E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
Crawford Wild History
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78885-525-9
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Journeys into Lost Scotland
E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78885-525-9
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
James Crawford is a writer and broadcaster, and for over a decade he worked for and researched Scotland's national collection of architecture and archaeology. He is the author of nine books, including Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Lost Buildings and The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World, both of which were shortlisted for Non-Fiction Book of the Year at Scotland's National Book Awards. He is the writer and presenter of the BBC One series Scotland from the Sky, the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Take Four Books and in 2024 he was appointed Chair of the Board of the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
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Introduction
You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. The crumbling remains that our ancestors left behind; moss-covered, tumbledown ruins; giant, overgrown earthworks; a circle of forgotten stones. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny symbol on your map, perhaps not. There are no signs or plaques to explain their fading presence before you, nothing to account for what they once were – who made them or lived in them or abandoned them. Now they are merged with the landscape. They are being reclaimed by nature. They are wild history.
. . .
How can history be wild? Well, in one sense, it can’t. Wilderness – true wilderness –means somewhere unaltered by human activity. Today, very few wild environments can be found anywhere on Earth. And arguably, even where they can, the scale and extent of human-influenced climate change has filled the very atmosphere, or seas, or soils around them. This is the product of the Anthropocene, the ‘human time’ – the name that has been given to our newest geological era, conceived to acknowledge that the presence and influence of people is no longer just something written the surface of the Earth but has become woven irrevocably the very fabric of the planet.
Scotland long ago lost any claim to true wilderness. Since the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago, this land has been moved through, occupied, cut up, cut down, dug out, built on and entirely changed. No parts – even those areas that are perceived as the most ‘extreme’ or ‘remote’ – have been left untouched by people. What has happened to our landscape is an accumulation. Of interventions, of events, of life. It began with hunters stalking their prey north and killing and cooking on land that we now call Scotland. In the process they left behind simple piles of shells and bones in rubbish pits known as middens – fish bones, deer antlers, hazelnut kernels. The scorch marks of the millennia-old fires that they lit, the hearths that they gathered around, have persisted, in the depths of the loam, all the way up to the present day.
As time passed, these traces – so faint and fragmentary at first – built inexorably. Much was destroyed or erased or lost. But not everything. The from one era merged with the from another. The fires stopped moving, the walls around them grew solid, the accumulation intensified and accelerated. Ploughshares started to rip up the ground. Axes – and a colder, wetter, windier climate – began to clear the forests. Bit by bit, communities overspread the land, turning the wilderness to their own ends.
The result is that, today, we live entirely among the physical impression and presence of the past. Often it emerges in the shapes of our towns and cities; in the ways our fields look; in the bare reaches of our sheep-wandered hills and moorlands. Just as before, so much has been destroyed or erased or lost. But at the same time, the list of the from successive periods has grown vast. Some have even been afforded special status, segregated from the present to be offered up as preserved, curated ruins and tourist attractions; even adopted as national icons. A handful receive millions of visitors each year.
But the majority do not. Rather, they exist in a state of continually fading obscurity, spread out across those parts of the landscape which people once knew, but now, largely, don’t. They are what this book is about. The uncurated and the ignored, the unfiltered and the abandoned. Those places that are not wilderness, but rather feel post-human: the shadows of people’s lives in the landscape, sometimes growing faint, but still persisting. are what I mean by wild history. History set adrift, let loose, let go. History, in some sense, set free. Just there: overgrown, overlooked – and increasingly untamed.
. . .
For a decade, I worked in an archive which, at the time that I came to join it, was exactly 100 years old. It was a slightly odd kind of an archive, with rather unusual origins – not least that, when it was first founded in 1908, it wasn’t supposed to be an archive at all.
It had been established as a Royal Commission, tasked by King Edward VII with making ‘an inventory of the Ancient and Historical Monuments and Constructions connected with or illustrative of the contemporary culture, civilisations and conditions of the life of the people in Scotland from earliest times to the year 1707’. Only a few years earlier, in 1882, Parliament had passed the first-ever Act for the preservation and protection of ancient sites and structures. That Act came with a list of those places throughout the UK deemed most important. A third of them were to be found in Scotland, but it still amounted to just twenty-one sites – a few stone circles, a handful of burial cairns. There wasn’t even a single castle. Everyone knew that there had to be more: it was just that no one had ever been tasked with identifying them.
This job fell to Alexander Ormiston Curle, the Royal Commission’s first Secretary, and its only full-time member of staff. The original intention was that he would carry out a desk-based study, compiling a master list from previously existing maps and accounts – but Curle and the six commissioners appointed to oversee his work were having none of it. In the first hour of their first meeting, held in Edinburgh in February 1908, they decided that ‘it was essential that the Secretary should visit each county in turn with the object of personally inspecting each monument’.
By the summer, Curle was out in the field on his bicycle, navigating the quiet backroads of Berwickshire in the Scottish Borders, maps and measuring instruments strapped to his crossbar. On day three, he set off south from the village of Coldingham to arrive at a place called Habchester, marked on his Ordnance Survey (OS) map with the enigmatic title ‘site’. ‘I made use for the first time of my surveyor’s staff and clinometer and found them most handy,’ he wrote in his notebook, which he later titled . What he was recording was the remains of a 2,000-year-old hillfort. ‘Though one half has been entirely obliterated,’ he said, ‘it is still a most striking fort, with two ramparts.’ While he humbly doubted the accuracy of his measurements, he resolved that they were, at least, ‘better than the word “site”’.
Curle kept going with this first survey up until the beginning of November, travelling some 300 miles by bicycle – and, as he proudly recalled, only five times by horse and trap and twice by car. Of walking, he said, ‘The number of miles I have tramped by moorland and meadow I have no reckoning of but they are many. It has never been anything but the most intense pleasure to me.’ In the process, he visited and explored over 260 sites, seventy-one of which had never been recorded before. And, although he did not realise it at the time, all those journals full of scribbled accounts, observations and measurements, marked the beginnings of an archive.
A year later, Curle was in Sutherland in the far north of Scotland, working all summer and autumn in often harsh conditions. There, he wrote, ‘The monuments and constructions of Sutherland were found to greatly exceed in number those previously known to exist.’ His second report was three times the length of his first. Curle continued his relentless progress. By 1916, when the Royal Commission’s work was suspended until the end of the First World War, he’d visited five of Scotland’s twenty-five counties. At that rate, the Royal Commission was on course to finish its task sometime around the 1950s. Except, as Curle’s Sutherland report noted, rather matter-of-factly, ‘There still exist a certain number of objects which have not come under our observation.’ So, in essence, even when the survey of a county was complete, it wasn’t actually complete.
As the work began again after the war, and as the decades passed, the field notes and reports were increasingly supplemented by survey drawings, maps and photographs of sites. The