafBFEvebLjsdhuKc2Gps6A/s1600/AT+framed+3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkCW2zXSpW4ftrSQOK51SQlYrYRDIhaAzhiQpZ8aY1-4Yu3WlXKOnk85NyazSrziKmStQM2whW2LOr9QHBlTizWVfRQtM8ox2V5HVDv4DdQXc5By9jO9UwJafBFEvebLjsdhuKc2Gps6A/s320/AT+framed+3.JPG" width="320" /></a> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">(‘in gardens /wilderness / must be framed’, AF, after GFD)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011<b> </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>defining <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCBjR2YyxgEgEQ7n3q5VoAdEvlMYmJj0UFFs87j6efVYkyWitW9GSYpScYUVTBu4K2lXTYr86ihWsIq78_sWLtBoJc64kg-B1NDfMl-0yJ2PPY-GJL1hVTGyp7CH0MeNnJLuh1_10QcKk/s1600/AT+Duttonia+gorge.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCBjR2YyxgEgEQ7n3q5VoAdEvlMYmJj0UFFs87j6efVYkyWitW9GSYpScYUVTBu4K2lXTYr86ihWsIq78_sWLtBoJc64kg-B1NDfMl-0yJ2PPY-GJL1hVTGyp7CH0MeNnJLuh1_10QcKk/s320/AT+Duttonia+gorge.JPG" width="320" /></a> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Duttonian gorge</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As we climb there is evidence of the year-by-year process of adaptation, as the poet battened woodland against the incursions of weather. <i>Shelter</i> is a word that appears often in his writings. </span>The general air is of a hillside wildness unfolding episodically; but this still allows for the juxtaposing of disparate climates and we notice how the garden was helped to find ways to inhabit the different potentials of patches of soil and rock, accepting the exigencies of the slope.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">This ecology Dutton defined in terms of 5 ‘axes’:</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>(I) highly acidic pine wood & heather moor</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>(II) moss-hung spray forest</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>(III) thin, acid, ericaceous birch woodland</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>(IV) lush neutral valley</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>(V) mildly acidic juniper dotted turf</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj16pmQhviFk4RaW98UFL5PevrXFN467FzmyLS7_E6m_2_6pBGgiOYj-PbR2aBxmA_3HVdkarWK7uzQ9hebLQT7u4OesMqfY5u4NgqGVeFd6rBSUpLJIEscAtLK6VADdxXG6wIMyfr7YGY/s1600/frame+3.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj16pmQhviFk4RaW98UFL5PevrXFN467FzmyLS7_E6m_2_6pBGgiOYj-PbR2aBxmA_3HVdkarWK7uzQ9hebLQT7u4OesMqfY5u4NgqGVeFd6rBSUpLJIEscAtLK6VADdxXG6wIMyfr7YGY/s320/frame+3.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">(‘in gardens /wilderness / must be framed’, AF, after GFD)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Reflecting on these axes, I can’t help turning to the comparison with two other gardens, Stonypath (Little Sparta), where the intimate grove and small path offer a gentle ordering of ‘diverse secrecies’, and the grander botanical spectacle of Crarae Woodland Garden (Argyll).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Given the terrain, the more obvious kinship lies with Crarae, which is also composed around hillside & burn. There the visitor works their way through the glen by graveled paths. Crarae defines mountain ecologies by plantings, striking up a thematic relationship between the continuum of the garden and the world. </span>As magical as it is, Crarae remains a garden in which the botanical aspect remains upmost. The episodes are a gazetteer of botanical wonders, featuring forms and, above all, colours. The visitor is guided from label-to-label, exotic-to-exotic.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">At Stonypath the episodes conduct us through styles and eras, <i>Julie’s Garden, The Henry Vaughan Walk, Heidegger’s Woodpath.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In terms of composition, Dutton refers to the structure of his garden as a series of <i>episodes</i>, each a <i>compartment of happening</i>. IHF refers to these as <i>areas</i>, each presided over by a garden poem, as a <i>reigning deity</i> dedicated to the spirit of place. It follows that, at Stonypath, paths conduct us between areas where we stand to contemplate a poem. While at Duttonia, the <i>episodes </i>are less focused within their own bounds, being as much places to stand and look toward arches and paths, arcs and branches.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Given this distinction between the way the poet’s order our experience, wandering through Dutton’s garden turns out to be surprisingly close to the atmosphere of Stonypath – and this is because of the way the poet-gardeners compose time and space. </span>At Crarae one is invited to imagine the Himalayas. In both of the poet’s gardens the viewer perceives a <i>modeling</i> of time and space.<br />
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Where their models differ is that IHF’s is mythic and historical, while Dutton’s is native and vernacular. IHF modeled a portal to the past, yearning for fugitive states of being and feeling best defined in the ideal terms of philosophy and poetry. Dutton’s garden models an ideal version of the richest possible environment, within the restrictions of the ecology of the present.<span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The poet-gardeners and their gardens are not opposed: it is a question of emphasis, of philosophy and, as Dutton reminds us, of <i>self-revelation</i>. Both gardens were composed on the margins of cultivation, but where Stonypath is an ideal garden of the poetic imagination, <i>Duttonia</i> is an exemplary statement of biodiversity.</span><br />
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Stonypathian garden poems enact a technology of the imagination. <i>Duttonia</i> proposes a sustainable technology, dedicated to the matrix of wilderness, while always bearing in mind the responsibility to remind us that, in our world, all such wildness must be managed. </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Duttonian credo</i><br />
<br />
marginal gardeners<br />
are shepherds of plants –<br />
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encourage them<br />
here or there<br />
<br />
comfort them in a crisis<br />
but never drive your flora</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy0r9L30Bmt3Xdwq6uXijfX5KljKOP1p2PRu0mr71jAlyWRCP6VEb_k4RcxO9MZoQMUMJa-XXzqmcknRIuXjTiUKCwwpmTlwfxcIRDJpDXU92dbjOcgFHyR_4NiH_n6fBy162UWOzV14Y/s1600/IHF%252C+fragile+%2528gillanders%252C+1998%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy0r9L30Bmt3Xdwq6uXijfX5KljKOP1p2PRu0mr71jAlyWRCP6VEb_k4RcxO9MZoQMUMJa-XXzqmcknRIuXjTiUKCwwpmTlwfxcIRDJpDXU92dbjOcgFHyR_4NiH_n6fBy162UWOzV14Y/s320/IHF%252C+fragile+%2528gillanders%252C+1998%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Ian Hamilton Finlay with Sue Finlay, photograph by Robin Gillanders, 1998</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The stone inscribed FRAGILE placed at the border between Stonypath garden and Pentland moor could be transplanted here, were the statement not so clearly made by the trees themselves. </span>To see the richness of Dutton's woodland is also a cautionary and moving reminder of how rare it is to experience this rich equilibrium of native and mountain species<span style="font-size: small;"><b>.</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>wandering <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyof7sdj4SkJuTI4YljZ_DGp0jhkqhkNHi3vsC5ZNNALOFimbx_C6JxbC51fE8sZz3gmYM0wWwDJeOVMeQlQx4O7fXLYYLn1_bju0Uf7KehmQE2Qq67HGE31KqxXFOgpTfPMh_WeaV1fI/s1600/AT+framed+1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyof7sdj4SkJuTI4YljZ_DGp0jhkqhkNHi3vsC5ZNNALOFimbx_C6JxbC51fE8sZz3gmYM0wWwDJeOVMeQlQx4O7fXLYYLn1_bju0Uf7KehmQE2Qq67HGE31KqxXFOgpTfPMh_WeaV1fI/s320/AT+framed+1.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">(‘in gardens /wilderness / must be framed’, AF, after GFD)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As I walk through – no, up, and over, and then down – the garden, slowly the realization dawns: this is most accomplished composition of paths that I have ever encountered. The paths laid out at Stonypath are intimate; the hillside paths of <i>Duttonia</i> are touching in the way that they are so lightly marked, as if one were following a set of footsteps in the sand that have been partly covered by a breeze.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dutton’s guide to gardening makes it clear that such effects are an act of will and skill. </span>The habitual imagery for such leafy domains threaded with myriad paths is <i>maze-like</i>. It doesn’t work here. This poet’s scheme is intuitive, remaining constantly true to the ground itself, which, being a Perthshire hillside, is broken, liable to be riven by spates and roughed up by frosts.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Paths are not folds, they cannot be planned on paper alone. </span><i>Duttonia’s</i> paths are desire lines: they follow each contour and hollow, tacking up rises, around bluffs, guide us between established trees. There is no such thing as the straight line at <i>Duttonia</i>. It would be an egoistic folly.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There is magic in the recurring feeling that one is invited in different directions, without the pressure of a ‘right’ route. The sensation is of a localized intelligence conducting one, but in such a way that at each moment one is where one should be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The views are not perspectival or extended; the viewer is not chivvied to find the ‘right’ place to stand. Indeed, as Amy notices, there seem to be few if any ‘views’ out of the garden, except through branches looking toward the sky. The hills are hidden, the burn too, though, as Gerry says, one hears it all the time, deep in the glen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The poet remained true to his own advice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>plan a path</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>with feet and eyes</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>make a trodden way </i></span><br />
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</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>a path should merge</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>into the wild</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>on either side</i></span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>paths transform</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>confused ground</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>into comprehensible order</i></span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>a path holds</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>the foreground together</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>and assembles the distance</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>paths are interludes between episodes</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>that crystallize into prospects</i></span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>a path is not static</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>the viewer moves</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>in Time</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><br />
</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>the surface of a path</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>should satisfy usage</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>upkeep and harmony</i></span></blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhufaT0GA8Yhzh3vGAX2AxheVLDqxCcf4QA26dKbPlIvjbSx9cBUE6v2L-ONjob5Ox8S747_HxdCwCLXwRHS6iQXgjv_nixw4IZ3NY0gCAUJtHMMm61bISX5QEizmqYaCgDof80KsuO2nU/s1600/path.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhufaT0GA8Yhzh3vGAX2AxheVLDqxCcf4QA26dKbPlIvjbSx9cBUE6v2L-ONjob5Ox8S747_HxdCwCLXwRHS6iQXgjv_nixw4IZ3NY0gCAUJtHMMm61bISX5QEizmqYaCgDof80KsuO2nU/s320/path.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>composing <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpkjAWhAq0-Y40ypO8ivzjmTku73VLS5zqoGymv7rq35XKYjmYuHMXb6e5QRbKpwsZEbFOtQ-sCLVQgRIv4TEvZsOLGBqhTHK_7RxQFsMGX_lsFdxKl-eUCAcCx2uiYYV_tWVKMEcuRBI/s1600/AT+dutton+030.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpkjAWhAq0-Y40ypO8ivzjmTku73VLS5zqoGymv7rq35XKYjmYuHMXb6e5QRbKpwsZEbFOtQ-sCLVQgRIv4TEvZsOLGBqhTHK_7RxQFsMGX_lsFdxKl-eUCAcCx2uiYYV_tWVKMEcuRBI/s320/AT+dutton+030.JPG" width="213" /></a></div>
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<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">an under</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">wood</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">of hazel</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">for restfulness</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The wood’s alphabet of trunks and cross-bars shape groves & glades, interiors that are sheeted in a rich mat.</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">the matter</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">of moss</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">lichen and</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">fallen leaves</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Greens and coppers anticipate snow. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgerACIaRBfdndAr5IHKJ3w9pBCJeJans5O5H3nHvpYSctakMA6GTUqJLjfPAG3ljbT3JRapQVV9VzMsvhBFtVWOdqSt9gvds51_997AWX0_BMV-WMMqK8Ol0MTDJ5C65JpTIso8NBJ-WI/s1600/winds+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgerACIaRBfdndAr5IHKJ3w9pBCJeJans5O5H3nHvpYSctakMA6GTUqJLjfPAG3ljbT3JRapQVV9VzMsvhBFtVWOdqSt9gvds51_997AWX0_BMV-WMMqK8Ol0MTDJ5C65JpTIso8NBJ-WI/s320/winds+1.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">winds can blow</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">away winter</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">darkening the snow</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">to water</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>AF, after GFD</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The ‘rooms’ are only lightly walled – or better, screened, as in an old-time Japanese house. The paths are hints. Obvious to say, the whole is all an agreement of different elements. Again I’m reminded how the gardener-scientist-climber-poet lamented the folly of compartmentalized thought. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDwqn3tZElkLOuLAjykV500UeCX7N36LA4zSZAVhr5ck7_E-HFdY7mkNGgMzSJ_saJmkOyzoTEFZzAeKjZKkekZhosuHjrBiNOVe6yYGguUhGwUkx2CJOnwFB2gSh_m4CMLImneWzLUiA/s1600/frame+4.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDwqn3tZElkLOuLAjykV500UeCX7N36LA4zSZAVhr5ck7_E-HFdY7mkNGgMzSJ_saJmkOyzoTEFZzAeKjZKkekZhosuHjrBiNOVe6yYGguUhGwUkx2CJOnwFB2gSh_m4CMLImneWzLUiA/s320/frame+4.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">(‘in gardens / wilderness / must be framed’, AF, after GFD)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dutton paid heed to<i> the bones of topography</i>. The planting appears to be largely native – though it is wintertime and my botany is famously poor. He does refer in his books to mountain species, such as those collected by George Forrest among the stone bowl of the peaks of Yunnan, but, in terms of plants, there is nothing to distract from this continual fidelity to the revealing of mantled earth. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There are practical essentials, such as the necessity of a deer fence.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">There is also Dutton’s ingenuity – he would have liked best Morven foraging for chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms. I appreciate his wit. Aluminum and tin cans employed to stop the buggery rabbits cause with their winter nibbling. Gardener’s huts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The map and axes that he proposed are useful guides in terms of ecology, but the spirit of the place simply<i> is</i>; and, r</span>ather than particular 'episodes', what stays with me are the little touches, tweaks that reveal his idiomatic thinking and emblematize his presence and, now, his absence.<span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>hutting <i>Duttonia</i></b></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMErFDKj0F653MDl6MlGwoFHlpaHMg9M2rxTENOU7596lhZwDNjjMhgrOsN3CvmGMLKdmlX1KUEA6YFBNFboNFERG3i32OXZdaZ7OUzC3m654UZfTcf6CmBcAW9EQY6c8bR1pRlQjnSqM/s1600/stone+hut.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMErFDKj0F653MDl6MlGwoFHlpaHMg9M2rxTENOU7596lhZwDNjjMhgrOsN3CvmGMLKdmlX1KUEA6YFBNFboNFERG3i32OXZdaZ7OUzC3m654UZfTcf6CmBcAW9EQY6c8bR1pRlQjnSqM/s320/stone+hut.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay, 2011</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">A low stone grotto-like hut, set on pine pillars.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>poeming <i>Duttonia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Duttonia</i></b></span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>for Ken, Amy, Gerry & Morven</i></span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">a garden</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">is a bounded island</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">a garden is indivisible</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">interweaving horticulture</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">ecology & psychology</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">a garden is a domain</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">of continued intent</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">in which time unwinds</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">a garden is where</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">frequent pruning</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">allows you to see</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">your own idiomatic</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">idea of order</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">crystallizing prospects</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">through the arch</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">of some dark branches</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">that frame the wilderness</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">for no matter</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">how bare, how marginal,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">how mossy you become</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">your beginning and end</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">is here</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">on and of the ground</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">merging into the wild</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">on every side</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">garden, gardener</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">follow the pathways</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">your discoveries offer</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">through the semi-permeable</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">membrane of the biosphere</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">always remember</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">the biomass includes you</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>(many of these phrases are cuttings taken from the gardener's writings)</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">(‘in gardens / wilderness / must be framed’, AF, after GFD)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">And Ken composed this 'version', untitled, after a poem of Stefan George's.</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Come to the garden which might seem dead and view</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">the empty house, the dripping ferns and mosses.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Between the clouds an unexpected blue</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">unshades the hollows and the paths’ criss-crosses.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Accept those dabs of yellow, the lichen-greys</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">that nuzzle birch and hazel like a breeze.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The last rosehips still haven’t lost their red.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">They cluster like a garland round your head.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Don’t miss the bank where chanterelles are rife</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">or the tiny plums, dark and sour and solemn</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">and gently spool into the face of autumn</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">whatever still remains of this green life.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>for Eck & Amy, Gerry & Morven</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>i.m. G.F. Dutton</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Duttonia</i>–Drumderg: transitional birks</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As Dutton consistently insisted, this is a managed hillside.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As we reach the top of the hill there began to be more light and sky. Climbing over the low end of the dyke, around a corner we happened on his final work, a birk plateau. This final coda was as entirely unexpected as it was perfectly judged.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Beyond lay a field, beyond that the heather moor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Thinned so as to offer a wandering delay and intricacy, the birch offered a delight of managed nature, a final reminder of the construction the entire domain represented. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Only later did I realize that within the shelter of these birches there lay another garden lesson as to how we might consider renewable energy. They had the poetry of a grove, but it is also possible to apply the rhythm of trunks to the bar moor and its wind-towers. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">AF, photograph by Alec Finlay, 2011</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> WI ld</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">la ND</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Drumderg installation is just out of sight of <i>Duttonia</i>, over the lip of the skyline. But we may still adopt it as our site of prospect and consider how installations such as these might be arrayed as a technological garden. We could consider the ecology of the moor in relation to the managed nature of the wilderness garden. And why not ally the Drumderg installation to acts of active ecological renewal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Call it wind-gardening. As Amy says, all that seems to be missing there is a gardener.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">proposal for <i>Duttonia</i> (II)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">poem, AF; photograph Amy Todman, 2011 </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dutton insisted that biomedicine and gardening could be part of an integrated synthesis: technology reminds us that synergy is not a literal art. A birch is lovelier than a wind-tower, but, in our complex world, they must relate to one another.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">proposal for Drumderg</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">poem, AF; photograph, Amy Todman, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">On the specialist maps the Forest of Alyth is an SAC: <a href="http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/protectedsites/sacselection/sac.asp?EUcode=UK0030152" target="_blank">Designated Special Are of Conservation UK0030152</a>. Neither the SAC nor <i>Duttonia</i> appear on the everyday OS, only Drumderg is marked. It is time we made maps that represented all these specialized visions, so that we might see better how they relate.</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="font-size: small;">the masts are still</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">the sails all move</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">AF, photographs by Amy Todman, 2011</span><br />
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The wind towers on Drumderg Hill need not be reacted against as an imposition, menacing the delicate ecology of the moor. They do exact a cost in footfall and access, but there is no reason that the necessity of installing this temporary technology cannot also enrich the moor, in perpetuity, if we bring our awareness and appreciation of the moor, as 'makars' striking a balance between the natural and made.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirr_FRbjEgb8HdF3HwdDWDRtzSjq-YGbq8g2mIjA9h76pK2LPg9cuoAgM0rm54h7T0C0ppqnZGDkwGge0x_eAKGhgfqjDQoitDV7uqjtov2URSrDXX30fVwEFD_1m7ZnG7lYWSTu-zqUg/s1600/AT%252C+use+in+blog%252C+Drumderg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirr_FRbjEgb8HdF3HwdDWDRtzSjq-YGbq8g2mIjA9h76pK2LPg9cuoAgM0rm54h7T0C0ppqnZGDkwGge0x_eAKGhgfqjDQoitDV7uqjtov2URSrDXX30fVwEFD_1m7ZnG7lYWSTu-zqUg/s320/AT%252C+use+in+blog%252C+Drumderg.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman, 2011</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The philosophy of managed equilibrium that <i>Duttonia</i> represents can guide such awareness. The garden frames the wilderness.</span></div>
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Gerry contributed this coda:</div>
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<b>C</b><b>oda: Arbor ventus est</b><br />
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photograph Gerry Loose, 2011<br />
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Who knows when the day starts?<br />
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What grows unaided may be considered wild. What grows with our aid may be considered cultivated. The overlap is as much internal as external.<br />
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Internal wildness may be cultivated. External wildness may be assisted. Both shelter.<br />
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Wild landscapes or gardens in Scotland exist only in the cracks where hoes and secateurs do not reach.<br />
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What wild mind, that early morning as we left for Geoffrey Dutton’s garden, left three fine liberated salmon (though one had no head) under the hedge outside our boat?<br />
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Over what wild sky did the long straggles of southing geese flow before reaching our eyes and minds on the road to the garden, and what weeds across memory have overgrown their trace except “sky”?<br />
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We find what we set out with in mind: Geoff Dutton’s garden-gorge; benches, huts and deliberately curtailed views. <br />
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What ‘s left is wild: the chanterelles growing under the birches, the hedgehog mushrooms nearby; sloes and hazels.<br />
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From the sloes we make cultivated gin. With stratified hazel seeds I plan a grove of nut trees.<br />
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Above the garden those wind turbines lost in mists are the latest manifestation of the great wheel <i>dharmachakra</i> <br />
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Turbine arms harvest the wildness of geese, of the sky, of the garden and of the salmon through wind-shuddering stems into cultivated domesticity.<br />
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The tree is the wind. <i>Arbor ventus est. </i>Geoffrey Dutton <i>fecit</i>.<br />
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(Gerry Loose)<br />
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proposal for Duttonia; concept Alec Finlay, latin text by Gerry Loose, photograph by Amy Todman<br />
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<b>coda (II): later that evening </b><br />
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<br />
(Morven Gregor)<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>intimations</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Geoffrey Dutton, poet, molecular biologist, marginal gardener, wild swimmer, mountaineer, died in 2010. As the garden is not open to the public we have not given its exact location. If anyone wishes to visit they should contact the family first at: jonesglenquiech(at)googlemail.com </span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>bibliography</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">poetry:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Squaring the Waves</i> (1986)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Concrete Garden</i> (1991)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Bare Abundance, Selected Poems: 1975–2001</i> (2002)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">gardens:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Harvesting the Edge</i> (1994)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Some Branch Against the Sky</i> (1997)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>see also</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Dark Horse</i> magazine, <a href="http://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com/Resources/Dutton.pdf" target="_blank">interview with G. F. Dutton, summer 2005 </a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The Biochemist Society, <a href="http://www.biochemist.org/bio/03204/0052/032040052.pdf" target="_blank">obituary for G. F. Dutton, August 2010</a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Amy Todman's own account of the visit to <i>Duttonia</i> & Drumderg can be read <a href="http://amytodman.blogspot.com/2011/12/line-through-duttons-winter-branches.html" target="_blank">here</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.kencockburn.co.uk/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;">Ken Cockburn</span></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Alistair Peebles: <a href="http://www.braeprojects.com/" target="_blank">Brae projects</a> | <a href="http://alistairpeebles.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">blog</a> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.gerrycambridge.com/photography.html" target="_blank">Gerry Cambridge</a></span><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.gerryloose.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Gerry Loose</span></span></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.fotomomo.co.uk/publications-shows.htm" target="_blank">Morven Gregor</a></span></span><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.theroadnorth.co.uk/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US">the road north</span></i></span></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-53674485795146201362013-06-12T14:40:00.000+01:002013-06-12T14:40:11.458+01:00The Invisible Field<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH34zuSgQeednYA72fXI8jrihubQzNbhbQyqpGkheMSYNOkHtEQBeOxgRjlheagc7v_f9cBvZ6qKn0MT1Z0LClkYG3RyDBI4vc_6lz-mpY6zQiGcdklQ2RPg3zbMqpYpOOWDYk_pHq3HI/s1600/A+Sloy+Dam+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH34zuSgQeednYA72fXI8jrihubQzNbhbQyqpGkheMSYNOkHtEQBeOxgRjlheagc7v_f9cBvZ6qKn0MT1Z0LClkYG3RyDBI4vc_6lz-mpY6zQiGcdklQ2RPg3zbMqpYpOOWDYk_pHq3HI/s400/A+Sloy+Dam+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span id="goog_182858810"></span><span id="goog_182858811"></span><br />
<br />
The Invisible Field<br />
<br />
Beyond a gate emblazoned with padlocks<br />
in a ghost territory of bracken and fencing<br />
bootsoles smash downwards on concrete<br />
and powerlines sing under the arch of pylons<br />
<br />
<i>Where the shepherd had a house from the master</i><br />
<i>two cows’ grass pasture for sixty sheep on the hill</i><br />
chainsaws fell upright stands of conifer<br />
for chipboard cellulose rayon newsprint<br />
for boxes fences telegraph poles<br />
<br />
<i>The graziers were at first considered by the natives</i><br />
<i>as aliens and invaders of property</i><br />
<i>Abortive attempts were made to extirpate them</i><br />
<br />
The soil of the plantings rain-washed downwards<br />
leached ash grey iron pan on the slopes<br />
<i>(salt and earth kept separate on the breast of the corpse)</i><br />
the alkali of the spirit<br />
the destructible granular body graded and quarried<br />
<br />
concrete uplifted by mountains<br />
where ice cup was <i>argent</i> spillage of cold<br />
rasped over quartz mica<br />
All this broken through <i>a saltire engrailed</i><br />
<i>(The crest a demi-savage</i><br />
<i>brandishing in his dexter hand a broadsword)</i><br />
<br />
A <i>torse</i> of rock crushed and sectioned<br />
one hundred and fifty tons an hour transported <br />
across submerged and treacherous regions<br />
mixed with sand became the healing balm<br />
on cableways slung from headmasts<br />
three thousand cubic yards a week<br />
eight and a quarter miles of concrete aqueducts<br />
a hundred and four intake dams<br />
section by section the headwall<br />
thirteen buttresses spanned by arches<br />
<i>In an escroll above the motto THIS I’LL DEFEND</i><br />
<br />
Upright upon the earth the engineer<br />
calculated the meanings of rock and water<br />
<i>Let concrete be the balm Let water run</i><br />
<i>in the penstocks Let energy equal light</i><br />
<br />
<i>Supporters two highland men in belted plaids</i><br />
in trenches of rock and mud <br />
incomers from war at war with the earth <br />
rainwashed slipping beneath them <br />
(the cast-off cladding the falling timber<br />
the men bare-headed sweating shaken) <br />
<i>(anonymous but for the injured and the dead)</i><br />
<br />
Section by section the headwall<br />
a memorial plaque one hundred and sixty feet high<br />
<i>all Proper standing on a compartment wavy</i><br />
<i>whereon is the word LOCH SLOY</i><br />
<br />
The slung cables sigh under the arch of pylons<br />
The invisible field dwarfs the bungalow<br />
a man and a woman fenced and netted <br />
bodies disrupted as mine is<br />
passing beneath that charged singing<br />
<br />
<i>Let there be light in the dark regions</i><br />
<i>an end to black Mondays on Clydeside</i><br />
<i>an end to blackouts on washday in the tenements</i><br />
<br />
And there was light: far down Glen Loin<br />
it burns over the nuclear secrets<br />
over the shipwrecked yards<br />
over my own boots on the road<br />
<br />
<br />
poem, Gerrie Fellows<br />
photography, Tom Prentice<br />
<br />
The images show Loch Sloy hydro-electric dam and power station<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Alec Finlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11604980865660585293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-60380043630827502292013-03-19T11:17:00.004+00:002013-03-19T11:17:57.195+00:00wind(turbine)flower<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Alec Finlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11604980865660585293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-11501218703327691582013-03-19T11:16:00.000+00:002013-03-19T11:16:17.656+00:00Four windflowers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Alec Finlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11604980865660585293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-71533036084034284122013-03-19T11:08:00.000+00:002013-03-19T11:08:10.033+00:00three windflowers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Alec Finlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11604980865660585293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-88505003276524580792012-05-14T18:49:00.000+01:002012-05-14T16:01:47.701+01:00Rousay & Billia Croo<div style="color: white;">
.</div>
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPXyX5RO3VVXB-ClKHy4k3mHFhpt_JwOpxUrycMpJARD3U2YeaHFIDwkrMLya3GcIt2ZBcU7l-6K3YcTvCQqPI2EyJ68DsOs-q8Hgm956LvHejeePk2o9T4BNKBAvUP9V-Mp9MqyFCWD8/s1600/AP+Costa+Head+from+Rousay.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPXyX5RO3VVXB-ClKHy4k3mHFhpt_JwOpxUrycMpJARD3U2YeaHFIDwkrMLya3GcIt2ZBcU7l-6K3YcTvCQqPI2EyJ68DsOs-q8Hgm956LvHejeePk2o9T4BNKBAvUP9V-Mp9MqyFCWD8/s400/AP+Costa+Head+from+Rousay.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
WORD MNTN (Costa Head, from Rousay); poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'But the sea <br />
which no one tends <br />
is also a garden <br />
when the sun strikes it <br />
and the waves <br />
are wakened. <br />
I have seen it <br />
and so have you <br />
when it puts all flowers <br />
to shame.' </blockquote>
<br />
– William Carlos Williams, 'Asphodel, That Greeny Flower' <br />
<br />
<b>Two Gardens: Sea-Garden & Wind-Garden </b><br />
<br />
Before we make for Rousay we head through Stromness, Innertown to Outertown, for a visit with Tam of the bookshop at Don. Alistair wants to show me Gunnie’s garden. <br />
<br />
Tam & Gunnie were old friends of my mother's and back in the early 1970s they lived for a while on a steading near Ellery, which belonged to the Argyll branch of the Lockhart family. My childhood memory (mis)places the house in the very middle of a beach, surrounded by sand, and I recall going endlessly to and fro through the shell bead curtains that Gunnie had made. I'd never seen such an exotic design before and the only thing I could see that the beads were made for was walking through over and over again, cool shells trickling and tickling your cheeks, giggling. <br />
<br />
That was before they moved to Orkney and become part of the fabric of the islands; Tam at Brown's bookshop, Gunnie with her photography and her garden.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-onvCI8J_xskuwS2y_A4AZqy7vZxqf7IBKYhYO3D6ZOWfs1-Sj8wrh0ngQUQrTks14SplafdPe0wk9oij_WS8hyphenhyphenrnvrzmWyxWD9Rrv-cw7tdmynPv9CYPAdqGggby4OnjMQLv7QKrHCM/s1600/Alec+%2526+Tam.jpg"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-onvCI8J_xskuwS2y_A4AZqy7vZxqf7IBKYhYO3D6ZOWfs1-Sj8wrh0ngQUQrTks14SplafdPe0wk9oij_WS8hyphenhyphenrnvrzmWyxWD9Rrv-cw7tdmynPv9CYPAdqGggby4OnjMQLv7QKrHCM/s400/Alec+%2526+Tam.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
Tam & Alec; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011<br />
<br />
To Alistair and my delight as the van noses out to Warebeth, this is the very morning the tugs are passing through the sound of Hoy, pulling the enormous platform and foundations for the new Oyster 2, a pioneering wave energy generator which will soon be installed at Billia Croo. You can see it here, between our smiles. The great prongs of the rig are more lobster than oyster; soon they will be lowered and fixed to the sea-bed, ready to grip fast the turbine workings.<br />
<br />
This is the future; this is some of your Orcadian blue-sea thinking. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglrdsB0L5CxhaPdnDPSXGGFLcndKOZDVj1fPrDHsnc0Pe7viZ1GqeTbsQWte0AeUlSHAIh6up8thk1zYT82ycom23flN3IEQjJGbhyvFkUEw6hwtbc-PFQnwkJa_UBuj6DzAA0YZsKZEs/s1600/AP%252C+af+mesostic%252C+Rousay+and+billia+croo+blog.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglrdsB0L5CxhaPdnDPSXGGFLcndKOZDVj1fPrDHsnc0Pe7viZ1GqeTbsQWte0AeUlSHAIh6up8thk1zYT82ycom23flN3IEQjJGbhyvFkUEw6hwtbc-PFQnwkJa_UBuj6DzAA0YZsKZEs/s400/AP%252C+af+mesostic%252C+Rousay+and+billia+croo+blog.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
Mesostic, Billia Croo; poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
ebBing <br />
tIdes <br />
spLish- <br />
spLash <br />
In <br />
A <br />
<br />
Current <br />
wheRe <br />
Oysters <br />
flOurish </blockquote>
<br />
I asked Alistair if he knows where the name for this bay came from and he directed me to these notes from his talk in Kalmar. <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>'Billia Croo is a beautiful name, but no one knows what Billia means. The Croo bit is probably the same as in planticreu, and also -kro, -kreu, -krue (and planticrub in Shetland). It derives rom ON krókr, a corner, as in an odd piece of land, or a yard, but planticreu means an enclosure for a vegetable plot (to keep out animals), as does kalykro, which is the same as kailyard, of course. Formerly it was more often an enclosure to keep animals in, like a sty. But since it's a shore it's hard to say why it might have been called by that name, though it's a shore at which – due no doubt to the shape of the bottom and the currents, a lot of driftwood and other flotsam tends to fetch up.' </i></blockquote>
<br />
A sea patch then, with the whole sea garden glinting beyond. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLjpkpjzUGf0FAYKVuVECNlTvVFTaEtQewogpnso8MNUee3vtYjaVLUmMI5UDOfysRhok-wU6ENzHQRd94H0nS08wtwzx7JtjBKzevYFG04YvYvK226-pOaHDHaAXerq1Ateb5DXN-2UI/s1600/AP+circle+poem+%2528Rousay+and+Billia+Croo+blog%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLjpkpjzUGf0FAYKVuVECNlTvVFTaEtQewogpnso8MNUee3vtYjaVLUmMI5UDOfysRhok-wU6ENzHQRd94H0nS08wtwzx7JtjBKzevYFG04YvYvK226-pOaHDHaAXerq1Ateb5DXN-2UI/s400/AP+circle+poem+%2528Rousay+and+Billia+Croo+blog%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
circle poem (sea flowers salt waves sea flowers stone)<br />
poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
Gunnie’s sea-garden is a series of colourful waves, thickets, low spinneys and soft stems, among the remnants of sheds and stables; salt-bleached blooms secreted within protective flag kists; an enfilade of dwarfie willow, a draggled blue and yellow Swedish flag which sings of remembrance for her Nordic presence. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUGUVTXzR8hsE9JjDYucu3Nr4dpUskZ-oT1qhFFzKQkdk5oSHSjTBU9taYRp29qXimDV4v_obv21HZUS766IzlAoB2Nh1BRZksPngn7-oF5oLwwQPXCsymByu-AMA84EZlS_nYj6w34qQ/s1600/AP%252C+af+poem+salix+salix%252C+rousay+and+billia+croo+blog.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUGUVTXzR8hsE9JjDYucu3Nr4dpUskZ-oT1qhFFzKQkdk5oSHSjTBU9taYRp29qXimDV4v_obv21HZUS766IzlAoB2Nh1BRZksPngn7-oF5oLwwQPXCsymByu-AMA84EZlS_nYj6w34qQ/s400/AP%252C+af+poem+salix+salix%252C+rousay+and+billia+croo+blog.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b>Salix salix</b></i><br />
<br />
sea-bleached<br />
dwarfie willow<br />
<br />
allowing for the<br />
sea view</blockquote>
<br />
<b>proposal for Billia Croo </b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggyVUCDly8tUhx_LzynhW-n6p0uiCJ-QuFYcygbWwKrVK60CYBYffw0KI4bGnnB73zOOIT0B_pbkzbxe5h2Hk8EssnJvN8don4WhS63hHYWfrZgJNMzPlAlcA3rGytxx7D0J4rvKSvTi8/s1600/god+of+the+waves+%2528billia+croo%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggyVUCDly8tUhx_LzynhW-n6p0uiCJ-QuFYcygbWwKrVK60CYBYffw0KI4bGnnB73zOOIT0B_pbkzbxe5h2Hk8EssnJvN8don4WhS63hHYWfrZgJNMzPlAlcA3rGytxx7D0J4rvKSvTi8/s400/god+of+the+waves+%2528billia+croo%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
proposal for Billia Croo, Alec Finlay, 2011; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
<b>Rousay </b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc6Vv2hkROCSGX5cqGPMrjOnppgOWLP3jWTE7cFJl2LGLuBRoBM3juC0X9vVyYrXl-qFGm6ICfewUYz-N52In9YHDq0ZNDBFpiaLN_eYdW2HXfCPq42BUp6_O3tqfv1YSyRimh8xyYdaQ/s1600/AF-Stone04.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc6Vv2hkROCSGX5cqGPMrjOnppgOWLP3jWTE7cFJl2LGLuBRoBM3juC0X9vVyYrXl-qFGm6ICfewUYz-N52In9YHDq0ZNDBFpiaLN_eYdW2HXfCPq42BUp6_O3tqfv1YSyRimh8xyYdaQ/s400/AF-Stone04.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
a black sheep on Rousay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
Later that day, a ferry ride on, we rounded the east of Rousay, spinning around the top of Kearfea Hilll. Alistair pulled in opposite Blossom Quarry where my father dug and barrowed stone in the late 1950s. A tough job that he recorded in this poem, written in Edinburgh in the early 1060s, missing Rousay. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
<b>BLOSSOM QUARRY, ROUSAY</b><br />
<br />
"Blossom" they call this quarry of grey stone,<br />
Of stone on stone on stone, where never white<br />
Blossom was sweetly blown; wet dynamite<br />
Would blossom more than seeds in this place grown.<br />
<br />
And yet as Blossom quarry it is known.<br />
And who knows but the namer named it right?<br />
Its flowers are on the hand with which I write:<br />
Bent backs, sore bloody blisters it has grown.</blockquote>
<br />
Here, 50 years after his days on the road gang, with the help of Neil & Andrew and the Pier Arts Centre, my father placed this inscribed stone.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrvu9CCahm9-JToxUZDUMYaqdT065fwIAAF_nMj218V7DwgrcjggnggBndsVHgZ5dcdo8Q3v0_5hz6mo1vHs1DMkeVgExAZx00CDoqAC9QtDYtQsKtqXQfs8Zsb8bD9dKck-e4RCwtDXs/s1600/BlossomNotRoses03.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrvu9CCahm9-JToxUZDUMYaqdT065fwIAAF_nMj218V7DwgrcjggnggBndsVHgZ5dcdo8Q3v0_5hz6mo1vHs1DMkeVgExAZx00CDoqAC9QtDYtQsKtqXQfs8Zsb8bD9dKck-e4RCwtDXs/s400/BlossomNotRoses03.jpg" width="400" /></a></span> <br />
IHF, the promontory; photograph by Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
GODS OF THE EARTH <br />
<br />
GODS OF THE SEAS </blockquote>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
The Rousay my father knew – his ‘dear black sheep’ – was a seeming perfect circle, facing south, east, north and west. The wholeness of the island was itself a poem to him, being, as he wrote to Stephen Bann, "very particular ... very realised" <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b>after IHF</b></i><br />
<br />
drinking<br />
smoky<br />
<br />
tea on<br />
Rousay<br />
<br />
rolling<br />
up my<br />
<br />
jersey<br />
sleeves<br />
<br />
looking<br />
over to<br />
<br />
St Magnus<br />
on Egilsay</blockquote>
In his day, rather than the whirling of two-bladed windmills that now measure one's journey around Rousay, the wheel that turned or sat still was that of the watermill at Sourin.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQYs7pIXDJm960cxBCfigzJASCs3epn1bqI7XDrdcttAzrV4A4LScMyAHZJuyfZiHB21HS55AqJhmm_woxPEx76VrrF2EctuZvhzTo2E0a3DhWVPFf4Dj3oP6JPNzPw1liuElXoGgLB5w/s1600/sourin+mill" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQYs7pIXDJm960cxBCfigzJASCs3epn1bqI7XDrdcttAzrV4A4LScMyAHZJuyfZiHB21HS55AqJhmm_woxPEx76VrrF2EctuZvhzTo2E0a3DhWVPFf4Dj3oP6JPNzPw1liuElXoGgLB5w/s400/sourin+mill" width="400" /></a></div>
Sourin Mill; photograph, Around Rousay<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>JOHN SHARKEY IS PLEASED TO BE IN SOURIN AT EVENING </b><br />
<br />
How beautiful, how beautiful, the mill<br />
-Wheel is not turning though the waters spill <br />
Their single tress. The whole old mill<br />
Leans to the West, the breast.</blockquote>
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0000ee;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEing0TP5p7pDqRSWXOhVBHPcl5jjGxexJ0a1r1Q26zyFBVqUr0RXR17INC54IIOOr0C112K2RdkEDoIcsq3NVXZ36ZmI5Nii3s6lF6iMS-VfgVgYbGQ0UcBzoH3zVCIBxv72SMbfi2VTtg/s400/Sourin01.jpg" width="400" /></span></span><br />
Sourin, Rousay; poem-label, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
from Fa Doun<br />
the mill at Sourin<br />
is a child's toy</blockquote>
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoYxTz1m4c-QPxrMQVOHuGx1yX5awJXUWnBWSfFJ9noADFCqDbuSD5mtRiSBgtH_vXvtY1GS0CLW3sTQsH78ZGn9aCG4h3HLbKYi86DnNp4Xt-laO7uTL5J_7EVoWUg5Ol_lyqIt6x9SY/s1600/FittyHill1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoYxTz1m4c-QPxrMQVOHuGx1yX5awJXUWnBWSfFJ9noADFCqDbuSD5mtRiSBgtH_vXvtY1GS0CLW3sTQsH78ZGn9aCG4h3HLbKYi86DnNp4Xt-laO7uTL5J_7EVoWUg5Ol_lyqIt6x9SY/s400/FittyHill1.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="400" /></a></div>
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word-mntn (FITTY HILL); poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
Now Alistair has brought me to the promontory overlooking Saviskaill Bay and Westray; and here I add these views following and realiging of IHF's sight-lines: a word-mntn looking towards Fitty Hill, a conspectus, two poem labels and a new inscription. <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Saviskaill Bay Conspectus </b><br />
<br />
a net of stone lines <br />
cast over waves <br />
meshing islands <br />
<br />
Eday, Westray, Sanday <br />
as rocky Agean atolls <br />
afloat in aquamarine brine. </blockquote>
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMYwgirvfXTZ-kFXR6oAwsM5jBoJ2MAsDdrukRF_zk9k6HFYFjPwDMixRJkik5SjZcrOlJr_f7y4DaA77rqvqhcLlo9NMXT0bqqirdStLt4YKxHjniej0mz1KJQvTw9UeIeQxo5tAmkTU/s1600/AP+Blossom+Curlew.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMYwgirvfXTZ-kFXR6oAwsM5jBoJ2MAsDdrukRF_zk9k6HFYFjPwDMixRJkik5SjZcrOlJr_f7y4DaA77rqvqhcLlo9NMXT0bqqirdStLt4YKxHjniej0mz1KJQvTw9UeIeQxo5tAmkTU/s400/AP+Blossom+Curlew.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
poem-label, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
an evening curlew <br />
calls from <br />
<br />
the Anston burn <br />
to the stone at Blossom</blockquote>
<br />
I can't help recalling the birds calling over the moor, and the boggy turf reminds me of the wilder parts of Stonypath, where flowers are flints of colour. <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b>at Blossom </b></i><br />
<br />
not roses <br />
but louse- <br />
<br />
wort, tormentil <br />
and yellow vetch </blockquote>
<br />
And the inscription, only names, reflected in a mirror<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
GODS OF THE WAVES <br />
<br />
<i>billia croo </i><br />
<br /></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
GODS OF THE WINDS <br />
<br />
<i>rousay </i></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
Without intending Alistair has guided us through this mirror: the morning view west toward Hoy, finding symetry with this afternoon view, bathed in the same full sun, east over Westray. Gunnie’s enclosed garden, her memorial, mirrored by this peaty headland, dominated by a single immense slab of Portland stone, memorial to Finlay’s Rousay. But we aren't here to look back.<br />
<br />
<b>Proposal for Rousay </b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2nZab63X8hGu9ajfGXGfY-Oy5Sy_HxXv-KTq5prw47N4U24_PDj9MIzTKmZKbv3W3-okB342Qw_RZ5mB9n9v1w9FrGjOYb95D1-XP4wUyAHmLuqDQL1eNG0ggBMUDVhze0V4Al5QUtaA/s1600/god+of+the+winds+%2528rousau%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2nZab63X8hGu9ajfGXGfY-Oy5Sy_HxXv-KTq5prw47N4U24_PDj9MIzTKmZKbv3W3-okB342Qw_RZ5mB9n9v1w9FrGjOYb95D1-XP4wUyAHmLuqDQL1eNG0ggBMUDVhze0V4Al5QUtaA/s400/god+of+the+winds+%2528rousau%2529.jpg" width="265" /></a></span> <br />
proposal for Rousay, Alec Finlay, 2011; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011<br />
<br />
The inscription acknowledge today’s journey between two gardens, two compass points, two islands, and the Gods of two forms of energy. <br />
<br />
<b>Wind-Garden </b><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNs2YLTxgc-M_7s8OK07fICWOtUXmcSd6nzVoyu36gqaxlGEluuF-glzpzkX-sUTtLIlXlrPvbOJd_aDPr_GeUceecYOYHj18WLcedMwF_Y-PFdCBRxzzl1iO7yLLT8tr-zQr5lIAO140/s1600/Fa+Doun+cottage.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNs2YLTxgc-M_7s8OK07fICWOtUXmcSd6nzVoyu36gqaxlGEluuF-glzpzkX-sUTtLIlXlrPvbOJd_aDPr_GeUceecYOYHj18WLcedMwF_Y-PFdCBRxzzl1iO7yLLT8tr-zQr5lIAO140/s400/Fa+Doun+cottage.JPG" width="400" /></a><br />
Fa Doun, Rousay; photograph, Alec Finlay 2011 <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
gRey <br />
Or <br />
blUe <br />
Sea <br />
And <br />
skY </blockquote>
<br />
Before the full circuit of Rousay was done, travelling <i>deisil</i>, back to the cottage at Fa Doun, Alistair turned us up the wee road that heads inland to Curquoy, just above the Suso Burn. From there we could see the diggings for the new community turbine that will soon be raised on the slope of Knitchen Hill, a wind-tower which will finally catch Rousay up with Eday and Westray, neighbour islands which each have one or more turbines producing a shared communal income from wind. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd9WZZZY1mszw8wnta9gPg4-6KPoCJecd1CJdMHg_XqSvRDESycaw4j4UEeRyO9myLeb5lBCTr4gPci7UeBfE6JnhdcXq7BRxVYBkj2CcafPvQoM7El7vqKJd7mSPjMW43YVkAbPLonxw/s1600/ErvadaleNoPoem03.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd9WZZZY1mszw8wnta9gPg4-6KPoCJecd1CJdMHg_XqSvRDESycaw4j4UEeRyO9myLeb5lBCTr4gPci7UeBfE6JnhdcXq7BRxVYBkj2CcafPvQoM7El7vqKJd7mSPjMW43YVkAbPLonxw/s400/ErvadaleNoPoem03.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
Ervadale, Rousay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
Curlews, geese and oyster-catchers called across the fields and heather moorland; an Arctic Tern plied swift overhead. At the third to last house, Evadale, we glimpsed a wee cluster of small turbines of all kinds, like a thicket of sharp-petalled exotic flowers. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPcVxR7prh7BMW8ku-AjXLw5L5-PIFr-QWPoSW5_H0TzXzmnW6lDBzt0ml-nCa4K5-rdVUd_sx1F2dgazMmF0iZBSnthwKjTsC6f8URUyidBTG4eK0mjg8PdkYMptC5OHuwu9LCxUIt78/s1600/AP+af+poem+towers+that+flower.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPcVxR7prh7BMW8ku-AjXLw5L5-PIFr-QWPoSW5_H0TzXzmnW6lDBzt0ml-nCa4K5-rdVUd_sx1F2dgazMmF0iZBSnthwKjTsC6f8URUyidBTG4eK0mjg8PdkYMptC5OHuwu9LCxUIt78/s400/AP+af+poem+towers+that+flower.jpg" width="265" /></a></span><br />
Ervadale, Rousay; poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
towers <br />
that <br />
flower </blockquote>
<br />
Alistair parked the van and I asked if we might look around their pastoral-technological installation, and take some photos. <br />
<br />
The Ervadale folk had come up from midgie Mull three years ago; they were kind enough to give us a tour of the various renewables that made their back garden workshop into a wind-garden.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5kRCxlSrnoeZpFzdjjnaTyVFMHCT9eNWnp5-4xci4jZGMO3hbUE7SjIW5_b7_wdxfX7WXv6rEdleEP37ygJVOubc0c8ZidtNUcPjWnd0RwXr89a0Bgx0cWjuXo7UgshDevYOMLn1tLyQ/s1600/15.+Rousay+1+windflower+sunflower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5kRCxlSrnoeZpFzdjjnaTyVFMHCT9eNWnp5-4xci4jZGMO3hbUE7SjIW5_b7_wdxfX7WXv6rEdleEP37ygJVOubc0c8ZidtNUcPjWnd0RwXr89a0Bgx0cWjuXo7UgshDevYOMLn1tLyQ/s400/15.+Rousay+1+windflower+sunflower.jpg" width="265" /></a></div>
proposal for Ervadale, Alec Finlay, 2011; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
There were <i>sunflowers</i>, in the form of photo-voltaic units mounted on angled stands, fastened to old van wheel axles and linked by motorbike chains, trained to move with the sun. The wind-gardener explained how this imitation of nature can increase daily output by as much as 30%. <br />
<br />
Poking up from the shrubbery were three guyed pole towers, each one at a different height. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwHYdPIo34_a7uFN128uPYwhE66B3MCshMyMMTrhlfjY0cVHBom0GGIkdpltgNy8Lf5h_X2prTni7w7DCQDQ3tKrda_K4_E2AvFbGi7f0NualdS0UBUnwPGow_CFHkamFUxz6jAm-aLF8/s1600/ErvadaleNoPoem02.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwHYdPIo34_a7uFN128uPYwhE66B3MCshMyMMTrhlfjY0cVHBom0GGIkdpltgNy8Lf5h_X2prTni7w7DCQDQ3tKrda_K4_E2AvFbGi7f0NualdS0UBUnwPGow_CFHkamFUxz6jAm-aLF8/s400/ErvadaleNoPoem02.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
Ervadale, Rousay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
as every wind-gardener knows <br />
you should always grow<br />
<br />
your wind flower towers <br />
to different heights<br />
<br />
and never put your turbines <br />
too close together<br />
<br />
or one will interfere <br />
with the wind of another </blockquote>
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSvC2cI-t6iBJiS7SEOhq9RBcKiM6f4YxHrgxUHBmtm3UAPhgKISdE9ZLe4LoFlYYylONkoykQMXfFECrl-2Z-OAKvYIuF1QGRF-laAxlbPszSflwOrvypx-TTfsGadKOMwAfPreUsHUU/s1600/horizontal+axis.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSvC2cI-t6iBJiS7SEOhq9RBcKiM6f4YxHrgxUHBmtm3UAPhgKISdE9ZLe4LoFlYYylONkoykQMXfFECrl-2Z-OAKvYIuF1QGRF-laAxlbPszSflwOrvypx-TTfsGadKOMwAfPreUsHUU/s400/horizontal+axis.JPG" width="298" /></a><br />
HWAT turbine, Ervadale, Rousay; photograph, Alec Finlay 2011 <br />
<br />
Unusually, there was also a horizontal axis with paddle blades waiting for the strong winds it needs to rev into gear. <br />
<br />
This wind-garden of renewable blooms was one ingenious island way of making a living. The wind-gardener was also a kind of self-proclaimed energy ‘Minister’ for Rousay, preaching conversion and taking responsibility for most of the new wind installations on the island. Soon this back-garden test centre will expand into an eco-business based in Kirkwall, back on The Mainland, as they call greater Orkney here. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmtbAhz1rmqM2NKrFThnC9DCSf36x_wFqUKNk8YHVe4QBTyHsZOVfBQBgYgAbcaltXZoPd35qE3UoxXB471wvFIlPmxSlsOBtzIgeSODLV9lZ8EY-tUKDDIzNl1ZAXZ6iKTKCZGCrpvgg/s1600/flower+in+the+grass.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmtbAhz1rmqM2NKrFThnC9DCSf36x_wFqUKNk8YHVe4QBTyHsZOVfBQBgYgAbcaltXZoPd35qE3UoxXB471wvFIlPmxSlsOBtzIgeSODLV9lZ8EY-tUKDDIzNl1ZAXZ6iKTKCZGCrpvgg/s400/flower+in+the+grass.JPG" width="300" /></a></div>
flower in the Ervadale grass; photograph, Alec Finlay 2011 <br />
<br />
We discuss the issues around small turbines and innovation. The feed in tariffs the Government makes such play on are only available for approved designs of turbine, and as a result many of newer designs have no such accreditation. <br />
<br />
<b>Bi-bladed Rousay </b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd_EWJu1y9cmp6zASQW716Ma1xUXPauMpVCSnQZaOkGtsKO8pfJO-d3eY6UttsyC_pDBEcB3NApf7pMebP2NiZq6g6KDb1lcCCOEJ2e7tJyBZNfbrh1Gqh38Cbhg_aB7JWMWBmFPZ3leM/s1600/110617-100750.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd_EWJu1y9cmp6zASQW716Ma1xUXPauMpVCSnQZaOkGtsKO8pfJO-d3eY6UttsyC_pDBEcB3NApf7pMebP2NiZq6g6KDb1lcCCOEJ2e7tJyBZNfbrh1Gqh38Cbhg_aB7JWMWBmFPZ3leM/s400/110617-100750.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
The first landmark anyone sees as the ferry approaches Rousay is the tall handsome two-bladed turbine installed out on the shore, near the ferry pier, by the local farmer at Trumland. It’s a beauty, with a blue nacelle as beautiful as sea-holly. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9VTKsGxPu39138PnSknUskrMLHUvqXlZecX5QLtTqSmUUqG2HfbncS7VoDEBvnWyG_bLw1f_9r9BvAEWr_BAoQPeIBmYLDHADOYn-fgqmQ1qPd2OrzXsg0em4ivY0zAgBnLxCTuOCRQg/s1600/RousayPoem06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlDs5wO6bk_1J6qwFTMAwk9FTXfLtfqfCN6jGx6HuT9Mx7lMsw6bq7btzyqV7q8I0wLz39dARBV1ewZKbjt1i2aLio8A4H8K2d1gLwqdDbz_m08zwLBzkLkZQI1dLwir9OJWSMksY4uIk/s1600/110617-100915_01.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlDs5wO6bk_1J6qwFTMAwk9FTXfLtfqfCN6jGx6HuT9Mx7lMsw6bq7btzyqV7q8I0wLz39dARBV1ewZKbjt1i2aLio8A4H8K2d1gLwqdDbz_m08zwLBzkLkZQI1dLwir9OJWSMksY4uIk/s400/110617-100915_01.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
But by far the most common type of turbine design on the island is a simpler and smaller two-blade device, which has the appearance of a propeller on a stick and looks to furl and turn easily. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9VTKsGxPu39138PnSknUskrMLHUvqXlZecX5QLtTqSmUUqG2HfbncS7VoDEBvnWyG_bLw1f_9r9BvAEWr_BAoQPeIBmYLDHADOYn-fgqmQ1qPd2OrzXsg0em4ivY0zAgBnLxCTuOCRQg/s1600/RousayPoem06.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9VTKsGxPu39138PnSknUskrMLHUvqXlZecX5QLtTqSmUUqG2HfbncS7VoDEBvnWyG_bLw1f_9r9BvAEWr_BAoQPeIBmYLDHADOYn-fgqmQ1qPd2OrzXsg0em4ivY0zAgBnLxCTuOCRQg/s400/RousayPoem06.jpg" width="265" /></a><br />
proposal for a symbol for bi-bladed Rousay; photograph, Alec Finlay 2011 <br />
<br />
These were all imported from a French manufacturer, via a concession in Kirkwall. Our local expert was of the opinion they are not really robust enough to last long enough in the veery gusts and squalls of Rousay. Over time, with wear and tear, they may not prove economical. They can also, he said, be noisy, whiny, and they vary greatly in the amount of electricity they can produce. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT8BUxHBGTq56H44PbGvkZm_YoozYheQS51MN-UcNtPw2AUW9-LthwIUXPSwFIJ-59IrGSwN7Cvia4C1eHoVP-___XTcXM_Ar8Pos6sVvFmRUuwrqwgpc_3E5qUTY-ilAUt5I0S3zxuvc/s1600/RousayPoem05.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT8BUxHBGTq56H44PbGvkZm_YoozYheQS51MN-UcNtPw2AUW9-LthwIUXPSwFIJ-59IrGSwN7Cvia4C1eHoVP-___XTcXM_Ar8Pos6sVvFmRUuwrqwgpc_3E5qUTY-ilAUt5I0S3zxuvc/s400/RousayPoem05.jpg" width="265" /></a><br />
poem-label, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
lend us <br />
your arms </blockquote>
<br />
The quantity of small turbines on Rousay is testimony to the willingness of islanders who are on-grid to also become producers and earn additional income. <br />
<br />
<b>Rousay Philosophy </b><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the Rousayian is a wind- <br />
gardener by day<br />
<br />
and a wave- <br />
gardener by night </blockquote>
<br />
Alistair shared with me a lovely story he was recently told, about when cars and tarmac roads first came to Rousay. People would go a drive around the island; so he asked, naturally, if they didn’t get bored with the same view driving the one road around and around. The reply came, in the Orcadian manner, why would they get bored, for if they did then they’d only to drive around in the other direction. A form of island zen: one need only look at a thing from the other side. Life, for example. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsuyvy50Unf_q_quF7KmwWBGAbF8qo4DqL05Be4HdL9M7lyicE-8lQPd-0qrNgsdiPwpVdskQTNYIuJMq03a8Kf62KzYsF8EClav0ST7VhEsTul9pmV6LzWCoiWgVY-5w6PYoMz0pubcw/s1600/DonAF-TM07.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsuyvy50Unf_q_quF7KmwWBGAbF8qo4DqL05Be4HdL9M7lyicE-8lQPd-0qrNgsdiPwpVdskQTNYIuJMq03a8Kf62KzYsF8EClav0ST7VhEsTul9pmV6LzWCoiWgVY-5w6PYoMz0pubcw/s400/DonAF-TM07.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
Tam & Eck, Don & Hoy; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
<b>Wedder Forecast</b><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>for alan</i><br />
<b> </b><br />
Orkney bright<br />
Shetland wet<br />
<br />
Orkney wet<br />
Shetland bright<b><br />
</b></blockquote>
<br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial; font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;"></span>A Shetlandic Coda </b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjliHbbuMbwJS3nFxpcJgA2_zMhB02JVm9P0cQEBy3UEmAcaLoiyV_JsR1rDz_i3W8r6BX2eVUKpPWpKKSaZf1Xof-1Mor8hyphenhyphent2dBqHlrXa53aCqZjR6OhoSIRMMCcc_9oCYUIpxXXnQgs/s1600/Shetland+wind+garden+2.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjliHbbuMbwJS3nFxpcJgA2_zMhB02JVm9P0cQEBy3UEmAcaLoiyV_JsR1rDz_i3W8r6BX2eVUKpPWpKKSaZf1Xof-1Mor8hyphenhyphent2dBqHlrXa53aCqZjR6OhoSIRMMCcc_9oCYUIpxXXnQgs/s400/Shetland+wind+garden+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
wind-garden, Burra; photograph, Alistair Peebles 2011 <br />
<br />
<a href="http://alistairpeebles.blogspot.com/2011/07/burra-birling.html">Alistair's blog</a> records a delightful contemporary wind-garden he happened upon at Burra, Shetland. This assemblage of 28 models or wind-toys was created by Ewan Hynd, at The Riddle. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVDxlyJVWMjZ_iAYdPF1nueDxf5E25AVmZ1181yMnb0rbZHnA9TGrW0rrNRzvyVapBcuMD2MWiEhfT8gkqi8JOrB8hosJWhiYiTUlIwWo-EP4dgRylCxNfe9TPEiXZh2Y2dldOR-KZ1T8/s1600/Shetland+wind+garden+1.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVDxlyJVWMjZ_iAYdPF1nueDxf5E25AVmZ1181yMnb0rbZHnA9TGrW0rrNRzvyVapBcuMD2MWiEhfT8gkqi8JOrB8hosJWhiYiTUlIwWo-EP4dgRylCxNfe9TPEiXZh2Y2dldOR-KZ1T8/s400/Shetland+wind+garden+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></span><br />
wind-garden, Burra; photographs, Alistair Peebles 2011<br />
<br />
<b>intimations </b><br />
<br />
Visitors to the Shetland wind-garden are welcome by appointment: contact hyndesign@btinternet.com <br />
<br />
Alistair Peebles: <a href="http://www.braeprojects.com/">Brae projects</a> | <a href="http://alistairpeebles.blogspot.com/">blog</a><br />
<br />
Amy Todman: <a href="http://amytodman.blogspot.com/2011/10/bring-me-head-of-william-stukeley.html">bring me the head of William Stukeley</a><br />
<br />
Photograph at Sourin Mill by <a href="http://www.aroundrousay.co.uk/photos.shtml">Around Rousay</a><br />
<br />
Linnéuniversitetet: <a href="http://lnu.se/om-lnu/konferenser/places-people-stories-2011/stories-in-wave-and-stone">Stories in Wave and Stone</a> <br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-19946893159372795312012-05-14T15:05:00.003+01:002012-05-15T10:09:46.088+01:00John Thornes<div style="color: white; text-align: left;">
.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: white;">.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPQXkIiYqRqLNKq9aOKgXxr1VY43UL8iHEbThuQUN_cqCU-nNogbv4WYWIsvfgm9p_tbdNkTj-qwuaW_qIaTY3rtrTG4uCSa3Eh3d_IUEj7QDkyKBIM8_mfh2ikVdh72IMuR21Y5BLCjg/s1600/797px-Wreckers_Coast_of_Northumberland_Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPQXkIiYqRqLNKq9aOKgXxr1VY43UL8iHEbThuQUN_cqCU-nNogbv4WYWIsvfgm9p_tbdNkTj-qwuaW_qIaTY3rtrTG4uCSa3Eh3d_IUEj7QDkyKBIM8_mfh2ikVdh72IMuR21Y5BLCjg/s400/797px-Wreckers_Coast_of_Northumberland_Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Turner, Wreckers Coast of Northumberland, c.1834</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
What is it about our weather that makes it a suitable subject for art and music just as much today as in the past? It appeals both to the scientist wanting to understand and predict the weather and climate just as much as to the artist wanting to represent it in some direct or indirect way.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Thoreau, the famous American environmentalist and philosopher, wrote in 1854:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
<i>It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look ... to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. </i>(Thoreau: Waldon 1, p61)</blockquote>
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Turner, in one of his lectures to students at the Royal Academy in 1811, placed great emphasis on studying our changeable British weather:</div>
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<i>What seems one day to be governed by one cause is destroyed the next by a different atmosphere. In our variable climate where all the seasons are recognisable in one day, where all the vapoury turbulence involves the face of things, where nature seems to sport in all her dignity and dispensing incidents for the artist’s study …how happily is the landscape painter situated, how roused by every change in nature in every moment, that allows no languor even in her effects which she places before him, and demands most peremptorily every moment his admiration and investigation, to store his mind with every change of time and place. </i>(Wilton 1979: The Life and Work of JMW Turner, p107) </blockquote>
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Turner, <i>Study of Clouds, with a Shower Passing over Water, </i>c. 1826-32<br />
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Turner loved the chaotic and unpredictable ceaseless change that our weather brings to otherwise fixed, unchanging landscapes. The weather brings our landscape to life and weather paints an unceasing array of infinite cloud form on our blue sky canvas. </div>
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However Luke Howard had already recognised, in his lecture to the Askesian Society in 1803, that: </div>
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<i>If clouds were the mere result of the condensation of vapour in the masses of the atmosphere which they occupy, if their variations were produced by movements in the atmosphere alone, then indeed might the study of them be deemed a useless pursuit of shadows, an attempt to describe forms which, being the sport of winds, might be ever varying, and therefore not to be defined. However the case is not so with clouds. They are subject to certain distinct modifications, produced by the general causes which affect all the variations of the atmosphere; they are commonly as good visible indicators of the operation of these causes, as is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body.</i> (Quoted in Thornes 1999: John Constable’s Skies, p36) </blockquote>
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Luke Howard went on to outline his Latin cloud classification (stratus, cumulus, cirrus etc) which showed that our weather is not totally chaotic and indeed our weather is constrained by climate into regular seasons. No two clouds will ever be identical but they take on a recognisable form. </div>
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One of Constable's 'skying' cloud-studies</div>
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Constable was familiar with Luke Howard’s cloud classification and it was Constable’s willingness to invest time in understanding contemporary meteorological theory as well as in sketching the sky, out in the open air, that enabled him to paint ‘sky moments’ that we can all recognise and identify with. </div>
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<i>I have often been advised to consider my <u>skey</u> – as a <u>white sheet drawn behind the objects</u> – Cirtainly if the skey is <u>obtrusive</u> (as mine are) it is bad. But if they are evaded (as mine are not) it is worse. They must stand and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. It will be difficult to name a class of landscape – in which the skeys is not the “<u>keynote</u>” – the <u>standard of “Scale”</u> – and the chief “<u>Organ of Sentiment</u>”. The skey is the source of light in nature – and governs everything.</i> (Quoted in Thornes: ibid, p280; taken from original 1821 letter)</blockquote>
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Barbara Novak sums it up perfectly: </div>
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<i>The sky is a finely tuned paradigm of the alliance between art and science. In that mutable void, the landscape artist’s concerns – poetic, ideal and symbolic, empirical and scientific – are sharpened rather than blurred. As the source of light, spiritual as well as secular, the sky relieves absolutism with infinite moods, unchanging ideals with endless process. No wonder artists fix their particular attention on those moist cargoes that describe the void in brief but repeated compositions: clouds.</i> (Adapted from Novak 1980: Nature and Culture, p78) </blockquote>
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Horsey Mill, Norfolk Broads – a Constablesque landscape</div>
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Photograph: Alexander Maris, 2007 </div>
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We are born into the air and our senses have developed to live as part the atmosphere - through the air that we breathe and the core temperature of 37 degrees Celsius that we maintain. On average we breathe about 15m<span style="font-size: xx-small;">3</span> of air each day. Each m<span style="font-size: xx-small;">3</span> of air weighs 1.23kg which gives us a daily intake of nearly 18.5kg, equating to about 7 tonnes of air per year. Without air we would all perish in a few minutes. (The world record for holding one’s breath on land is just under 10 minutes (just under 20 minutes under water) but the rest of the world’s population would be brain dead by then! On average, with each breath, we breathe in and share at least one molecule of Caesar’s last breath!) </div>
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<i>As I contemplate the blue of the sky … I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue…</i> (Merleau-Ponty, Quoted in Ingold 2011: Being Alive, p129) </blockquote>
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Tim Ingold goes on to state: </div>
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<i>The sky, then, is not an object of perception. It is not so much what we see as what we see in. We see in the sky as we see in the light, because the sky is light, the sky is luminosity itself... In the experience of looking up into the sky lies the essence of what it means to hear and within this experience also lies the ecstasy of feeling. </i></blockquote>
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Unfortunately, because we have been in such intimate touch with the atmosphere and the sky - throughout evolution - we automatically take it for granted. We need to rediscover and protect the wonderful, free and natural services the atmosphere provides for us all.<br />
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<b>intimations </b><br />
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John Thornes is Professor of Applied Meteorology at the University of Birmingham, whose main research focus is the atmosphere and the dialectic between the atmosphere and society, for which he has developed three main areas of inter-related research in the fields of transport meteorology, landscape meteorology and the commodification of the atmosphere. Published work includes '<a href="http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.environ.31.042605.134920" target="_blank">A Rough Guide to Environmental Art</a>' (2008) and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/John-Constables-Skies-Fusion-Science/dp/1902459024" target="_blank"><i>John Constable's Skies</i></a> (1999). In the course of his research Thornes has produced a table of <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1599958/jt%20table.pdf" target="_blank">the relative values of atmospheric services</a> (John Thornes <i>et al</i>, 2010).</div>
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<span style="color: white;">. </span></div>Alec Finlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11604980865660585293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-6581402788772020172012-03-29T15:19:00.000+01:002012-03-29T15:20:20.060+01:00hydro<div style="color: white;">
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<i> Pitlochry Hydroelectric Dam</i></div>
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<br /></div>Alec Finlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11604980865660585293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-42868288233836715252011-10-25T20:28:00.001+01:002015-11-09T13:25:05.690+00:00Costa Head, Orkney <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span style="color: white;">.</span><b><br />
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illustration from E. W. Golding's <i>The Generation of Electricity by Wind Power</i> (1955)<br />
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My first destination in Orkney is one of the most important ‘archaeological’ sites in Britain in terms of renewable energy, Costa Head. This site has no helpful information panels, nor is there a hilltop museum embedded into the shell of the old concrete hut. This now historical renewables memorial doesn't gain any mention on the plethora of brown signs that guide one around the clock face of Mainland Orkney, from rune to standing stone to the corbell sunken dwellings of Skara Brae.<br />
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Here at Costa there is only a bog-covered rock whose mound forms the North-Eastern tip of the island, edged by cliffs that the swell <i>beatsbeatsbeats</i><i> </i>against continually.<br />
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Over time the construction that towered here has become ruin, and therefore, potentially, a monument. It is the form, function and context of this installation that I hope to begin piecing together today, with a little help from my friends, Alistair Peebles (poet, photographer, of Harray) and Laura Watts (poet, mapper, of Copenhagen).<br />
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WORD MNTN (Costa Head, from Rousay)</div>
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poem Alec Finlay, photograph Alistair Peebles</div>
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The Head is a lodestone representing the earliest years of post-war experiment in wind energy, a time when utopian vision was given impetus by the pressing memory of wartime shortages, which exerted themselves in the years of post-war austerity.<br />
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The few scientists employed in alternative energies, such as wind, had absorbed the lessons of wartime aeronautics, fighter wing fashioned windmill blade – indeed, the blades fastened to the nacelle at Costa Head were directly adopted from those of a helicopter.<br />
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These new experimental and marginal research projects grasped the potential of inexhaustible energy sources: wind, tide, sun, the warmth of the earth; their proponents foresaw the energy crisis of the 1970s – even if they were not yet able to predict the era of climate change and carbon crisis. It seems that the work of these few innovators was also viewed with suspicion and hostility by the coal industry and the new nuclear research establishment.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6A0g-71DhzJ_dX6CtsyLTCnWVNqg4HuVr48TRmGNyQhbs01p_xktAoKVqHlgw-cXq53K9pjH_Zgs5g_BFr7lz8-8yQvwFIbzByWCxBOdonnk3uYNre2ap75k3Hzcu2g7IcH-0V-RrWWs/s1600/costa+hill%252C+orkney%252C+e+w+golding.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6A0g-71DhzJ_dX6CtsyLTCnWVNqg4HuVr48TRmGNyQhbs01p_xktAoKVqHlgw-cXq53K9pjH_Zgs5g_BFr7lz8-8yQvwFIbzByWCxBOdonnk3uYNre2ap75k3Hzcu2g7IcH-0V-RrWWs/s400/costa+hill%252C+orkney%252C+e+w+golding.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6A0g-71DhzJ_dX6CtsyLTCnWVNqg4HuVr48TRmGNyQhbs01p_xktAoKVqHlgw-cXq53K9pjH_Zgs5g_BFr7lz8-8yQvwFIbzByWCxBOdonnk3uYNre2ap75k3Hzcu2g7IcH-0V-RrWWs/s1600/costa+hill%252C+orkney%252C+e+w+golding.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>Costa Head, E. W. Golding, <i>The Generation of Electricity by Wind Power</i> (1955)<br />
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The research undertaken here at Costa also connected Orkney to an international network of innovators, under the sponsorship of UNESCO, the recently formed Hydro board and the post-war Labour Government.<br />
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A short documentary of Costa Head can be viewed online, <a href="http://www.orkneywind.co.uk/costa.html">here</a>.</div>
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<b>The Headman: Golding</b><br />
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E. W. Golding, <i>New Scientist</i> (18 July 1957)<br />
Photograph, Ida Kar<br />
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The leading figure for this new movement was E. W. Golding, head of the Electrical Research Association and a scientist who held a passionate conviction that innovative technology could supply energy to rural or isolated areas, whether in the Highlands or in the developing world. In some respects it seems Golding's work was fated to find a better reception internationally than in the UK, and he initiated experimental wind projects in Haiti and Israel, as well as evaluating other energy sources such as waste vegetable matter.<br />
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At a time when nuclear power was being presented as the key scientific frontier, offering the solution to the country's energy needs, Golding allied himself with a small committed network of wind enthusiasts, such peers as Morch in Denmark, Ailleret and Andreau in France, Hutter and Christaller in Germany, Thacker in India, Frenkiel in Israel. As Golding puts it: "It is very pleasant to be able to record that ... close contact has been maintained between almost all the people working on the subject and that, through international meetings, private conferences, and through correspondence, information on progress and experience has been freely exchanged".<br />
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Their studies were focussed on the best designs, understanding wind behaviour and the best method of utilizing the energy produced.<br />
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This particular hill on Orkney was selected to test the UK’s first large-scale windmill turbine – in what turned out to be a brief episode of wind, embedded within the great ‘Soviet’ era of the hydro-electric dam schemes of the 1950s and early 1960s.<br />
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A second British turbine was constructed at St Albans in 1952, to a design by the Frenchman, Andreau, and later moved to Algeria. This unit was never considered successful in economic terms as the frictional losses were too great.<br />
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The prototype device was commissioned by the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board and installed in 1955. The tower was a lattice steel construction, built by the famous Clyde ship-builders, John Brown. The 100 Kw turbine was connected to a diesel-powered grid, there being no national grid on Orkney at the time. It was only intermittently operational.<br />
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wind energy roses for Costa Head<br />
illustration from E. W. Golding's, <i>The Generation of Electricity by Wind Power</i> (1955)<br />
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Despite Golding's enthusiasm the lattice tower was badly damaged in a 200+ kmph hurricane.<br />
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Golding's book makes frequent reference to Costa Head as a test case in the discussions of siting and the calculations necessary to assess wind speed, the effects of gusting, and other crucial factors in terms of the economic generation of electricity.<br />
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diagrams from E. W. Golding's <i>The Generation of Electricity by Wind Power</i> (1955)<br />
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Orkney was also used as a site to measure wind speed, with masts on Costa and nearby Vestra Fiold – which may explain why an old local guy who Alistair got chatting to could recall their having been two lattice towers.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS7ZZAErUd6Qff2k6vhvcjo7XZ4fmwVRGfT6LSopHWE2miYmyMmYasS6xEL3qUtkAeFqyiVlCJUWLlsLo6TEBUGrL9MJ41LDPfyIAiS8iwllHjmitHWgu-RsTUS_cXT0NPHtpgND7avd8/s1600/golding+5+new.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS7ZZAErUd6Qff2k6vhvcjo7XZ4fmwVRGfT6LSopHWE2miYmyMmYasS6xEL3qUtkAeFqyiVlCJUWLlsLo6TEBUGrL9MJ41LDPfyIAiS8iwllHjmitHWgu-RsTUS_cXT0NPHtpgND7avd8/s400/golding+5+new.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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map of Costa Head & Vetra Fiold<br />
E. W. Golding, <i>The Generation of Electricity by Wind Power</i> (1955)<b> </b><br />
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<b>Rounding Costa Head</b></div>
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All technology passes away, becomes ruin, scrap and then, in time, treasured memento or museum artefact. It will happen in the same way to today’s wind-farms just as it happened to the big wheel of the colliery, or pinkish shale bings which were once so despised and are now the preserve of rare alpines.<br />
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We park by Swannay Loch and follow the track that winds up, anti-clockwise, around the contours of Costa Head. In the turbines day this was a road you could take a car up, now it’s little more than a wide sheep track. <br />
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As we climb higher we come on tufty bog-cotton plateau’s with low squared off pools where black peat banks have flooded. Every now and then we pause for a breather and turn to take in the view<br />
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<blockquote>
E: little Eynhallow, lining up the era of Mid Howe with that of Maes Howe and the hills of Hoy, drawing the eye along a quarter point SW.<br />
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E: the ‘black sheep’ of Rousay, from the top of Ward Hill and Twelve Hours Tower to Westness, the incised edges of Quoynalonga Ness and the fields of Quondale, the only Estate that was cleared on Orkney<br />
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S: the farms of Evie and wind turbines on Burgar Hill which are facing our way<br />
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W: Once we’re high enough, west toward Greeny Hill Sandwick and the rook of Birsay<br />
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N: north, the outlying form of Papa Westray, Fitty Hill with the turbine in its lee; beyond that, some imaginary isle on the horizon where the low reflected cloud lays onto the surface of the sea – Orcadia’s own Ultima Thule</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi6LvWIAOh-EM4pl4VPw9tKVvnX2C6kcTpwNI3Zlq84x7Mk5dGEOOmXEpRzqAL-7Zof_0XKdXu5YzgFukSLXPr0aCJblY4EJSwT-078pfU9SQpI3KYN3TxfcqJc6vimdcuI_sgW7RHZO8/s1600/GreenyHill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi6LvWIAOh-EM4pl4VPw9tKVvnX2C6kcTpwNI3Zlq84x7Mk5dGEOOmXEpRzqAL-7Zof_0XKdXu5YzgFukSLXPr0aCJblY4EJSwT-078pfU9SQpI3KYN3TxfcqJc6vimdcuI_sgW7RHZO8/s400/GreenyHill.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
WORD-MNTN (Greeny Hill)<br />
poem Alec Finlay, photograph Alistair Peebles 2011<br />
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WORD MNTN (Fitty Hill)<br />
poem Alec Finlay, photograph Alistair Peebles 2011<br />
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Over the next few days Alistair guides me around the Orkney Mainland and the east coast of Rousay. Fresh in our thoughts, Costa Head offers itself as a new aligning feature for the island; a blunt raised prow overlooking the churning sea channel, the great door that carried vessels into Orcadia, around Eynhallow, where the tidal race collides. This sea/land ending/beginning was articulated as a gateway by the ancient inhabitants of Orkney: arrayed in the processional alignment of Mid Howe, Eynhallow and the broch at Gurness.<br />
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The lattice tower on Costa Head followed no such alignment; unlike those ancient monuments it was placed on the highest point, an articulation of dominance.<br />
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<b>The Remains</b><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0000ee;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAj6Jm9RKa-t_GRZjz7G8LY7hzs3OJ-HM6bHbhlj00KZ6_TeMtdSiMCk9AaA_d2g5NlYgu7_Er6yQiDQHfYkdPxIqs-CspCouWH-Kw4DOGlW4WAj6BMlrFq1L_gS5CSBkt_5DNXVpYQwQ/s320/BurgarHill02.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="320" /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">WORD MNTN (Burgar Hill from Costa Head)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">poem Alec Finlay, photograph Alistair Peebles, 2011</span></div>
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Make for the squat ruin first, on an island dotted with Nissan and all forms of surplus hut, many left over from the war, adapted to every purpose, from storage to chapel. <br />
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When the turbine was operational there was always someone on watch. Who was here on the day or night the tower collapsed?<br />
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Scattered hereabouts there are rusty steel fragments fastened to concrete and the remains of foundations and, farther off, smaller earth ‘pegs’ and immense sloping blocks, scattered around the hilltop in what one can, with difficulty, reimagine into an arc sweeping around the tower. <br />
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First up, Laura writes an in memoriam.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWYbG6zCpa1A9K5f9r4eqpWPMH-MuXbPOaLaz9tAVl0CWzTB2PZfBhOqZGwOICj5PEk6hNXz3Vsug904D1L859PK1cczg20rxKmgJdcy_E-OKxFBtHakZxqyL2iJFB3MrOyeIMi-eyO6c/s1600/tomb.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWYbG6zCpa1A9K5f9r4eqpWPMH-MuXbPOaLaz9tAVl0CWzTB2PZfBhOqZGwOICj5PEk6hNXz3Vsug904D1L859PK1cczg20rxKmgJdcy_E-OKxFBtHakZxqyL2iJFB3MrOyeIMi-eyO6c/s400/tomb.jpg" width="300" /></a> <br />
tomb (Costa Head)<br />
poem and photograph, Laura Watts 2011<br />
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<blockquote>
mica encrusted<br />
tomb<br />
<br />
to the unknown<br />
turbine</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe844ayCJUklJcEqvSfai2zQPRwsY9eZq3kumxhy8dgrPWgB-qamtGh2uzb4scHUKcvHU4zEzFnPc-ryEo6TqZQ3jUplxiUQOEaho6_T-n_ZrB-OwKxlojLigFfW4YaV2DOMu2G3RfY0Y/s1600/CostaMesost01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe844ayCJUklJcEqvSfai2zQPRwsY9eZq3kumxhy8dgrPWgB-qamtGh2uzb4scHUKcvHU4zEzFnPc-ryEo6TqZQ3jUplxiUQOEaho6_T-n_ZrB-OwKxlojLigFfW4YaV2DOMu2G3RfY0Y/s400/CostaMesost01.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
mesostic Costa Head<br />
photograph, Alec Finlay 2011<br />
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<br />
lattiCe<br />
Of<br />
Strong<br />
sTeel<br />
Angles<br />
<br />
tHe<br />
hurricanE<br />
hAs<br />
lanDed<br />
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The original lattice structure is one of the key motifs for my renewables project, symbolic artefact of an earlier eras thinking and attempts at alternatives to energy production.<br />
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word-lattice<br />
Alec Finlay, 2011<br />
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At the time the lattice would have represented the strongest engineered form for a tower of this height. Alistair, who has assembled a playful photographic survey of the aerials of Orkney, explains, that such a sight would have been familiar to Orcadians from the experimental radar station at Netherbutton naval station, Holm, built during the war.<br />
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Alistair Peebles, from <i>Some Aerial Views of Orkney</i><br />
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Whether it wasn’t strong enough, or because the mechanism of the nascelle and blades were too unstable, the Costa Head experiment failed. It seems even steel can be blown away. Maybe mainland scientists – Golding and his team – were unable to fully conceive the sheer brutal force the wind can command here, a force beyond the numbers their graphs and charts were capable of recording?<br />
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Perhaps what was lacking was that Neolithic knack for understanding the lay of the land: the world is not always best understood by means of commanding heights? There’s a balance to be struck in place of extremes.<br />
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Alistair and Laura, Costa Head</div>
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photograph, Alec Finlay, 2011</div>
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Alistair and Laura walk on towards the sea cliffs, shadowed over their shoulders by some snarky bonxies, to look for Standard, a rock stack hung off the highest cliffs on the Mainland.<br />
<br />
I sit awhile on one of the great concrete plinth remains then walk over to the remains of the windmill base, where the tower fixed itself to the earth. A rusty trig-point, the single remaining pin marking not so much a height as a falling. There’s peaty tea to drink and some poeming to do, joying in the sun and conspectus of loch and hills, eyes roaming calmly from island to island.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhbtd02DrfM6oJYykfuDs35jU4J9BHgoPvuxyoPaiBO5Qj6X9e9K8B00EbEFdr9wSnpou4sUPUV0n0EbTmkNzRrJfKUFGRguaykpnxnMbxYl9K6fwqfNNkcrGNbd7R8Hw4K8Ddw_efoLw/s1600/tea.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhbtd02DrfM6oJYykfuDs35jU4J9BHgoPvuxyoPaiBO5Qj6X9e9K8B00EbEFdr9wSnpou4sUPUV0n0EbTmkNzRrJfKUFGRguaykpnxnMbxYl9K6fwqfNNkcrGNbd7R8Hw4K8Ddw_efoLw/s400/tea.JPG" width="300" /></a></div>
Costa Head Windmill Turbine in Tea <br />
photograph, Alec Finlay, 2011<br />
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The concrete’s warm, weathered soft, a Corbusier northern sun-lounger. Settled here I try to imagine the tower over again, using my own wide-armed shadow, following the line where the guy hawsers would have run up at an angle to gauge it’s height. <br />
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There was a circus big-top here that moved on; that tower is now air.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHxjCwCLXXqmAAm2QTNHrlZxhEU_WUuaEE0T20idP7GTulLvE746nD1A_Iww2kK8unSYbIDjnKNX51w0_vpCcx_vVnEtdHgH82p2kIPJAkfXyduRRmGnu_KnoYuZHUlWRhCvfcGepJxpM/s1600/Costa+remains.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHxjCwCLXXqmAAm2QTNHrlZxhEU_WUuaEE0T20idP7GTulLvE746nD1A_Iww2kK8unSYbIDjnKNX51w0_vpCcx_vVnEtdHgH82p2kIPJAkfXyduRRmGnu_KnoYuZHUlWRhCvfcGepJxpM/s400/Costa+remains.jpg" width="265" /></a> <br />
Concrete plinth, poem-label, Costa Head<br />
poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
<br />
The old fixtures allow for the pun.</div>
<br />
<blockquote>
as every guy knows<br />
time releases</blockquote>
<br />
What if the experiment hadn’t been toppled? Would wind power have flourished in Britain decades earlier? Is Costa Head a monument to a lack of nerve, a misreading of the extremity of the locality, so obvious in it’s ecology? <br />
<br />
Was it conceived in the laboratory minds of London, Edinburgh, or Glasgow, following a regime of drawing-board, stress tests and calculation, but without factoring in that extreme element, the Orcadian wind, the skreevar that gusts so brutally? <br />
<br />
There is a comparison to be made, between the old research station installed on Orkney, imported from Mainland-Britain, with the pioneering renewables experiments now being conducted on the islands by local companies, scientist who live here.<br />
<br />
After chatting with Alistair and Laura I allow myself the thought that Orcadia may now have the advantage of combining the skills of engineering with the ingenuity of an island consciousness. This conceptual pragmatism relates to ingenuity, a wide-reaching term Alistair has long reflected on.<br />
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<a href="http://www.word-power.co.uk/books/orkney-futures-I9781907508004/"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP5NLO3LEU9l6qegar9DOGdN3pVFq4a3C0RQQkTkhTLPD2n-14I61b9g1LAuJHMQNXmDLGu4I7LBH8tl9cr6yl6RtHicJjtDzEhb2Sxn5HvHxlA7lBcyUlBMFO0aqJFNWg6Knb8mg_0fE/s400/orkney+futures" width="283" /></a></div>
Orkney Futures, <a href="http://www.braeprojects.com/">Brae Editions</a>, 2009<br />
Available <a href="http://www.word-power.co.uk/books/orkney-futures-I9781907508004/">here </a><br />
<br />
Laura and Alistair are, in their different ways, puzzling and answering, in the tradition of poetic speculation, and the collection of Orkney Futures that they edited together is a sampler of island consciousness, its flexibility, wry humour and sense of wide horizons. <br />
<br />
It is possible to wonder what windmills were, and could be, here and elsewhere, without thoughtlessly imposing towers where they don’t belong. But how gauge what belonging means? How could such belonging learn from another installation of verticals, the stones at Brodgar.<br />
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Understanding Costa Head may deepen our awareness of what defines that elusive term, ‘belonging’; after all, its an issue which every technology has struggled with. There is a period of adaptation in any new experimental technological outpost, where plans and concepts are refined by the particularities of place and weather, needs and beliefs. These adaptations and innovations can then flow back, from ‘island’ to ‘mainland’, being imported, undergoing further adaptations and refinements.<br />
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Nowadays knowledge about renewables, reports and assessments, pilot plans and prototypes, washes in a tidal swell of data between Orkney and the Mainland. The weather may be local, but Orkney is no longer a periphery in terms of thinking and experiment. What is placed here may, in the future, have evolved here.<br />
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Sitting here on the soft bog-grass weave, taking in the broad sun, no sense of failure accrues to the Costa Head experiment, nor is it a site of scientific bravura. Progress is a walk forwards, over uneven ground.<br />
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As a culture we’d to live through coal, oil and gas. As with the other remains for which Orkney is so valued – the ancient aligning stones and rune scratched tombs that have been set down in this salt and honey landscape – we’ve only to gaze at the remnants of this once great lattice turbine to set ourselves the task of wondering what forms of life they represent and how these might bloom in our own time.<br />
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<blockquote>
<i><b>Costa Head</b></i><br />
<br />
<i> </i> <i>for Alistair Peebles Laura Watts</i><br />
<br />
in the mainland lab<br />
white-coated minds calculated<br />
sums minus the winds<br />
standard island blast<br />
<br />
the lattice form fell<br />
Head down<br />
erasing criss-cross shadows<br />
from bog-cotton and rushes<br />
<br />
the steel tower outlasted<br />
by its road and ruined hut<br />
rusty pegs, twined cables<br />
workings hid among moor-grasses <br />
<br />
an arc of grasping guys<br />
shorn of tension<br />
sagging from concrete bays<br />
open-maws gripping on<br />
to nothing<br />
<br />
Alec Finlay, 2011</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
<i><b>Imaginary Guy</b></i><br />
<br />
<i> for Alec Finlay</i><br />
<br />
Two of us walked further on – matters,<br />
wonders we might see, like the ‘Standard’ stack,<br />
and Hether-Blether, both somewhere beyond<br />
this headland, past cotton grass and orchids,<br />
tormentil – all the salt and gritty, windblown,<br />
thriving stuff of summer – the bonxies,<br />
and further yet, fulmars in the sun-blue air.<br />
So we left you, resting on the anchoring slab,<br />
to other wonders – guylines whining, tower<br />
and turbine shuddering out some kilowatts<br />
till a 50s hurricane tore the whole lot down.<br />
‘They’d no control of it,’ said a farmer later,<br />
telling of a landmark that he still could place,<br />
and you could, still defining all that space.<br />
<br />
Alistair Peebles, 2011</blockquote>
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<b>intimations </b><br />
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Alistair Peebles: <a href="http://www.braeprojects.com/">Brae projects</a> | <a href="http://alistairpeebles.blogspot.com/">blog</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.sand14.com/">Laura Watts</a> <br />
<br />
E. W. Golding portrait is from <i><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=R0Yy19eXEWAC&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=new+scientist+e.+w.+golding&source=bl&ots=-5bOhT4XAi&sig=BuioeieyVyz8uo-zuWicUUBqpys&hl=en&ei=iY-eTtGuLom_8gO_9ZX7CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=new%20scientist%20e.%20w.%20golding&f=false">New Scientist</a> </i><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.odin.uk.com/cms/">Orkney Defence Interest Network</a> is <span style="color: black;">a group set up to highlight the importance of Orkney’s wartime heritage.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;">In 1939 </span>a radar station was constructed at <a href="http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/n/netherbutton_chain_home/index.shtml">Netherbutton</a>, Orkney, as part of the defenses for Scapa Flow, the main anchorage for the British Fleet during the war. <a href="http://www.orkneycommunities.co.uk/imagelibrary/picture/number774.asp">Here</a> you can see an image of the masts as they stood, and <a href="http://www.orkneycommunities.co.uk/imagelibrary/picture/number838.asp">here</a> an image of a torn-down mast after they were decommissioned in the 1980s.<br />
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A silent film of the experimental wind turbine on Costa Head was produced in the Autumn/winter of 1950. The film is in the Scottish Screen archive at the National Library of Scotland. This link is to Orkney Sustainable Energy: <a href="http://www.orkneywind.co.uk/costa.html" target="_blank">http://www.orkneywind.co.uk/costa.html </a><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: white;">.</span> </span><br />
<i style="color: white;">. </i><b><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=R0Yy19eXEWAC&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=E.+W.+Golding,+biography,+wikipedia&source=bl&ots=-5bMoV1Yyp&sig=FFMuU2RcZ7IrfX9GANsbxXeWSSQ&hl=en&ei=J_yKTp3-MYeU0QX8qZzUBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false"> </a></b><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-37271528489494923152011-10-06T13:39:00.055+01:002011-12-15T12:14:59.974+00:00'Off Grid' (by Linda France)<div style="color: white;">.</div><br />
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Between May 1981 and October 1992 I lived in a house with no electricity in the North Tyne valley. It had no electricity because there was no road and these two not negligible absences were all part of the appeal, the adventure for a young couple, expecting their first child, keen to escape the increasingly brash clamour of the metropolis.<br />
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Threpwood Hill Cottage was an old gamekeeper’s house on the Chipchase Castle estate, near Wark. Various members of my brother-in-law’s family had been tenants over the years but it had lain empty, mouse- and damp-ridden for some time. When it was offered to us, we accepted without a second thought and started making plans to move north. I was pleased Newcastle would be our nearest city, where by a clever coincidence we were both born. <br />
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We’d been living in a licensed squat above <i>The Whizzer</i>, a bicycle repair co-operative in Camden Town, where my new husband, Simon, worked. Amongst the clientele was Ivor Cutler; a visit from him always a highlight of the day. He wouldn’t leave without taking out his wallet and giving us a few of his small ‘poems’ printed on sticky labels. Simon would stick them on his guitar (‘funny smell’) and I still have one saying ‘you are beautiful’. The place was busy and colourful, vibrant with the punky-hippy counterculture that was such a feature of the early ’eighties. It was partly this upbeat, defiant pragmatism that propelled us so fearlessly into our new lives where all the colour would be nature’s or our own, all the lights unimaginably small and precious.<br />
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Even though my mother started collecting paraffin lamps and flat irons for us, in an excited wave of recollected wartime austerity, I wasn’t prepared for how much living in a house without electricity would involve taking a step back in time. Everything happened much more slowly and quietly than before and that first summer we acclimatized to a different pace that seemed to suit the baby growing inside me. We made a garden, started keeping hens and bees, painted walls, hung curtains and generally made a home for ourselves on the top of a hill with one of the loveliest views in Northumberland. Just thinking about it, I have to catch my breath.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDnDQzFox1iSKkfur8CE_SqY74p6gXqsRLXBCD44oozS2AR2nboFd-2Dj2nzTYfpkYPHFGFeb35Cmis1Ppaf0EQ7sk0iQn5tANzKpQiP3Ttjj7DDnn60kvNRnE_5JggBboH-C2QT1iPmk/s1600/lf3.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDnDQzFox1iSKkfur8CE_SqY74p6gXqsRLXBCD44oozS2AR2nboFd-2Dj2nzTYfpkYPHFGFeb35Cmis1Ppaf0EQ7sk0iQn5tANzKpQiP3Ttjj7DDnn60kvNRnE_5JggBboH-C2QT1iPmk/s400/lf3.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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It was only when the nights fell earlier and earlier and it started getting colder and colder that the full impact of our decision really sunk in. The baby was due mid-November and we’d always planned to have him at home. A rota was drawn up of local midwives, many of whom still remembered when home births were the normal way of doing things. However everyone was relieved when Rufus was born in the early afternoon. The doctor embroidered the few stitches I needed after the delivery by the light of a Tilley lamp.<br />
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A fortnight later the worst snows for many years hit Northumberland and, as we had no upstairs heating at the time, we had to de-camp to the kitchen, setting up a bed-sit type arrangement for ourselves in the only room with any warmth: a big old Rayburn, the heart of the house. It roared away night and day, fuelled by logs both gathered and delivered, keeping the new family of three cosy, cooking our food, baking our bread, boiling clean Rufus’s towelling nappies in an enormous ancient pan which stained them with little spots of rust after a month or two. We’d go to bed on our mattress on the floor around the time <i>The Archers</i> came on at 7 o’clock, knowing we’d be awake again around midnight or the small hours when he woke up for a feed and a nappy change, during which we might have a cup of tea and a biscuit, listening to the only programme that we could pick up at that hour – Radio 2’s <i>Trucker’s Hour</i>.<br />
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The old radio ran on a fat square battery tucked inside it, wires threaded round the contact points at the top. Apart from that, in terms of power, we had the Tilley lamp you had to pump up to ignite, which hissed and shed a cold pale light; a paraffin lamp with a white glass globe that looked like the moon and had a calming effect on Rufus, who was a colicky baby, restless and crying for the first 3 months of his life. There were also numerous candles in an assortment of holders. It’s only when you’re using a candle for illumination rather than decoration that you see the advantages of those candlesticks with a little a dish round the bottom and a ring to hold onto. Moving from room to room, walking up and down stairs, it’s impossible not to drip melted wax; over the years our walls, furniture and floors became streaked with greasy gothic trails.<br />
<br />
That first winter the windows upstairs were frequently thick with frost on the inside and the toilet froze solid so we had to use the bedpan the midwives had left behind and empty it on the compost heap. I washed all our clothes by hand in the extremely chilly scullery, or sometimes the bath. Every now and then we resorted to taking a batch of bedding and towels to the launderette in Newcastle and used it as an excuse to visit friends and family. The world of electric lights, TV, fridges and stereos was both seductive and jarring. We were slowly becoming tuned out of the mainstream, turning into wild creatures, who preferred the softness of candlelight, the deep just-rightness of the dark, the map and calendar of the moon and stars, the resonant echoes of silence. <br />
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Over the next few years another boy was born (Nathaniel, who appeared no-fuss, unfazed soon after midnight by the light of the Tilley), and we gradually made some small ‘improvements’ to how we used power. We rigged up a gas lamp attached to the old cooker that sat in the scullery and ran off a Calor Gas bottle. This new light hissed a little too but its glowing mantle shed a warmer, more extensive and reliable light than the Tilley and the paraffin lamp. We installed a wood-burning stove in our bedroom, which made the whole upstairs a much more viable space in the winter.<br />
<br />
We became friendly with a local alternative energy co-op, NEW (Northumberland Energy Workshop), who very kindly gave us one of their cast-offs – an old Rutland 5W, which powered more new lights <i>and</i> a radio cassette player. That doesn’t sound like much but it lifted us out of the gloom and made life, especially with two growing children, much easier and more civilised. A light at the bottom of the stairs! Later we also acquired some solar panels, which added to the energy available to us, stored in the big slightly Heath Robinson-style battery in the barn, all wires and buttons.<br />
<br />
Looking back, despite the hardship, the chilblains, the constraints of that life, I can’t help but feel a nostalgic glow. There was a sanity about it, a spaciousness and freedom that I miss now I have electricity, central heating, broadband (and the bills that go with them). Maybe it was our youthful idealism and energy but now it seems wonderfully innocent, embodying a profound harmlessness that comes from the modest and conscious consumption people are currently embracing as if they’d invented it.<br />
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A whole decade of culture passed me by. I have a yawning gap in my personal catalogue of music and films spanning the ’eighties, a deep incomprehension when I come up against what was out there. It doesn’t seem to have left any lasting scars. If you’re going to lose a decade, the ’eighties is probably one of the best. The space was more than filled by the richness of family and friendship, the incomparable blessing of figuring some important things out on my own, following the thread of my reading, my deepening work as a poet. This was an apprenticeship that happened in the dark, like a seed germinating, organic, irrepressible. Then in 1992, six months after my first collection, <i>Red</i>, was published, life on the hill ended and my marriage with it. Even though it broke my heart, I was the one who had to move out and, entering a new switch-on-switch-off life, I knew full well how much I’d lost. But I am grateful that I had it at all.<br />
<br />
As if those eleven and a half years set up a momentum inside me too strong to resist, my life today is a halfway house between off and on grid, then and now. I have electricity and all its benefits but live in a field on the edge of woodland, where there are no streetlights and several gates between me and the main road. The sense of keeping the mad extravagance of too much heat and light, the threat of its imminent combustion, at a distance suits me. Living like this, simply, frugally, I need to stay conscious, explicitly translating need into effort. It’s still a good place for me to write from. Braving the muddy gates, I can travel down the valley to the city for work or pleasure, always happy to follow the stars in the ever-deepening dark to find my way home.<br />
<br />
<i>Linda France </i><br />
<i>Portgate </i><br />
<i>Winter 2011</i><br />
<br />
<b>coda: Rutland</b><br />
<br />
This is the type of small windmill design that provided the poet and her family with electricity<b>. </b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaoQjM3QM0hqQSviMKWkcvJdIEM8R4VUMIKyQBsDiFN2ZCsoJsUacJJyqL4whrNDnoL2ae2rNSSVWrZIwaItBd23tVvxf3QOPm9Nr5cBUDq5GsHat0L_Et6DqDiLKDj4paY6r-URWyx2U/s1600/small_rutland_913_pole_mounted_wind_turbine_1831723.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaoQjM3QM0hqQSviMKWkcvJdIEM8R4VUMIKyQBsDiFN2ZCsoJsUacJJyqL4whrNDnoL2ae2rNSSVWrZIwaItBd23tVvxf3QOPm9Nr5cBUDq5GsHat0L_Et6DqDiLKDj4paY6r-URWyx2U/s400/small_rutland_913_pole_mounted_wind_turbine_1831723.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<b>intimations</b><br />
<br />
Linda France's <a href="http://www.lindafrance.co.uk/" target="_blank">website</a><br />
<br />
Linda France's blog, <a href="http://everywherewaseden.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">'in the poet's garden'</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-75427506197331956122011-10-05T20:59:00.000+01:002011-10-14T16:58:48.125+01:00Orkney<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKiRZQzyl6kyS9RCO9yjwL52Ldz0mLV724tvCSOqZBe95NfC8Y_w3ULJybd-JKR2B00m47fn-5lROUQG7i2FrBOcp5a_Z0kSUSUgDifbV9fHL3Wc7wy0fFE0Wt9K2dADNH9JSjtUVJpp0/s1600/For+Orkney+Blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><br />
<b>Orcadia</b><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTVyVYtuTUnKc8Z6TabOYimgrY845pYXAfT5nYTuiwQ-cpzFxRQM0i42SDluDmq1M0EeVDhGNvnX6-lhJtWkdVZND-7JOWwDW2-7etvFIdgAPlgsHXY3Xq5mXGs1LgvBPLk7c9siOug3I/s1600/dedicatory+poem.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTVyVYtuTUnKc8Z6TabOYimgrY845pYXAfT5nYTuiwQ-cpzFxRQM0i42SDluDmq1M0EeVDhGNvnX6-lhJtWkdVZND-7JOWwDW2-7etvFIdgAPlgsHXY3Xq5mXGs1LgvBPLk7c9siOug3I/s400/dedicatory+poem.JPG" width="400" /></a><br />
dedicatory poem: Buckquoy<br />
Alec Finlay, 2011<br />
<blockquote><br />
peedie <br />
wind<br />
<br />
peerie<br />
licht</blockquote> <i> </i><br />
<i>(peedie</i>:<i> </i>Orcadian for<i> ‘wee’; ‘peerie</i>: Shetlandic for <i>‘wee’)</i><br />
<br />
This is our first day together – Alistair Peebles, Laura Watts, Alec Finlay: we could be the newly formed Archaeological Survey for Renewable Energy, A.S.R.E., but better by far to be pals out for a walk. We meet upstairs in the Stromness Hotel to outline some common aims from out of our different projects. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4LjD_Tv8FgE5AmVDq6xF2fXWuRcPcCLRm6vhab23XTfAOLrVvx8YnQ7LatP3RAHp_SUyPIDoywmKP_yrC8pu_vI-XULKvE0gvbFjvpQkABUdOkMuIEq5Tqae_SBDygv0t4AOfy2Cywlg/s1600/Orkney%252C+blades+over+hilltop.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4LjD_Tv8FgE5AmVDq6xF2fXWuRcPcCLRm6vhab23XTfAOLrVvx8YnQ7LatP3RAHp_SUyPIDoywmKP_yrC8pu_vI-XULKvE0gvbFjvpQkABUdOkMuIEq5Tqae_SBDygv0t4AOfy2Cywlg/s400/Orkney%252C+blades+over+hilltop.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
Alistair Peebles, 2008<br />
<br />
For Alistair this is an ongoing attempt to understand his own coming to and dwelling on Orkney, and his interest in the ingenuity of island technology.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0_8Axa4jPrDUuON65ORl-d9QyPMJ7N-rbHNGGMhKEFBM31Gw4yKHVPwUzPbJ1OF_i_26ovtAyMFdp_o4aw0Op_m1-Wt-iBBkFoYgxM0SnFGQj6c4leBJG_LbnURZLb3GueATxU0hb_5I/s1600/AP+Laura.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0_8Axa4jPrDUuON65ORl-d9QyPMJ7N-rbHNGGMhKEFBM31Gw4yKHVPwUzPbJ1OF_i_26ovtAyMFdp_o4aw0Op_m1-Wt-iBBkFoYgxM0SnFGQj6c4leBJG_LbnURZLb3GueATxU0hb_5I/s400/AP+Laura.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
Laura Watts, Costa Head<br />
Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
<br />
Laura is an anthropologist and archaeologist of the contemporary. Although she preserves her status as a welcome visitor, she’s no stranger here; her manner is not that of the detached observer. Laura’s embedded, and for her the islands are comforting and familiar. They are also a locus in which to imaginatively analyse the span of technology over five millenia.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYV2Vpq6fxVCvmyLAaX7UV-bt2JibjWf4cawzkaBt0Md1i9VMoVGaF9XZbScPKGF8sRgspg57GCYDfKR2uaNckne2_3VuHhsGdCne8lG6CMllxrkhy0mdl5tQbCSNvx9o7NMvEU6VhjH4/s1600/Gairsay07.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYV2Vpq6fxVCvmyLAaX7UV-bt2JibjWf4cawzkaBt0Md1i9VMoVGaF9XZbScPKGF8sRgspg57GCYDfKR2uaNckne2_3VuHhsGdCne8lG6CMllxrkhy0mdl5tQbCSNvx9o7NMvEU6VhjH4/s400/Gairsay07.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
WORD MNTN (Gairsay)<br />
poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
<br />
I’m a traveller, and I bring my interest in art and poem as aids to viewing to the islands, partly as a way to continue the things I learned to love on <a href="http://the-road-north.blogspot.com/"><i>the road north</i></a>.<br />
<br />
These blogs will combine a number of flexible forms, and evolve new ones. They include photographs, sketches, and the 'tanzaku' poem-labels that I adopted on the road north. Some of these labels have short poem sketches, others are WORD-MNTN, relating to the various small hills of Orkney.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_yLCL7VBZMJwQwuHyQD6xGmX1OBga88dlxVWkvrpqXSnWh7BmvPYMmlTb3LbxsVsBFPALb73Ozhyphenhyphen99Nxly33kOwosDcaMZatRje-NRnhIILnIIEcVu3rXIv9ismu00NruvIo4_1eT504/s1600/BlotchnieFiold.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_yLCL7VBZMJwQwuHyQD6xGmX1OBga88dlxVWkvrpqXSnWh7BmvPYMmlTb3LbxsVsBFPALb73Ozhyphenhyphen99Nxly33kOwosDcaMZatRje-NRnhIILnIIEcVu3rXIv9ismu00NruvIo4_1eT504/s400/BlotchnieFiold.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
word-mntn (BLOTCHNIE FIOLD)<br />
poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
<br />
Many of the journeys I will make seek conspectus: places where the landscape settles into aligned meanings. I’ve no expertise in any one of the stratified skills associated with these types of knowledge – archaeology, geography, geology, anthropology – and each text is a confluence of indoor and outdoor reading, listening and chatting to folk, and poeming. Out of this informal wandering practice a series of more formal artworks will emerge, whether in the form of poems or objects. Many of them will be collaborative.<br />
<br />
By the time the three of us have sketched the myriad themes that Orcadia and renewables suggest, and found some of their intersections, the broad band of morning rain has passed over. ‘Da wedder’ is turning to the better, and that golden ball is the sun.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">It’s time to begin.</div><div><br />
</div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_bfp7FduwLxs7_0h0XZMA7uYKJlCgmVKKEMpWfaEA5xGELg36RQpd94BLazixmim4d_xFBdZw1L61e7L90D3QW_2K9Mwpo4JWfaP-EW_Ctv0GbJgWCn3Zijfg2V0jY9kfHUxR-PCbsvY/s1600/AP+lift+Buckquoy.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_bfp7FduwLxs7_0h0XZMA7uYKJlCgmVKKEMpWfaEA5xGELg36RQpd94BLazixmim4d_xFBdZw1L61e7L90D3QW_2K9Mwpo4JWfaP-EW_Ctv0GbJgWCn3Zijfg2V0jY9kfHUxR-PCbsvY/s400/AP+lift+Buckquoy.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">poem, Alec Finlay; photograph by Alistair Peebles, 2011</span></b><br />
<br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"></span></span></b><br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Naming The Northern Sky</blockquote></blockquote></div><blockquote><blockquote><i> lift</i></blockquote></blockquote><b><br />
</b><br />
<b>Orkney</b><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW0D13GErdTlhZIYVOov8a5sHgZUkCnVfE8CArx3YkVHmYl7uatqwAPKkvfbLdb2Ishs5xrQON5224-dR_0akCbHe9-ekdCinwWgBheaqeEsvFpz0YymhV_lE9s3NtQxYCDulRWqgAwYE/s1600/AP+boat+view+Sanday%252C+2005.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW0D13GErdTlhZIYVOov8a5sHgZUkCnVfE8CArx3YkVHmYl7uatqwAPKkvfbLdb2Ishs5xrQON5224-dR_0akCbHe9-ekdCinwWgBheaqeEsvFpz0YymhV_lE9s3NtQxYCDulRWqgAwYE/s400/AP+boat+view+Sanday%252C+2005.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
Sanday, Alistair Peebles, 2005<br />
<br />
A visit to Orkney is an encounter with a number of island demesne, each of a rich complexity. Being both discrete and complete, this outset culture cannot help but suggest a way, or ways, of life.<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote><i>after Cunliffe</i><br />
<br />
culture <br />
is at its richest<br />
when there is</blockquote><blockquote><br />
the greatest ratio<br />
of coast<br />
to land</blockquote></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyM7Pzhj2XE_5hcaH5U6SJsd3JmPsZBVrvPnwzzk5Afhs9LrQyiiy9o5jJ1PiSwCfAAdptpqe65J3hX7_0XRJKS0tunP7XDLtDrOnkrwbXauBJ816Ysc5aBAqLoeNwtfbwEOaPWimFVlQ/s1600/for+orkney+blog+2.png" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyM7Pzhj2XE_5hcaH5U6SJsd3JmPsZBVrvPnwzzk5Afhs9LrQyiiy9o5jJ1PiSwCfAAdptpqe65J3hX7_0XRJKS0tunP7XDLtDrOnkrwbXauBJ816Ysc5aBAqLoeNwtfbwEOaPWimFVlQ/s320/for+orkney+blog+2.png" width="244" /></a> </div><br />
Being both discrete and complete, this outset culture cannot help but suggest a way, or ways, of life.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrrsTM5iHn6XWKYN_OGfbFO04FwK-mDRVEfVk0PjY7fdm9N-tSQ7nZ8siNSt5e5WlcfOgw0bTbW5nwSLy7qKBhgiFh_TZoxj3KOV5ZfZ9B14NHVwJW5fMvNDnJ3g9WnZUpltfu0_Be2RY/s1600/AP+Burgar%252C+2008+A.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrrsTM5iHn6XWKYN_OGfbFO04FwK-mDRVEfVk0PjY7fdm9N-tSQ7nZ8siNSt5e5WlcfOgw0bTbW5nwSLy7qKBhgiFh_TZoxj3KOV5ZfZ9B14NHVwJW5fMvNDnJ3g9WnZUpltfu0_Be2RY/s400/AP+Burgar%252C+2008+A.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
Burgar Hill, Alistair Peebles, 2008<br />
<br />
The islands balance wild nature with industry; fishing and farming with innovative engineering. Ancient Neolithic remains are to be found by the everyday road; walking among those stones one sees the silage wagon, a Nissan hut left over from wartime, and a distant wind-turbine.<br />
<br />
A mosaic of eras then.<br />
<br />
The idyllic beauty of Orcadia is not sequestered from the reality of Mainland – or indeed island – ambition, but it may, sometimes, temper this with a blend of island pragmatism and ingenuity.<br />
<br />
At its best, Orkney takes its geography as a symbolic duty, seeking ways to be a place that sees and lives in the round. <br />
<br />
To make a crude but perhaps necessary comparison, Orkney differs from the Western Isles in being a culture with a less catastrophic relation with <i>time</i>. It may sometimes clothe itself in a Norse identity, referring, for instance, to George Mackay Brown's imagination of these islands. But that Norse inflected mentality has not affected the success of its beef farmers to take advantage of good land, or the willingness of Stromness and Kirkwall to identify with a rapidly evolving new knowledge based economy such as renewable energy.<br />
<br />
Take a tour around Skye, which is rich in Neolithic and Norse remains, and one sees few if any signposts. Drive around Orkney and there are brown-age signposts helpfully placed at regular intervals. The past is configured into the present in an entirely different way in these two island cultures. Of course, some will argue there are levels of awareness that reach beyond the brown signpost and what little text fits on a Historic Scotland plaque, but the folk here know and share their inheritance.<br />
<br />
Gaelic culture is no doubt consumed by the struggle to preserve a remnant language, but aren't names themselves, especially the names of ancient places, an encouragement to walk towards the rich vocabulary of the folk who live in these places?<br />
<br />
As with any island, Orkney constructs ways of life around localism; non-localism is simply the act of leaving, which is called migration.<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i>Radio Orkney</i><br />
<br />
the wedderman<br />
warns fowk <br />
<br />
the wedder is gaan<br />
tae gat windier</blockquote><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoUSOBXMmPpXIRqJrEubbG4Vd1f9cp-9C6gPIlwmhiRXJmbFeed-RQUWUysf8sswIG4Sezz_uxNkaWXvHMUEzBdahix_mDvNO6aHam39tvP1P2su4CNBTU32bL-C8ibn04qiJpW2Ycqd4/s1600/AP+Burray%252C+2010%253F.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoUSOBXMmPpXIRqJrEubbG4Vd1f9cp-9C6gPIlwmhiRXJmbFeed-RQUWUysf8sswIG4Sezz_uxNkaWXvHMUEzBdahix_mDvNO6aHam39tvP1P2su4CNBTU32bL-C8ibn04qiJpW2Ycqd4/s400/AP+Burray%252C+2010%253F.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
Burray, Alistair Peebles, 2010<br />
<br />
If Orkney has become a pioneer in terms of renewables, from time to time it is also asking itself: as a community, have we the cultural intelligence to define a limit to those new concerns? How prevent an island becoming a colony of wind factories, a pin-stuck porcupine? Where economic gain covers the landscape with verticals, making it into a series of installations. The next few years will tell. <br />
<br />
There is no ‘Ting’ on Orkney, there is only conversation and unsaid understanding. Negotiations are always ongoing.<br />
<br />
One block on development is the historical landscape, but rather than monuments themselves, perhaps one could try to recover and learn from the perception of that landscape, the seeing of the place through ancient eyes, which may inform us of new ways to configure past, present and future.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw4C1SOyV1wMPl2lnz04ce2T7eSyVcVOP_Tk-ZqOz33BAbzUNxownH0vubnAw82rh5ghXMYYcDJ9PexH4XFNhGDQtDdmWPSvWVeBGOqf_k59cyNt4K8s43XnJxi0LphRoclfw3YVt1asw/s1600/Costa+Head+Mesostic+B.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw4C1SOyV1wMPl2lnz04ce2T7eSyVcVOP_Tk-ZqOz33BAbzUNxownH0vubnAw82rh5ghXMYYcDJ9PexH4XFNhGDQtDdmWPSvWVeBGOqf_k59cyNt4K8s43XnJxi0LphRoclfw3YVt1asw/s400/Costa+Head+Mesostic+B.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
Costa Head, poem, Alec Finlay; photograph, Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
<br />
Costa Head, site of the first large-scale windmill turbine in the British Isles is one marker where past and present overlaps. The site, or sight, is a reminder that towers don’t stand forever. And the arrival of the platform that will secure the Oyster II wave power units at Billia Croo points to the future – one that will affect on and off-island folk.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNqzt_AjKPfya1BdJ2Y3RrKAOpEibT7yDpkPCJTwgu78_QURIHMoipsF2lf02GVGCyYjnmbau5KJ-VD0Vg6fahoQQ-h0BIXZsIJ-L-wpa0H7MhsZBr1INQ4nO5sSREm-r7McOkWRy32mw/s1600/IMG_0832.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNqzt_AjKPfya1BdJ2Y3RrKAOpEibT7yDpkPCJTwgu78_QURIHMoipsF2lf02GVGCyYjnmbau5KJ-VD0Vg6fahoQQ-h0BIXZsIJ-L-wpa0H7MhsZBr1INQ4nO5sSREm-r7McOkWRy32mw/s400/IMG_0832.JPG" width="300" /></a><br />
<div style="color: black;">Stromness</div><div style="color: black;">Alec Finlay, 2011</div><br />
But I am only a visitor here; neither expert, nor Orcadian. It’s a place I’m fond of, and one where I have friends. I’m hardly unique in thinking Stromness by far the finest and most cultured small town in the British Isles. <br />
<br />
<b>Buckquoy, Harray</b><br />
<br />
My week-long stay circles around Alistair and Carol Peebles home at Buckquoy, where the garden gathers itself around a stone protected circus of thrift and low trees. Shelter, that’s the thing, always capitalized on Orkney. Shelter that allows us to chat while the butterflies enjoy their open-winged bathe on stone in evening sun. <br />
<br />
<blockquote>buff-<br />
eted<br />
<br />
butter-<br />
flys<br />
<br />
of Buck-<br />
quoy buey</blockquote><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoaUmomHAcNrX7glqv6k-jMUBPEUCjbZ9fKQjyVOV9pvOl4c5Ulu3pTGvvLGRCo0ZN-K4mtWGsdvcGWba3IaxgvEFQ9oSNwUivh5nHByv5nlrgsnt8vFOcm0ogMkIA_6qa5UC_hwsJXkw/s1600/AF+buffeted.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoaUmomHAcNrX7glqv6k-jMUBPEUCjbZ9fKQjyVOV9pvOl4c5Ulu3pTGvvLGRCo0ZN-K4mtWGsdvcGWba3IaxgvEFQ9oSNwUivh5nHByv5nlrgsnt8vFOcm0ogMkIA_6qa5UC_hwsJXkw/s400/AF+buffeted.JPG" width="400" /></a><br />
poem, Buckquoy, Alec Finlay, 2011<br />
<br />
These then, are the blogs from the Orkney trip, June 2011: Costa Head, Burgar Hill, Rousay & BIllia Croo<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1289379975"></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"><span style="color: black;">, '<a href="http://skying-blog.blogspot.com/2011/08/runehorizons-orkney.html">runehorizons</a>'.</span> </span></span><br />
<br />
<b>Intimations</b><br />
<br />
Alistair Peebles: <a href="http://www.braeprojects.com/">Brae projects</a> | <a href="http://alistairpeebles.blogspot.com/">blog</a><br />
<br />
Laura Watts: <a href="http://www.sand14.com/infrastructureguide/infrastructureguide_finalversion.pdf">8 Key Components In a Future Infrastructure For the Orkney Islands</a><br />
<br />
Alec Finlay: <a href="http://alecfinlay.com/">alecfinlay.com</a><br />
<blockquote><b><i><br />
</i></b></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-62358649278192559702011-10-03T16:04:00.000+01:002012-11-07T09:51:24.945+00:00elements (windflowers)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><br />
4 sketches of the elements of a windflower<br />
Alec Finlay, 2011<br />
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Alec Finlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11604980865660585293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-63234887324600347662011-09-18T17:05:00.000+01:002011-10-18T17:12:50.541+01:00Orkney detour<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="color: white;"><b>.</b><br />
<b>.</b><b> </b></div><div style="color: red;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWKryk9vtQMcZp0QTR-6D0QUyZFRrFuTrFhvxe03lcrym-6y_vEUZCM2CetVjSvw7G8Swpyb8RmkQUz1E-2HQIs3E2LyW1FKzeeKAX39kbRRMdVHgcWd2iADi9t6KCHOfj9m7qxdIidXk/s1600/Lupins.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWKryk9vtQMcZp0QTR-6D0QUyZFRrFuTrFhvxe03lcrym-6y_vEUZCM2CetVjSvw7G8Swpyb8RmkQUz1E-2HQIs3E2LyW1FKzeeKAX39kbRRMdVHgcWd2iADi9t6KCHOfj9m7qxdIidXk/s400/Lupins.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">a body</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">with arms</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">a flower</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">with petals</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">a tower</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">with blades</div></blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">On the drive across the northern plain of the Orcadian Mainland we pass a two-blade micro-turbine, and I’m reminded that in these islands, more than any other location in the U.K. – with the possible exception of the eco outpost at Scoraig, Wester Ross – there is a rich diversity of small-scale and domestic wind-turbine designs.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Every good journey should begin with a detour. Ours takes us off down The Peat Road, compressed moss and matter defining an earlier era of energy. We’re drawn down this lane by one of the new style of turbines – an inland cousin to the cluster of towers installed on the brow of Hammars Hill. For all their size, these new towers are sleek blooms. Typically pale grey, to my eye these ones are a shade darker than the usual RAL colour. Their colouration may be an adaptation to the dominant glettan, murr and rug of Orkney weathers.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The design features a nascelle that is more ovoid than the old box-top turbines. This flower-head accentuates the sense of the nascelles independence from the tower; such flexible engineering allows the blades to turn lightly, as if on a well oiled socket, sensitive to their purpose they constantly seeking out the apex of the wind.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Being more natural the form still doesn’t lessen the strangeness of the towers sheer scale.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"></div><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">From here we can see over patched silage fields and heather to the tops of the older turbines line up on the far slope of Burgar Hill.</div><div style="color: red;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"><br />
</span></span></div></div></div><b>intimations </b><br />
<br />
Alistair Peebles: <a href="http://www.braeprojects.com/">Brae projects</a> | <a href="http://alistairpeebles.blogspot.com/">blog</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.sand14.com/">Laura Watts</a> <br />
<br />
E. W. Golding portrait is from <i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_134094567">New Scientist </a></i><br />
<b style="color: white;">.</b><i><span style="color: white;"> </span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-71988976302320137082011-09-13T14:40:00.006+01:002011-10-27T15:47:29.287+01:00What things belong<div style="color: white;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span></span></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLRuIxml0jV-N7DnsCLc0B7fK8d_TrShPqWssc1eZ9P6FPD6aCIFfVbxDmDQ4UkYPPCsBy4PvMAf9yuItIQUZFNmVbe63XElX5nPtn7IG8GUkcnUtY_HI6HiwuH3g1z8pWguCaLkG_sks/s1600/Doune1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLRuIxml0jV-N7DnsCLc0B7fK8d_TrShPqWssc1eZ9P6FPD6aCIFfVbxDmDQ4UkYPPCsBy4PvMAf9yuItIQUZFNmVbe63XElX5nPtn7IG8GUkcnUtY_HI6HiwuH3g1z8pWguCaLkG_sks/s400/Doune1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Braes of Doune; photograph, Alexander Maris 2008<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At first I thought it a mirage. One Sunday back in 2006, I was cycling the low-lying farm roads of the carse of Stirling, a familiar enough ride, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that something was wrong about the view to the north. So I got off my bike and looked harder. There seemed to be gigantic white trees – far, far bigger than the ubiquitous plantation conifers - rising starkly from the hill country between Doune and Callander. My sense of perspective felt suddenly and weirdly out of joint. It took a few seconds, maybe even minutes, to realise that these were the first turbines of the <a href="http://skying-blog.blogspot.com/2011/09/braes-o-doune.html">Braes of Doune</a> wind farm. I’d read the papers, I knew the wind farm was coming, but that first glimpse of what it would mean for the land induced a kind of bewilderment bordering on shock. I cycled home feeling I had encountered, albeit at a distance, something strange and astonishing. </span></span> <span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">When the building work had been completed a year or so later, I pedalled (and pushed and dragged) my bike up to the wind farm. Up close the sheer size of the turbines made them look even more alien. Worse still, so much of the lush, grassy moor had been torn apart for foundations and access roads, the land seemed as pitted and cratered as a bombed city. Mind you, the sheep didn’t mind and by all accounts the local Red Kite population hadn’t been seriously affected by living next door to a wind farm.</span><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><span style="font-family: inherit;"> But even if the local wildlife didn’t seem unduly put out, had the Braes of Doune wind farm done irreparable damage of a different kind? John Digney of the Scottish Wild Land Group certainly felt so when, in the pages of The Herald, he described the site as ‘an eyesore’, also remarking that ‘It is not a pretty sight to find an industrialised development in one of the most stunning parts of the country.’ The marring of a beautiful and ‘wild’ landscape was, it seemed, too high a price to pay for a modest increase in the production of ‘green’ energy. Put simply, wilderness and industry don’t mix, and as far as The Braes of Doune were concerned a wind farm did not belong.</span></span><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZD3NZ5hCzJ_sfqIDM8lb90K6n2L9o-o5OcUEaQX1SiSkO4u_eyR-WaooC7BfwNwlsXfNGPBDdg2Q5tvtvY7D7cr4Cfdaikt9hUxRzZRQvVsgrtohn50pziY5Av_uA4emqgxbPCXrm6OI/s1600/Doune+Foxglove2.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZD3NZ5hCzJ_sfqIDM8lb90K6n2L9o-o5OcUEaQX1SiSkO4u_eyR-WaooC7BfwNwlsXfNGPBDdg2Q5tvtvY7D7cr4Cfdaikt9hUxRzZRQvVsgrtohn50pziY5Av_uA4emqgxbPCXrm6OI/s400/Doune+Foxglove2.jpg" width="267" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><br />
Braes of Doune; photograph, Alexander Maris 2008<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> But maybe things aren’t quite that simple; maybe wilderness and, especially, beauty aren’t simply properties of the land itself, but products of <i>how</i> we see the land. In this respect I can’t help but turn to Sorley MacLean’s great, late poem ‘Screapadal’, even if I can only appreciate it in translation. In the poem MacLean laments how the Highland Clearances have emptied the land of people but finds cause for solace in how the beauty of the land remains unsullied: </span></span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> The sound is blue in the sun</span></span> <br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">and the skies naked</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">and the white bands of Creag Mheircil</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">glittering to the south</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">above the woods of birch and hazel</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">rowan and alder</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">and above the green braes</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">where the young bracken</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">and the young grass are a carpet.</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">This evocation of wild land seems to conjure up exactly the kind ‘sacred’ landscape anti-wind farm protestors have in mind. And indeed, later in the poem MacLean does protest the incursion of modernity, but it is not the massive affront of a wind farm that ignites his ire. The threat is all but <i>invisible</i>: </span></span> <span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: inherit;" /></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A seal would lift its head </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">and a basking-shark its sail </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">but today in the sea-sound </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">a submarine lifts its turret </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">and its black sleek back </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">threatening the thing that would make </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">dross of wood, of meadows and rocks, </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">that would leave Screapadal without beauty </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">just as it was left without people. </span></span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><span style="font-family: inherit;"> But MacLean’s poem doesn’t just amount to a premonition of potential destruction; as far as he is concerned, the landscape is already corrupted. The ‘black turrets’ of the submarine may leave no enduring trace, but they mock ‘the flagstones of Maol Rubha/and the Giant’s cave in Rona.’ In other words, the presence of the submarine doesn’t just threaten the future; it disfigures MacLean’s relationship to Raasay, and our relation to the planet, here and now. </span></span> <span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><span style="font-family: inherit;"> It doesn’t take a dramatic leap of the imagination to apply this insight to the Braes of Doune wind farm. Just across the hills from the farm is a wonderful tract of ‘empty’ moorland, familiar to anyone who’s ever driven the Braco to Comrie road. It’s a place of cool, peaty burns and dome-shaped hills threaded by deer and sheep tracks. Compared to the cratered devastation of the Braes of Doune, it looks and feels beautiful and pristine. The trouble is that until a few years ago the army used this stretch of moor as a firing range for various kinds of heavy duty weaponry. Does this matter? As a lot of nature lovers, as well as MOD spin doctors, will happily explain, wildlife thrives on army training grounds – no pesticides, no hunting, few if any tourists trampling the nests of rare birds. But is the trade off between <i>preserving</i> wilderness and testing weapons of appalling destruction any more acceptable than trading the <i>loss</i> of wilderness for green energy?</span></span><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip__D_Eh8EkuwadtPBFhENUbowTTdZWIal9Z-qHmvXdBER79ciZdkaoyGZE8mcusSBSKA4AJwW-9snUnfKKktt0-btn-zoowK1C0XJqQ455VWRbWUDyifWt8M_siP2mAVQnK5PDcW-FKM/s1600/Doune5.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip__D_Eh8EkuwadtPBFhENUbowTTdZWIal9Z-qHmvXdBER79ciZdkaoyGZE8mcusSBSKA4AJwW-9snUnfKKktt0-btn-zoowK1C0XJqQ455VWRbWUDyifWt8M_siP2mAVQnK5PDcW-FKM/s400/Doune5.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><br />
Braes of Doune; photograph, Alexander Maris 2008<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> I don’t think there’s an easy answer to this question, but I do reckon it’s important that we think about how our aesthetic, economic and ethical lives intersect. It seems that the people who built the Braes of Doune Wind Farm may think so too. Some sort of reconciliation between industry and aesthetics has been attempted by placing a ring of stones around each turbine. To be honest, the effect feels rather paltry and contrived, like a parody of Callanish. All the same, maybe the idea of a wind farm as some sort of sacred site isn’t altogether facile, especially if we’re to develop a sensitive, modern regard for the land. As ecologists like to remind us, <i>everything connects to everything else</i>. At the beginning of the 21st century it feels like an act of reckless disavowal to separate how we <i>see</i> the land from how we <i>use</i> the land. In the end maybe it’s better, from the planet’s point of view, to catch the wind than reap the whirlwind. </span></span> <span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><span style="font-family: inherit;"> In the meantime I still look across to the Braes of Doune wind farm and feel again something of that mix of shock and entrancement I first felt back in 2006. But I feel other things as well. From a distance at least, the sight of all those turbines spinning in the clear autumn light can look…well…beautiful. And they’re starting to look familiar too, as if, against all the odds, they belong.</span><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">– <a href="http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/contacts/christopher-powici">Chris Powici</a> </span></span> <span style="font-size: small;"><br style="font-family: inherit;" /><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(This piece is based on an article Chris wrote for <i>Resurgence</i> in 2008)</span><b> </b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>intimations </b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.sorleymaclean.org/english/">Sorley MacLean</a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay and Alistair Peebles' visit to <a href="http://skying-blog.blogspot.com/2011/09/braes-o-doune.html">Braes of Doune</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: white;">.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-61281534234569485242011-09-13T13:15:00.003+01:002011-12-16T15:26:35.187+00:00bhreacain<div style="color: white;">.</div><br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-25238033003300753122011-09-07T16:55:00.020+01:002011-12-08T15:24:07.967+00:00correspondence (II): Alistair Peebles<div style="color: white;">.</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs_obkwEXfGmdXvu7_8bkFyIrJP_COk6M5iUUC6eg6D7GIY01RdYKSVcvdzB3RnKXfaf2MTq6OOdS1b02mwK48DSmLr586bbinord3vJRYx-sOL_9R37SUxC72J7Ambq3IjPuJfb70Dl8/s1600/AP+Burgar+Hill+2008.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs_obkwEXfGmdXvu7_8bkFyIrJP_COk6M5iUUC6eg6D7GIY01RdYKSVcvdzB3RnKXfaf2MTq6OOdS1b02mwK48DSmLr586bbinord3vJRYx-sOL_9R37SUxC72J7Ambq3IjPuJfb70Dl8/s400/AP+Burgar+Hill+2008.jpg" width="265" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Burgar Hill, Orkney; Alistair Peebles, 2011</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div>Buckquoy<br />
Harray<br />
<br />
24.12.07<br />
<br />
Dear Sir<br />
<br />
In view of the concerns currently being expressed over the siting of wind turbines in the West Mainland and more generally in Orkney, may I propose the following? That the various archaeological rings, tombs, dykes, ditches, monoliths and dwellings – all of them long-abandoned – should be uprooted and moved elsewhere.<br />
<br />
This would not only have the effect of ridding the landscape of intrusive leftovers from a bygone age, clearing the way for the development of new technologies, it would make them easier to preserve and more convenient to visit and study.<br />
<br />
With well-chosen new sites nearer modern centres – the entry points of cruise liners and other essential amenities – their extravagant carbon footprint would also be brought into line. Many other benefits would doubtless arise: the possibility of prestigious housing developments in historic locations, for example.<br />
<br />
Even more far-sighted, given that these relics are apparently so incompatible with turbines wherever they might appear (“Heard YE that whistle?”), is the suggestion that they should be relocated far across the Pentland Firth. This regularly happens with ancient material of all kinds, taken into care by the museums in Edinburgh.<br />
<br />
To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet proposed erecting turbines in the national capital itself. Our humble rocks and native bumps could be set up within the city, therefore, and live on untainted for years, with just the sort of skyline their ancient makers would have moved mountains to achieve.<br />
<br />
Finally, many will refer to a supposed connection between these crumbling structures and their “home” landscape. This link is something that can surely be preserved and recreated digitally (a showcase project for our own, more sustainable contemporary local technologies, perhaps?). It can then be celebrated online for the people of the world to see and enjoy as though they were actually here.<br />
<br />
Indeed that might well encourage visitors actually to come and witness first hand how we managed it. Windfarms are in any case famously attractive: is the Causeymire in Caithness not now experiencing a tourism renaissance?<br />
<br />
And there will always be other ruins to provide inspiration and wonder for those who view them. As GMB noted in An Orkney Tapestry: “Facing Scapa Flow is Lyness, like a Yukon shanty town abandoned after a gold rush.” Rather out of date as a description, no doubt, but still, for the turbine-oriented visitor, a winning combination.<br />
<br />
Stone age people have had their chance, and their unsustainable culture is now utterly discredited: dead and gone. Endless opportunities await the ingenuity of our modern engineers and marketers. Let’s shift the wreckage and let them have their day.<br />
<br />
Yours etc<br />
<br />
Alistair Peebles<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>intimations</b><br />
<br />
Letter to <a href="http://w/" target="_blank">the Orcadian</a> newspaper<br />
<br />
Alistair Peebles: <a href="http://www.braeprojects.com/" target="_blank">Brae projects</a> | <a href="http://alistairpeebles.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">blog</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-15698540958617222252011-09-06T13:45:00.053+01:002011-12-08T12:15:17.745+00:00'In Another Light' (by Andrew Greig)<div style="color: white;">.</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5hHQvssnHfD3_gllx_YxoQql_EtxLULyuHd6Mi6gAquUwwGVv-b6Htaj15JjeT1CSieV3fdGt_1TmbvVNs-3xbx_MZFeDTvGZZ5DwOTcf0EbJNqzgiE6YKXFAvBL5Vz1a0RZ0TiLJqxI/s1600/greig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5hHQvssnHfD3_gllx_YxoQql_EtxLULyuHd6Mi6gAquUwwGVv-b6Htaj15JjeT1CSieV3fdGt_1TmbvVNs-3xbx_MZFeDTvGZZ5DwOTcf0EbJNqzgiE6YKXFAvBL5Vz1a0RZ0TiLJqxI/s320/greig.jpg" width="206" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Andrew Greig, <i>In Another Light</i> </div><br />
Eddie Mackay in <i>In Another Light </i>was my second engineer narrator (first being in <i>Electric Brae</i>). I’ve always admired those who combine theoretical knowledge with practical effect in the physical world (my two brothers are a forester and a geologist respectively). I like my protagonists to have a job and be grounded in and by it. Living part of the year in Stromness these last 20 years, making him a research engineer in renewables was pretty inevitable. It is a big deal to us there, being a significant employer via the ICIT Heriot Watt outpost, plus the various engineering firms involved in escalating R&D.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPyG_GYpIcTw_YAqmErv4W9Qv7iixLEpZwI2cXtHPn3UbQvAhyBjtcG8CnvmUGgKxCmp4QO8CnEscv8Zv1fLDtWw9M-5V6oWxcjLcm48wAiLDdpuRLXMBH8n2VWi0cMmMlcAfYEfFePtQ/s1600/ICIT+heriot+watt.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPyG_GYpIcTw_YAqmErv4W9Qv7iixLEpZwI2cXtHPn3UbQvAhyBjtcG8CnvmUGgKxCmp4QO8CnEscv8Zv1fLDtWw9M-5V6oWxcjLcm48wAiLDdpuRLXMBH8n2VWi0cMmMlcAfYEfFePtQ/s400/ICIT+heriot+watt.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>International Centre for Island Technology (ICIT), Stromness<br />
<br />
Ideologically, I am a fan of renewables, and the wave and tidal ones seemed particularly interesting and natural to Orkney. At least as significant, it was an outstanding natural metaphor to the underlying existential quest of this and much of my writing – to be renewed.<br />
<br />
This some 10 years ago now. I walked up to the ICIT offices, asked about and found a very helpful lecturer and research engineer. I outlined my interests and needs, said I was a fiction writer and needed enough material to be convincing, and also to not make basic mistakes, and ideally draw more attention to the possibilities growing right here. He was great about it, and gave me with his colleague's agreement a draft report on the current state of research and development of both the engineering aspects and challenges of wave and tidal, and the ecological effects if any.<br />
<br />
So for that brief while, I was slightly ahead of public knowledge! And it gave me plot developments, and a whole new metaphor when I drew on the computer-generated patterning research for waves, and imagined that re-jigged as music. Not the sound of the sea, but the sound of the shape of the sea.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcRSXTtej1X_dCqUYdGJ4bIgsjs2BHlbXH13rziMbjGvpImjTh93kNYThu1d-Uoo6a1vzdX3BX79Y3z38mqKy35WlWOPqjp6FzTqrwjLu-xs_XuhKQMkECzCz9ruqWeawgdlxTcXVNvmc/s1600/icit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcRSXTtej1X_dCqUYdGJ4bIgsjs2BHlbXH13rziMbjGvpImjTh93kNYThu1d-Uoo6a1vzdX3BX79Y3z38mqKy35WlWOPqjp6FzTqrwjLu-xs_XuhKQMkECzCz9ruqWeawgdlxTcXVNvmc/s1600/icit.jpg" /></a></div>still from a <a href="http://www.icit.hw.ac.uk/suntans.htm" target="_blank">video</a> showing a single tidal cycle of the Pentland Firth<br />
International Centre for Island Technology<br />
<br />
I wish someone would go ahead and do this – think it could produce astonishing music, a cross-fertilisation of the endless ‘chaotic’ patterning of the natural world, and the mad-made, the computer-aided. I hope someone may yet do it!<br />
<br />
Since that book, the renewables research and projects in and around Orkney have grown remarkably, and I am very pleased and excited about it.<br />
<br />
<i>Andrew Grieg</i><br />
<i>August 2011</i><br />
<br />
<b>intimatons</b><br />
<br />
<a href="http://andrew-greig.weebly.com/" target="_blank">Andrew Greig</a><b> </b><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.icit.hw.ac.uk/" target="_blank">ICIT Heriot Watt</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Another-Light-Andrew-Greig/dp/0753820072" target="_blank"><i>In Another Light</i></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-68438835523106987372011-09-04T15:36:00.004+01:002011-10-14T17:00:50.452+01:00credo<div style="color: white;">.</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEGUhVrVq45f4IrnmUPlidcUN39ClKu4kMLlQLxDAY9HJtsTU4bEvfHmuue30ujbcYcpspE_70Dn2taEm0i968Zz65h60E4tpD8PfGJk6CT5hcyB04Am1x5TguLpLet3KRZlGxpffPDFk/s1600/burgar+hill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEGUhVrVq45f4IrnmUPlidcUN39ClKu4kMLlQLxDAY9HJtsTU4bEvfHmuue30ujbcYcpspE_70Dn2taEm0i968Zz65h60E4tpD8PfGJk6CT5hcyB04Am1x5TguLpLet3KRZlGxpffPDFk/s400/burgar+hill.jpg" width="265" /></a></div><br />
<div style="color: white;"><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;">This photograph is by Alistair Peebles, to see more of his art projects, including those relating to Orkney and renewable energy, see </span><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.braeprojects.com/">Brae projects</a> and Alistair's <a href="http://alistairpeebles.blogspot.com/">blog</a>. </span><span style="color: black;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;">The wind-towers depicted here are sited at Burgar Hill, Orkney, a more detailed discussion of this landscape will be published shortly.</span><br />
<span style="color: black;"> </span>.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-37599940082201937582011-09-04T14:04:00.040+01:002011-11-04T13:41:10.252+00:00Braes o' Doune<div style="color: white;">.</div><br />
<b>The Braes Gnomon: windmill</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPzdWFJaxZOpVd1cAvoie_0arqJRvuaktQjrcxedFZYlznpa2HFOJLNPosn765hN8k11rj1-CY5TT_nHuLD8b9bs-ETF6yrOuDW7ZvMLnQmyxZKxHwrqi322OVOc1x6GJ18hr-rSBGru4/s1600/Doune+%2528crop%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPzdWFJaxZOpVd1cAvoie_0arqJRvuaktQjrcxedFZYlznpa2HFOJLNPosn765hN8k11rj1-CY5TT_nHuLD8b9bs-ETF6yrOuDW7ZvMLnQmyxZKxHwrqi322OVOc1x6GJ18hr-rSBGru4/s400/Doune+%2528crop%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Braes o' Doune, Alexander Maris, 2007<br />
<br />
Our field of vision extends into the beyond, but we take comfort in the familiar measure of the near at hand.<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i>– over there</i> </blockquote><blockquote><i>– just a wee way</i><br />
<i> away</i> </blockquote><blockquote><i>– not far</i><br />
<i> now</i></blockquote><br />
On the scale of plane, vale or hill, which shape our horizons, the eye is irresistibly drawn to known verticals. We navigate by natural and technological landmarks, seeing and saying that the far is coming near.<br />
<br />
This <i>there</i> may be home, or a temporary destination. And how different it is to be travelling through a land in which we know no landmarks; how rapidly do we grasp on to anything new that becomes known on such new horizons. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/46584243@N00/576722945/" title="Torness Power Station by Shabba Al, on Flickr"><img alt="Torness Power Station" height="300" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1426/576722945_2c426a0675.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
Torness Nuclear Power Station<br />
<br />
My body-clock understands how far I am from Edinburgh when I pass the grey hulk of the power station at Torness. The fondness I haven’t been able to prevent myself feeling for this edifice is at odds to the menace that I suppose lies beyond the high searchlight boundary fence.<br />
<br />
From the Lothians one marker for north is the fractionated plume from Mosmorran, or at night, the gas flaring against low cloud.<br />
<br />
Coming back to Newcastle from the south we have a saying of greeting for the angel:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i>Watch out!</i><br />
<i>Gormley about!</i></blockquote><br />
Robin can tell where he is on the motorway by this plumb tower.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizuWH2sG4sHnDdoSg9w3pJwQYvXeBf7yApkVPER_IMidAYk6_ycQthk_OmxcENK9qbD28bnEdfNekiSbT_jsUoffeqTIfeHoMECSwgGI9U5Arxwz4_cMOiL7EgtyJIirIsKMGi6Adc9Kk/s1600/DG+Motorway+Windmill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizuWH2sG4sHnDdoSg9w3pJwQYvXeBf7yApkVPER_IMidAYk6_ycQthk_OmxcENK9qbD28bnEdfNekiSbT_jsUoffeqTIfeHoMECSwgGI9U5Arxwz4_cMOiL7EgtyJIirIsKMGi6Adc9Kk/s400/DG+Motorway+Windmill.jpg" width="298" /></a></div>Robin Klassnik, 2011<br />
<br />
On my first trip to Orkney Caroline and I stayed in a cottage on the south tip of South Ronaldsay and all our journeys up the chain of islands to Orkney ‘Mainland’ were marked by the Burray turbine. By the third day it was a familiar topographical timeline signaling we were nearly home.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKD_Hw7fnf-9Rc1KPeu3zh2VdZT_Jom_KBLG01JtT9u5ShZgakE3oe61_CWHDG6Sm6D4F5vu7B_uiEI5iiNUddJeCXTdbBaPYpvL_VLNagfmUkuCGDOVNAOZXURCb4QB5ijxhm9WhTQhg/s1600/AP+Burray%252C+2010%253F.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKD_Hw7fnf-9Rc1KPeu3zh2VdZT_Jom_KBLG01JtT9u5ShZgakE3oe61_CWHDG6Sm6D4F5vu7B_uiEI5iiNUddJeCXTdbBaPYpvL_VLNagfmUkuCGDOVNAOZXURCb4QB5ijxhm9WhTQhg/s400/AP+Burray%252C+2010%253F.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
Burray<br />
Alistair Peebles, 2010<br />
<br />
New towers are being raised on the outlying isles –Westray, Flotta, Eday, Sanday and now Rousay – each an aid to alignment; an island mast that identifies folk and their communally held energy solutions. One sees the towers in a swept arc west and north from Mainland Orkney and, for sure, they are also significant new markers for navigating boats and planes – after all, no-one wants to land on the wrong island.<br />
<br />
Which only goes to prove that most of us will – whether willingly, or despite ourselves – grow used to and fond of windmills as landmarks: gnomons for places.<br />
<br />
(Which isn’t to say some verticals don’t remain widely disliked, as the Duke of Sutherland knows).<br />
<br />
<b>The High Road To The Orient</b><br />
<br />
For many of us, the drive north into the Highlands has been given a new zonal marking by the broad array of turbines named ‘Braes o Doune’, on the old grouse- moor. The towers are strung between:<br />
<blockquote><br />
Beinn Odhar<br />
Coire Nochd Mor<br />
Uamh Beag</blockquote><br />
Hill names that mark the southern extent of Gaelic mountain nomenclature; below these ancient vocables we drift into the lowland tongue, marked by green fields for arable crops:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Cock Hill<br />
The Linns<br />
Loss Hill</blockquote><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7wDoMJt9LxJr12ohbY0whZaJjS2Xfyc6AN4n2INk-qHGIRWwvKQa2GwDcID7bO3GX45YNOkqzHfypgMBTJYMrnjy347H35YaltlD_ZQKiFzxsCKog3gUZR1v6yZ8UhGFFMIb4YszJPGE/s1600/Doune23%2528crop%2529%252C+maris.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7wDoMJt9LxJr12ohbY0whZaJjS2Xfyc6AN4n2INk-qHGIRWwvKQa2GwDcID7bO3GX45YNOkqzHfypgMBTJYMrnjy347H35YaltlD_ZQKiFzxsCKog3gUZR1v6yZ8UhGFFMIb4YszJPGE/s400/Doune23%2528crop%2529%252C+maris.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Braes o' Doune, Alexander Maris, 2007<br />
<br />
The pastoral name that the developers been attached to this windfarm has little to do with the wilderness it is situated within. There are few roses and fewer woodbine here: this is:<br />
<br />
<blockquote> WI<span style="font-size: xx-small;">LD</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">LA</span>ND</blockquote><br />
<b>Braco Recce</b><br />
<br />
From Dunira Alistair and I drove to Comrie and then turned down the old Braco road, following the Romans south over the moor – a somber place in rain or sleet, but on such a September evening, embellished by low sun, the pale bog grasses were luminous against the patched heather.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkWKN0UzTabyYRNuvngrUYMdwSUGbSEtUTVDW44-yfoEDV41iplOKq_SQVTNvjwSK4NaM_bh3e-AVo9m_FQhvPFx6TtrkDpp3I5lxI_FpWA_sGSrxzZCYsuuN7XMPN_zDOTwzsE7pRh14/s1600/DG+Little+Hill.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkWKN0UzTabyYRNuvngrUYMdwSUGbSEtUTVDW44-yfoEDV41iplOKq_SQVTNvjwSK4NaM_bh3e-AVo9m_FQhvPFx6TtrkDpp3I5lxI_FpWA_sGSrxzZCYsuuN7XMPN_zDOTwzsE7pRh14/s400/DG+Little+Hill.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>word mntn (LITTLE HILL)<br />
poem, Alec Finlay; photograph Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
<br />
We wind around Little Hill, me with the map on my lap, but there’s no certainty whether we will see the blades o’ Braes o’ Doune. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcS2oQh_bFo36qrST-3B0iYd07lrCWWdqSMFAnuqZcmg8RtTZcBCkuz68Drn4HI1tIepOKy1NDu0ROQHdWvoIUxCZcJ1qxadToTP_AhyVnZgFy37l2z36usNvMchb4XHyk0S9NQ3m7hI/s1600/DG+Cromlet.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcS2oQh_bFo36qrST-3B0iYd07lrCWWdqSMFAnuqZcmg8RtTZcBCkuz68Drn4HI1tIepOKy1NDu0ROQHdWvoIUxCZcJ1qxadToTP_AhyVnZgFy37l2z36usNvMchb4XHyk0S9NQ3m7hI/s400/DG+Cromlet.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>word-mntn (CROMLET)<br />
poem, Alec Finlay; photograph Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
<br />
Cromlet – cue our teatime joke for the week, “Cromlet for tea, <i>again</i>” – comes into view, and there the tips are, tirling over the far side of the ridge, beyond the line of the Arrevore Burn.<br />
<br />
<b>Braes o’ Doune</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVSY7G-3KvPmScjwcJM87wiWnrFmD2kocGY9-Gw1x_DcPPd1zt2zcu_zSRAB7qaJRhTki22w4TwM7fGW2aGxDgiUy4Io14W2EwXmwjO3NuD4RCbbWJSILwlxnXydlOzc6m2d6syYKq-Yc/s1600/DG+Braes+1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVSY7G-3KvPmScjwcJM87wiWnrFmD2kocGY9-Gw1x_DcPPd1zt2zcu_zSRAB7qaJRhTki22w4TwM7fGW2aGxDgiUy4Io14W2EwXmwjO3NuD4RCbbWJSILwlxnXydlOzc6m2d6syYKq-Yc/s400/DG+Braes+1.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"></span>Immense as the Braes o’ Doune installation is – 36 towers, owned by SSE – when viewed from the south, the towers leave less of an impression from the north, being all but hidden in the fold of the hills.<br />
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There were some initial environmental concerns about the possibility of pollution caused by the stour lifted by the installation works, affecting the burns that rise here and flow into the River Teith.<br />
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On the southern horizon we can see another installation of 13 Vesta towers, on the slopes of the Burnfoot Hill in the Ochils (owned by EDF-ER). <br />
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Landscape is always a network of new and old technologies.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbvN_jz7W69KEtnoXrRMGuBIkWj6l8QtvLVPYuz9AVaKmw9Yvh5W2idupGhK9p6cVQJsPg0oDiApAVbms-L94WKBuPuVsAaU5g2hRb4_inep-dK_uVUxEXvjVAB0lNwH-GPl6b3k3hZ6E/s1600/DG+Braco.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbvN_jz7W69KEtnoXrRMGuBIkWj6l8QtvLVPYuz9AVaKmw9Yvh5W2idupGhK9p6cVQJsPg0oDiApAVbms-L94WKBuPuVsAaU5g2hRb4_inep-dK_uVUxEXvjVAB0lNwH-GPl6b3k3hZ6E/s400/DG+Braco.JPG" width="400" /></a><br />
Braco<br />
Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
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<b>Proposal for Braes o' Doune</b><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdzR4xq4VP2zoNTR916Oc6l7_0fmYGA1NZKTsCve8k7CJmw-Px5MFFBQtqqkxWq8QxVbeeK1JN7sDwvF6X5D-AC1EhitV-HaZqmKnjy13J3ABNSnJ2DwAR9uzJFLk87yAQ9_S-lm-EQOs/s1600/Braes+o+Doune+proposal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdzR4xq4VP2zoNTR916Oc6l7_0fmYGA1NZKTsCve8k7CJmw-Px5MFFBQtqqkxWq8QxVbeeK1JN7sDwvF6X5D-AC1EhitV-HaZqmKnjy13J3ABNSnJ2DwAR9uzJFLk87yAQ9_S-lm-EQOs/s400/Braes+o+Doune+proposal.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Alec Finlay, 2011; photograph by Alistair Peebles, 2011<br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><b> </b></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><b>A note on terminology</b></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">From the correspondence that I had with <a href="http://skying-blog.blogspot.com/2011/06/no-more-windfarms.html">John Burnside</a>, it seems helpful to distinguishing between small and large-scale windmill turbines, so, to give minimalism and monumentalism, or the domestic and industrial, their due, we live in an era of windmills and wind-towers.</div><br />
<b>Intimations</b><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Alistair Peebles: <a href="http://www.braeprojects.com/">Brae projects</a> | <a href="http://alistairpeebles.blogspot.com/">blog</a> </span><br />
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<div style="color: white;">.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-24642916059317617892011-09-03T11:53:00.012+01:002011-10-27T15:49:34.957+01:00Whitelee<div class="post-header" style="font-family: inherit;"> </div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"></span></div></div></div><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> </span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><div ;="" center;="" class="separator" text-align:=""></div><div ;="" center;="" class="separator" style="text-align: left;" text-align:=""><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB_pUEf2p7RDk7cTUBeUlHpKC-gn7Ns0aXe4dBKD_95hnBauqutIMTGyJLSUkhytQiOXD-JCWHfG5zI25_c6Lc7a3APTuHmUVEjEhZAAva7ZUKN9B5xXJeaxQy5d1VNTr-IqydDp9cu3U/s1600/Whitelee+5sml.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB_pUEf2p7RDk7cTUBeUlHpKC-gn7Ns0aXe4dBKD_95hnBauqutIMTGyJLSUkhytQiOXD-JCWHfG5zI25_c6Lc7a3APTuHmUVEjEhZAAva7ZUKN9B5xXJeaxQy5d1VNTr-IqydDp9cu3U/s400/Whitelee+5sml.jpg" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB_pUEf2p7RDk7cTUBeUlHpKC-gn7Ns0aXe4dBKD_95hnBauqutIMTGyJLSUkhytQiOXD-JCWHfG5zI25_c6Lc7a3APTuHmUVEjEhZAAva7ZUKN9B5xXJeaxQy5d1VNTr-IqydDp9cu3U/s400/Whitelee+5sml.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB_pUEf2p7RDk7cTUBeUlHpKC-gn7Ns0aXe4dBKD_95hnBauqutIMTGyJLSUkhytQiOXD-JCWHfG5zI25_c6Lc7a3APTuHmUVEjEhZAAva7ZUKN9B5xXJeaxQy5d1VNTr-IqydDp9cu3U/s1600/Whitelee+5sml.jpg" imageanchor="1"> </a></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Photograph, </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Alexander Maris</span> 2009 </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Whitelee is Europe’s largest active wind farm, with 140 turbines spread over 20 square miles of moorland plateau and peat bog, embracing Lochgoin Reservoir and Dunwan Dam, the heights of Drumdruff, Corse, Queenseat, Mid Hill and Green Hill. The site is fringed by another dominant influence on the Scottish wilderness landscape, commercial sitka forest. </span></div></div></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Set only 9 miles from Glasgow, the turbines can be seen from the pavements of the city they power. Almost uniquely this wind-farm faces 'outwards', in terms of the community, as it has a popular visitor centre and offers various hobby pursuits, such as hiking, cycling and horse riding. The moor is also home to pipits, grouse, skylark and peewit.</span></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7maymxfYiCFKzGf1K-c_2V8gHda6tket49fECbmNHS79WZEAyonANi-TcIwAt2qVVbyU7eNpEN1CI58IZT8vQTc-qsdoH3Xwrr6Tncr7D8KdWGkbCPWrEiw6hjPF-fFwDM0hXC70zjr4/s1600/Whitelee+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7maymxfYiCFKzGf1K-c_2V8gHda6tket49fECbmNHS79WZEAyonANi-TcIwAt2qVVbyU7eNpEN1CI58IZT8vQTc-qsdoH3Xwrr6Tncr7D8KdWGkbCPWrEiw6hjPF-fFwDM0hXC70zjr4/s400/Whitelee+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Photograph, </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Alexander Maris 2009</span> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: small;"> W hen</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> t H e</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> m I st</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> lif T s</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> th E</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> <span style="color: white;">.</span> b L ades</span> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">slic E</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> gr E y</span></div></div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6_8Dj95IDagsK5FgYiNeNN4DLjJiXEDUlv3FrzWonCPSA-XA9Mdtkv1NINco3_P7sE5iKI4YX9E5uRM0wP00dmbc4qJV3k-eoNUW8CqjqDbpwkDBNlyiSMYMaZBa0nZhKRjir2ettghc/s1600/Whitelee+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6_8Dj95IDagsK5FgYiNeNN4DLjJiXEDUlv3FrzWonCPSA-XA9Mdtkv1NINco3_P7sE5iKI4YX9E5uRM0wP00dmbc4qJV3k-eoNUW8CqjqDbpwkDBNlyiSMYMaZBa0nZhKRjir2ettghc/s400/Whitelee+3.jpg" width="400" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Photograph, </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Alexander Maris</span> 2009</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">The concept of Whitelee defines the vision of a Renewable Scotland that the SNP made such major play on in the parliamentary elections of 2011. Alex Salmond's vision could not be more utopian in its ambition, in terms of energy, although he avoids the stubbornly problematic issues of the ownership of such utilities, and the land they are sited on:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US">'The move to renewable energy is fundamentally different from the move from wood to coal or coal to oil and gas. That was just moving from one limited form of carbon based energy to another. Renewable energy is different: the wind and the waves will be with us forever. Once we make that shift to renewable energy, there will be no going back. This is a pivotal turning point in human history, on a par with the move from hunter-gathering to settled agricultural communities or the discovery of the New World in 1492. The 19th century Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, George Canning, talking of the liberation of Latin America, said that he had brought a New World into existence to redress the balance of the old. Now we must bring a new economy into existence to redress the balance of the old. And unlike the discovery of the New World of America, this New World of energy will be gained not by force and conquest but by innovation and ingenuity.'</span></i></span></blockquote><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilf6lsACDVWDIqsvwRWEHCPZ-e0qDNFHyFlkgHtwgLhZm4btaGtYpJ3WE2bJU9EQq3-rp_ioZjpS5CDaiAcquYCfiASt33tYW9yV_nD9JWGnfsJH7mdBvTGdyK8pCZddYko-MwkMq5EBA/s1600/Whitelee+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilf6lsACDVWDIqsvwRWEHCPZ-e0qDNFHyFlkgHtwgLhZm4btaGtYpJ3WE2bJU9EQq3-rp_ioZjpS5CDaiAcquYCfiASt33tYW9yV_nD9JWGnfsJH7mdBvTGdyK8pCZddYko-MwkMq5EBA/s400/Whitelee+4.jpg" width="296" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Photograph, Alexander Maris</span> 2009</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTzmiuWutmDJvw2ky7mGFTWCtLSgQJMclpSckRoX-PUI989G7UITDOk-zhFm8R9crHXJQwO8Fdsh3XBOS9jK_D-rrceCqKvXmWht0kFbjX0CneYwFJaoLbeaQ3Yt1B31JcMfDvPeg03tc/s1600/Whitelee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTzmiuWutmDJvw2ky7mGFTWCtLSgQJMclpSckRoX-PUI989G7UITDOk-zhFm8R9crHXJQwO8Fdsh3XBOS9jK_D-rrceCqKvXmWht0kFbjX0CneYwFJaoLbeaQ3Yt1B31JcMfDvPeg03tc/s400/Whitelee.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Photograph, Alexander Maris</span> 2009</span></div><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">The ordinary human activities that take place every day under the towers of Whitelee perform a balancing act of their own. How improbable it would be for any of the dominant power complexes of the carbon age to associate themselves with leisure, access to wild nature, or indeed the encouragement of any form of human activity that isn't immediately productive of monetary value. Scuba diving under an oil platform? Geocaching in a nuclear power plant?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">I wonder, were any of the hydro-electric schemes that had such an impact on the Scottish highlands in the 1950s and 1960s allied to land access, or the creation of trails and rights of way?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Not since the peat-bog or the old hushes has a form of energy production suggested the potential of public access as a given; not that many wind farms currently follow Whitelee in this respect, but it remains clear that they <i>could.</i></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Will any of the multinational investors the SNP are so encouraged to see investing in Scottish renewables commit to this kind of social balance? The entire issue of land ownership and so-called 'wind-crofting' can become progressive forces for social change; equally, wind installations could become another regressive excuse for the exclusion of people from the landscape. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Alexander Maris photographs catch the eerie Tarkovskian atmosphere of the array of white towers, against the bleached bog grasses and dark heather of the moor.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIvZr3_sQ8PGdzOSUaA7sX0zN9jru8h3vMb7Pl-oK-OdYQSFAxQBPYJGtIqhy6zd9mpywbCcbTqejVx6jWipwhKrMyk9hC2xsMLCUOvGU4LfWefWBlqV_JCXTjuMizkUDVw1cvobtS0Uc/s1600/Whitelee+map+to+Add.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIvZr3_sQ8PGdzOSUaA7sX0zN9jru8h3vMb7Pl-oK-OdYQSFAxQBPYJGtIqhy6zd9mpywbCcbTqejVx6jWipwhKrMyk9hC2xsMLCUOvGU4LfWefWBlqV_JCXTjuMizkUDVw1cvobtS0Uc/s400/Whitelee+map+to+Add.jpg" width="400" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">This map is a helpful guide to the site (click to expand). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><b>Proposal for Whitelee </b></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyk16ifonlPrz-n9eK1eshOJi1V8r0eWLHGWRbEv0xv4nsdQgU7XknAfDKS9r8aVUTHjnyYM99TOJ6pMwiObegTjmpAIBGCCN5tRz7WURPkG7rbbuOsHVU3dkj-g0EFv5GCVBZyjRLys8/s1600/12.+Whitelee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyk16ifonlPrz-n9eK1eshOJi1V8r0eWLHGWRbEv0xv4nsdQgU7XknAfDKS9r8aVUTHjnyYM99TOJ6pMwiObegTjmpAIBGCCN5tRz7WURPkG7rbbuOsHVU3dkj-g0EFv5GCVBZyjRLys8/s400/12.+Whitelee.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Alec Finlay, 2011; p<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">hotograph by </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Alexander Maris</span>, 2009</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </span></span> <br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><b>intimations </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: black; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: black; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.whiteleewindfarm.co.uk/home?nav"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Whitelee wind farm, Eaglesham Moor, Scotland</span></span></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.whiteleewindfarm.co.uk/home?nav" target="_blank"><br />
</a></span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0South Lanarkshire, UK55.743557 -4.187283999999976955.449242000000005 -4.7640794999999772 56.037872 -3.6104884999999767tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-53831126169847436312011-09-01T14:20:00.013+01:002011-10-04T19:35:25.564+01:00 wind-song<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></b><br />
<b><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br />
<span lang="EN-US">Last September I visited what is speculatively considered to be the oldest standing roofed structure in northern Europe, Bharpa Langais, a Neolithic chambered cairn on a heather hillside in the heart of North Uist. Among our party was the Welsh harpist/artist Rhodri Davies, a gentle soul whose curiosity for sound continually guides him toward new possibilities of playing and performance. </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">In way that makes no claims to vague mysticism, the different procedures by which Rhodri sounds his harp represent a series of contemporary <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rites </i>– burning the instrument, blowing on it, adapting it through the interventions of bolts and screws, resonating with electric fans; rarely touching, or if he does, tickling, rubbing, strumming. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguVqvZV9jasDo_BxiPEXMlpgtfcEEzWWB-3s5KNtLNOHf91Mue-VWOrqxDoP6W_bmO6umlIb_SgRKztIiQ9G8n4KiJC59vgfHbgwRo-1gXMq9BS8SfeVetbygTAA_ubuzK3-XBCFRLPfs/s1600/Rhodri+Aeolian+Bharpa+langais%252C+paul.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguVqvZV9jasDo_BxiPEXMlpgtfcEEzWWB-3s5KNtLNOHf91Mue-VWOrqxDoP6W_bmO6umlIb_SgRKztIiQ9G8n4KiJC59vgfHbgwRo-1gXMq9BS8SfeVetbygTAA_ubuzK3-XBCFRLPfs/s400/Rhodri+Aeolian+Bharpa+langais%252C+paul.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">wind-harp</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Rhodri Davies, Bharpa Langais, 2011</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">photograph by Paul Edgerley</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">At Langais Rhodri allowed the breeze, fresh from the Atlantic seaboard, to perform <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wind-harp</i>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="225" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/15187277?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="400"></iframe></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguVqvZV9jasDo_BxiPEXMlpgtfcEEzWWB-3s5KNtLNOHf91Mue-VWOrqxDoP6W_bmO6umlIb_SgRKztIiQ9G8n4KiJC59vgfHbgwRo-1gXMq9BS8SfeVetbygTAA_ubuzK3-XBCFRLPfs/s1600/Rhodri+Aeolian+Bharpa+langais%252C+paul.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><span lang="EN-US">wind-harp, Rhodri Davies, Bharpa Langais, 2011</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">filmed by Andy Mackinnon</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">More recently he has created <a href="http://www.arpia-art.be/site/index.php?cat=about">a wind-harp installation for ARPIA</a>, a festival in </span><span lang="EN-US">Herzele, Belgium, from Aug-Oct 2011.</span><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiffNjE7KUTxmEJD2Cl2OeX4doHcVvEHBzoFkXUq_6bRT2KopryBZdwx3LLqzrfwhBcdcgoHjpCnF0O-ZHH3hra745vLh1xSpfrP0ZY6wkUO6abS4S4BUjfFr3NfnOOPU1SMNOeRTuq_YQ/s1600/wind-harp+%2528rhodri+davies%2529+1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiffNjE7KUTxmEJD2Cl2OeX4doHcVvEHBzoFkXUq_6bRT2KopryBZdwx3LLqzrfwhBcdcgoHjpCnF0O-ZHH3hra745vLh1xSpfrP0ZY6wkUO6abS4S4BUjfFr3NfnOOPU1SMNOeRTuq_YQ/s400/wind-harp+%2528rhodri+davies%2529+1.jpeg" width="300" /></a><span lang="EN-US"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Rhodri Davies, </span><span lang="EN-US">wind-harp, </span><span lang="EN-US">2011</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">photograph, Rhodri Davies, 2011 </span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK0hOeo5WNsqCPzjmGIkjwrYW0YhVeX59p3C9Bh21tYeL85V7ByFr0pW2Hvax7d9P_TUwiVy54bUAoBEz3pID5Lf6PxSPOKUCnt__-hXFcj1UIOdryNLjTnIW40CytpOPXCPO9yJ7Endo/s1600/wind-harp+%2528rhodri+davies%2529+3.jpeg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK0hOeo5WNsqCPzjmGIkjwrYW0YhVeX59p3C9Bh21tYeL85V7ByFr0pW2Hvax7d9P_TUwiVy54bUAoBEz3pID5Lf6PxSPOKUCnt__-hXFcj1UIOdryNLjTnIW40CytpOPXCPO9yJ7Endo/s400/wind-harp+%2528rhodri+davies%2529+3.jpeg" width="300" /></a><br />
<span lang="EN-US">Rhodri Davies, </span><span lang="EN-US">wind-harp, </span><span lang="EN-US">2011</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">photograph, Rhodri Davies, 2011</span><br />
<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">wood- wind song<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTw8IwkL0N8YZ2P__TwD7pdxyntWN3t0pjHDyOi_Gdz3vQlEYMpwMVbARtmQz7aF0VOMQJ24oHAn1F1htwp9GPMHkzltizub8E56FEL7IF4po3HphSwbdc4tkFHXKMAhVLNwJq8IUObNE/s1600/DSC_0038_2.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTw8IwkL0N8YZ2P__TwD7pdxyntWN3t0pjHDyOi_Gdz3vQlEYMpwMVbARtmQz7aF0VOMQJ24oHAn1F1htwp9GPMHkzltizub8E56FEL7IF4po3HphSwbdc4tkFHXKMAhVLNwJq8IUObNE/s400/DSC_0038_2.JPG" width="265" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">wood- wind song<o:p></o:p></span></i><span lang="EN-US"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">Ian Hamilton Finlay, with Sue Finlay, lettercarving by Maxwell Allan</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">photograph by Robin Gillanders, 2002</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Such improvisatory approaches seem distant from the classicism of my father's work, where nature is seen as something that must be redeemed by culture, in order to make a safe home for our dwelling.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">An early and defining feature at Stonypath, was the placing of this ‘poem’, ‘wood- wind song’, which my father set in the far corner of the garden, saying that this was where he 'first heard the wind'. He and my mother Sue had planted the pines there, and so they too, in their way, represent a kind of barrier harp. From those early beginnings this poem, or sound-corner, has continued to define a physical and symbolic foundation for the entire garden project.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">I call it a ‘poem’ as growing up I was used to such inscribed stones were referred to in that way. My childhood impressions were less for the words themselves, as for the feeling of shade and shelter – the rippled surface of the slate, the way rain shadows caught in the incised lettering, and the sound of the breeze shushing in the young pines. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">At an older age, I had to grasp how, despite the spare minimalism of the words, this poem did indeed belong in its carefully composed corner, with the pine needles swept neatly around the base of each trunk. The world of poetry was traditionally mapped onto books placed on shelves, and yet this text had a natural setting, the sounds of which translated the abstracted procedure of language back into a specific location.</span><br />
<br />
The wires of Rhodri’s harp become here the angled branches and ten thousand needles of the pines. Anyone who has lain down in one of the brown needled runnels of a forestry plantation knows that particular eerie rushing sound, as the wind is diverted into a thousand thousand streams, intensified by the unnatural tightness of the lines of arrayed trees. Another form of instrument then, these agri-woods, their sound so different to the softer broader rhythm that broadcasts from the canopy of a 'natural' wood.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">wind-song</span></b><br />
<br />
<b><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqh4KhNcSrvHDSw4iIQ_6rkLXaLRqJ7HF6nKdiuz09QEcAiKdbrBOL7NYg6Pvh4FZ2eEs2WmYDqb15gYzWIvx-JFyUKyoNqZsxJRrX0UlG-6FZmXQCV7HMskVoHQEWBD9anbJKxM8Q1W0/s1600/Tow_7.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqh4KhNcSrvHDSw4iIQ_6rkLXaLRqJ7HF6nKdiuz09QEcAiKdbrBOL7NYg6Pvh4FZ2eEs2WmYDqb15gYzWIvx-JFyUKyoNqZsxJRrX0UlG-6FZmXQCV7HMskVoHQEWBD9anbJKxM8Q1W0/s400/Tow_7.jpg" width="400" /></a><span lang="EN-US"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">wind-turbine</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">photograph by Alexander Maris, 2008</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">sound spreads</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">in an ex-</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">panding spherical</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">surface</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US">There is no denying that windmill turbines belong among the same band of eerie wind-songs; they sough, click, skirl, circle, howl, roar or banshee, depending on form and materials, blade dimensions and height, contours of the land and velocity of wind.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">this windmill swings whoo-</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">shing in an arc</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">this windmill howls</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">like a banshee</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">this windmill rattles and judders</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">like the mast of a schooner under sail</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">this windmill soughs</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">like waves on a pebble beach</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">this windmill</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-US">is silent</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">One aspect of this eeriness arises from the intersection – the constant passing through – of the natural and artificial, waves or jets of air and metal harp strings, turbine blades, even the close-planted sitka spruce has a constructed aspect. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7T8LmwL0tvwFly0G1xS4_MQeaxidl-jlWYkSOyZdi_aNvd-tRtO1pya0jnghKChY3wzSvwwBpZgKjCffP8Tt_rDQnfXlMwLw3Z58iwejuJ6sOzNW98lbyq8GUnk355K_tyg7iMDCqsPg/s1600/49+Langass+woodland+from+Ben+Langass.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7T8LmwL0tvwFly0G1xS4_MQeaxidl-jlWYkSOyZdi_aNvd-tRtO1pya0jnghKChY3wzSvwwBpZgKjCffP8Tt_rDQnfXlMwLw3Z58iwejuJ6sOzNW98lbyq8GUnk355K_tyg7iMDCqsPg/s400/49+Langass+woodland+from+Ben+Langass.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">sitka spruce plantation, Langais Community Woodland</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">photograph by Ken Cockburn</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><blockquote style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>the three</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>stringed</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>harp</o:p></span></div></blockquote><blockquote style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p>sounds the</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">winds eerie</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">witchery</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">There is chaos in nature, more than our consciousness cares to admit. We cannot afford to let it enter, for its register would overwhelm us.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">In his book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Connemara, </i>Tim Robinson meditates on the essential sound, the hum layered just above silence, that defines such wild places:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> such vast, complex sounds</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> produced by fluid generalities</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> impacting on intricate</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> concrete particulars</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Our perception, it seems, is tuned to fix constants within any state, layering experience into defined entities, the sea and tide, a wind from the east, a field of barley, are complex interweavings our ear simplifies. If we really saw or heard atoms and their flux, the vivid velocity and vibration of our microtonal world, then our comprehension of the view before us would be ripped from us. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT7Dpb64AEmSQq-7O39tY-5IxP3osad1cJUjVpnBqb9DOEL45SP5Zm4L7X58Dr2x1XYDIvDvuzMxeM_SGaPFyWRa8E2dcfA2qMEHAig5sacjOZb2xxJDJEk8B6Y88w1DVjg5E_j-UdRZY/s1600/%2528needles%2529+Scots+Pine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT7Dpb64AEmSQq-7O39tY-5IxP3osad1cJUjVpnBqb9DOEL45SP5Zm4L7X58Dr2x1XYDIvDvuzMxeM_SGaPFyWRa8E2dcfA2qMEHAig5sacjOZb2xxJDJEk8B6Y88w1DVjg5E_j-UdRZY/s400/%2528needles%2529+Scots+Pine.jpg" width="385" /></a></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Scots pine needle</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Alexander Maris, 2008</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Y5Sbjc_aviAUGD4rdSwEmd3fWpQySAp76ob4ipua0cb2WNLQ0KTv4b-Hbx4pIMikL5R9_6N3HuGOW8LEFq_UgguH38v8K7sZTPjSIuJmL9L-hgbhHlGeCaecS0e0m4iPxqGEl68Cv2A/s1600/circle+poem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">The honeycomb of our consciousness manages the world for us, settling vast vibrating fields of energy into known and reassuring patterns. These we can name, a ‘light wind’, a ‘rising swell’, and in so defining them we set them aside, to do whatever daily acts that require to be done. As Robonson says, disengaging and analysising the elements that we require to know from out of this aural pandemonium. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">One of the largely unacknowledged but fascinating aspects of renewable energy is the manner in which is it returning our attention to the elements themselves: for what is this wind that blows, what are these waves that flow, from which we can derive power? </span><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Y5Sbjc_aviAUGD4rdSwEmd3fWpQySAp76ob4ipua0cb2WNLQ0KTv4b-Hbx4pIMikL5R9_6N3HuGOW8LEFq_UgguH38v8K7sZTPjSIuJmL9L-hgbhHlGeCaecS0e0m4iPxqGEl68Cv2A/s1600/circle+poem.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Y5Sbjc_aviAUGD4rdSwEmd3fWpQySAp76ob4ipua0cb2WNLQ0KTv4b-Hbx4pIMikL5R9_6N3HuGOW8LEFq_UgguH38v8K7sZTPjSIuJmL9L-hgbhHlGeCaecS0e0m4iPxqGEl68Cv2A/s400/circle+poem.jpg" width="311" /></a><span lang="EN-US"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">Alec Finlay, circle poem, 2007</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">It seems no coincidence that artists and poets have pioneered ways of re-attuning consciousness to these elements, from the young LaMonte Young tuning into the howling of the telegraph wires, to Rhodri Davies holding his harp outstretched by Bharpa Langais, or Ian Hamilton Finlay & Sue Finlay's grove of pines to sound the wind at Stonypath.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">One idea I sketched out recently, based on these themes, is this hollowed boat – recognizably the lemon curve of an Orkney Yole – strung with harp wires. Partly inspired by my experiences with Rhodri at Langais, this proposal envisages a monumental wind-harp for The Pierhead, Stromness, Orkney. Its breeze-jaloused jangling being occasionally blended together with the daily blare of the ferry's horn. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjECArrvFhXDqiqqygwh4Hl9UN_jbh4LsaoruvzusjdPrfjtTfQUSCPjzAfel54WGYHXnI8NCogk2pT6G7JB-y6E1mZ8nbRNRhWpR6RUwzKaPmRPWe-fFdfi-9XQ9F5xB8baEn7GEHSm6U/s1600/yole.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjECArrvFhXDqiqqygwh4Hl9UN_jbh4LsaoruvzusjdPrfjtTfQUSCPjzAfel54WGYHXnI8NCogk2pT6G7JB-y6E1mZ8nbRNRhWpR6RUwzKaPmRPWe-fFdfi-9XQ9F5xB8baEn7GEHSm6U/s400/yole.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">sketch for a wind-harp: Stromness Orkney</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Alec Finlay, 2011</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">To represent this aural aspect of wind energy I commissioned Susan Maris to make these field-recordings of windmill turbines in 2010, produced as a limited edition 12" record, the spinning of which stirs a memory of these three-stringed wind-harps.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.alecfinlay.com/turbine.mp3"><span lang="EN-US">field-recording: for sky-wheels</span></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Susan Maris, 2010</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<b>intimations </b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<a href="http://www.birlinn.co.uk/book/details/Highland-Journey-9781841587820/">Robin Gillanders</a><br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-90191727020653743632011-08-31T17:49:00.032+01:002011-11-11T16:55:27.135+00:00sketches<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSDwgVYA9qc4j790HUdovVxD7VcC6yvao9byY-WLspIsWtyePGrWBBKGQcA3pd8aRQUl2zMh84Y5MEdgkq9JOm7frwlf-jX0NTMae17LHe4yXI72ttRIm31T0bMckiWPR3X739caegauw/s1600/tenderness.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSDwgVYA9qc4j790HUdovVxD7VcC6yvao9byY-WLspIsWtyePGrWBBKGQcA3pd8aRQUl2zMh84Y5MEdgkq9JOm7frwlf-jX0NTMae17LHe4yXI72ttRIm31T0bMckiWPR3X739caegauw/s400/tenderness.jpg" width="365" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1Zn7l-C8yZ9Qa6Oyehl7ZK-yzbfq9tlqtN8CLLYzA8GdYBuGBBuJgYb_dr7wmXg3L44xNWbqfzPqdQbhh5CrXCrhQih3rBiNhvoVgyOhavvZj3pLIUNxhzOh1ZTIYMHSy49dOhjkkzzA/s1600/nacelle+%253A+sail.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Alec Finlay, 2011</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: white;">. </span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-35107114676545064342011-08-17T11:55:00.050+01:002011-10-17T12:30:07.351+01:00Studio KAP (proposal for a shelter)<div style="color: white; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">.</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0KIpzZ6JrgBSbCGxfecaYW5kmsw7QLgYfm4dYZVcAGYOwcIHSRg72ihlMB8IxI3GF_5ZY_UXQ8eaJMJaO8O_geQUGK-X3wo4srqbd1Z5FKOFKgGbO7nIK8Tt7zupJMjUMlJouPzSBJvc/s1600/site.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0KIpzZ6JrgBSbCGxfecaYW5kmsw7QLgYfm4dYZVcAGYOwcIHSRg72ihlMB8IxI3GF_5ZY_UXQ8eaJMJaO8O_geQUGK-X3wo4srqbd1Z5FKOFKgGbO7nIK8Tt7zupJMjUMlJouPzSBJvc/s400/site.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Studio KAP were asked to provide some design proposals for shelters up on the moor at Whitelee. At the time of writing the biggest single windfarm site in Europe, it was bound to attract visitors and it was felt (correctly or otherwise) that these should to some extent be shepherded and provided for, rather than simply being left to roam randomly over the moorland.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">These behemoths on our hillsides and moors are so new, so strange, contradictory and ambivalent. They tingle the same nerves that one feels amongst the ancient stones at Calanais, Skara Brae or Kilmartin.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiZjmG7WI7Y4S_yfNnPIwNcypMgZmWCWU4nhqsX521UkNEp2OrKcp9L5RLXMt5JEnmjZzzzu2LjHZWcFJ01ct0EX_Y5dcGQeakZYhfinOJ47BlsMvMzoyNmx9dKchyphenhyphenUJrJjKszMsUs4QA/s1600/Rhodri+Calanish.JPG" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiZjmG7WI7Y4S_yfNnPIwNcypMgZmWCWU4nhqsX521UkNEp2OrKcp9L5RLXMt5JEnmjZzzzu2LjHZWcFJ01ct0EX_Y5dcGQeakZYhfinOJ47BlsMvMzoyNmx9dKchyphenhyphenUJrJjKszMsUs4QA/s400/Rhodri+Calanish.JPG" width="400" /></a></span><br />
<div style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Calanish; photograph, Rhodri Davies 2010<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">You feel in your guts that they are something different, not just their physical form of course but what they represent in terms of our current place in the world at large. </span></div></div></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">As man-made artefects they are at once an alien presence and at the same time probably some of the most refined and well-tuned interventions since pre-industrial times. Each turbine is at once an incredibly simple idea and a sophisticated quasi-organic form generated by computer modelling, barely distinguishable in its reality from the computer generated imagery that graced the desks of the planning enquiries. </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbTAeEep28T2SF-Uitc0YxSmqDA4_p8FPQEWbGyhCJFEJ5RkksKdKp5QAMcuiGpAsSYdHb67AThCuihDGGpLL70mDXW_fA4Y88cgVzRTC0OlE3MGKURIuHi9bPjlzxNGkRz2ye2tdfpU/s1600/sketch.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="327" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbTAeEep28T2SF-Uitc0YxSmqDA4_p8FPQEWbGyhCJFEJ5RkksKdKp5QAMcuiGpAsSYdHb67AThCuihDGGpLL70mDXW_fA4Y88cgVzRTC0OlE3MGKURIuHi9bPjlzxNGkRz2ye2tdfpU/s400/sketch.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">They are at once a symbol of hope for future generations but also engender a poignant sense of futility that suffuses all the green endeavours of our affluent minority in the west. What use is a windmill or two in the face of a population steadily rising in its billions? We are a confused folk at the turn of a millennium.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-Wfud7orZyeutlNyuWS9e4wwslYfrwAU3PtwqvDlDdzVWcH0oogMquBs8uUpXiwGqk6CcW3-i8mPS84P49-MNgjZz-90ELu3KJFoRt8iO4q_5t1vDGt9va3TVGuoY72M2RDVpqkNyfjQ/s1600/view.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-Wfud7orZyeutlNyuWS9e4wwslYfrwAU3PtwqvDlDdzVWcH0oogMquBs8uUpXiwGqk6CcW3-i8mPS84P49-MNgjZz-90ELu3KJFoRt8iO4q_5t1vDGt9va3TVGuoY72M2RDVpqkNyfjQ/s400/view.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Our shelters chime with this ambivalence: proposing a series of similarly primordial but, we hope, also elegant forms cast among the feet of these great machines. Sure, to a degree they will keep the rain off and provide place for a sandwich, but somehow a walk out there is more significant as it blows away the cobwebs of our working week.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Are these seeds, puffballs, eggs? Wind-blown spores of the giants themselves?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">– Roderick Kemsley</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Studio KAP (Glasgow)<b> </b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>intimations</b></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<a href="http://www.whiteleewindfarm.co.uk/">Whitelee</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.studiokap.com/">Studio KAP</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.studiokap.com/architects/people/staff/Roderick-Kemsley/">Roderick Kemsley</a>, Studio KAP architect, Glasgow </div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: white;"><a href="http://www.studiokap.com/architects/people/staff/Roderick-Kemsley/"><span style="color: black;"><br />
</span></a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: white;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: white;">.</span></span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-62861541934470413402011-08-15T10:43:00.013+01:002011-09-15T21:03:48.866+01:00three wall texts <div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgSGJoGBOydodqQ0uwM6IuJwTWg3iERddqswGuJV1cyBLkZjPlNyKGCRUrLyANO77hRTguRuG0WbR8Ph3mYk7Gr6sh3Ay3IKirEzLPofQmVrhnVCoz7cN1A9wcTbETJolgeC6MZyjdFfI/s1600/WM+wall+texts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgSGJoGBOydodqQ0uwM6IuJwTWg3iERddqswGuJV1cyBLkZjPlNyKGCRUrLyANO77hRTguRuG0WbR8Ph3mYk7Gr6sh3Ay3IKirEzLPofQmVrhnVCoz7cN1A9wcTbETJolgeC6MZyjdFfI/s400/WM+wall+texts.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq1HvH8xxsURI0Yu7zK3qg25rpGJLJ3fsQurw_oo4HOTvdtPFxm8oxlkhLtbswXLYkdAyHfLUNUK4JInJ85RXaAnxQ5iX0S47MxkiSSbEhJDHiSMzcKpLHXKglzRcPRJDHB9NnMdO875Y/s1600/WM+wall+texts.jpg" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"> </a> </div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><br />
</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i> three wall texts, Alec Finlay, 2010</i></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
These three wall texts were presented as part of the exhibition, 'all art is, is rhythm', as part of the 2010 AV Festival in Newcastle/Gateshead. </div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;">The first pair of texts are a call and response with Kurt Schwitters, whose comment that all art depends on rhythm owes much to Ezra Pound:<i> </i><br />
<br />
<blockquote><i>'Rhythm is perhaps the most primal of all things known to us… Music is, by further analysis, pure rhythm; rhythm and nothing else…’</i></blockquote></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
The colours for the texts were taken from the specifications notated in the <a href="http://skying-blog.blogspot.com/2011/07/colour.html">sky-wheel.</a></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcGPmhSwJiduomfntMe6L6X2ElLPE4CsTn1_UVDlXrqBQvJ-kjGdz6ia55rEEQxPtuQGVDzYK2gmW75cNFNkQwOn0Twla6mvrFguwU-nUbX4k3neJQqlafgQyRNMepDwlo3OQ9mNfyWlQ/s1600/WM+AV+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcGPmhSwJiduomfntMe6L6X2ElLPE4CsTn1_UVDlXrqBQvJ-kjGdz6ia55rEEQxPtuQGVDzYK2gmW75cNFNkQwOn0Twla6mvrFguwU-nUbX4k3neJQqlafgQyRNMepDwlo3OQ9mNfyWlQ/s400/WM+AV+2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">Alec Finlay,<i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> sky-wheels</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> <i>installation</i></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">AV10, Hatton Gallery (Newcastle)</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">intimations </span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.alecfinlay.com/"><span style="font-size: small;">alecfinlay.com </span></a> </div><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"> </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4548523102993067851.post-64565123039450637492011-08-15T10:11:00.010+01:002011-10-16T23:14:06.818+01:00autumn windmill<div style="text-align: center;"></div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpASOThGtWXNWxN94HZ7lfHfzga78DqaBDpEYxwJVvl8QG5KWTOtVGoDAl-0Oqu-S2O9UsV_ZKbUfEJaTPvN-Wgonig2GxfF2oVJzuoWsp8zwyMW76vGXQEDgKakU05QesnJOMajLnxmI/s1600/many+orange-y+tinted+keys.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpASOThGtWXNWxN94HZ7lfHfzga78DqaBDpEYxwJVvl8QG5KWTOtVGoDAl-0Oqu-S2O9UsV_ZKbUfEJaTPvN-Wgonig2GxfF2oVJzuoWsp8zwyMW76vGXQEDgKakU05QesnJOMajLnxmI/s400/many+orange-y+tinted+keys.jpg" width="298" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpASOThGtWXNWxN94HZ7lfHfzga78DqaBDpEYxwJVvl8QG5KWTOtVGoDAl-0Oqu-S2O9UsV_ZKbUfEJaTPvN-Wgonig2GxfF2oVJzuoWsp8zwyMW76vGXQEDgKakU05QesnJOMajLnxmI/s1600/many+orange-y+tinted+keys.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">ONE (ORANGE) ARM OF THE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> WORLD'S OLDEST WINDMILL</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <i>autumn</i></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><i> (IHF)</i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i></i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i></i></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0tLo4-fXSi3_mMBVNnJQc9wioehGLzw7I2K-SAnW0yileogiHsJhtJtex6Ai4cX82cdOs_dicjKXcKAXoED2eUy2ZpfR2nx7tRnRN4xZeJ2DzwcfjJeRxoypE0uEB1m1bW1Iel5cWCIA/s1600/Autumn+windmill+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0tLo4-fXSi3_mMBVNnJQc9wioehGLzw7I2K-SAnW0yileogiHsJhtJtex6Ai4cX82cdOs_dicjKXcKAXoED2eUy2ZpfR2nx7tRnRN4xZeJ2DzwcfjJeRxoypE0uEB1m1bW1Iel5cWCIA/s400/Autumn+windmill+2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br />
<br />
</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;">MANY (ORANGE-TINGED) KEYS<br />
TO THE WORLD'S OLDEST SEASON<br />
<br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><i>windmill</i></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><i> (AF) </i></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><i><br />
</i></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><i><br />
</i></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><i><br />
</i></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><i><br />
</i></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0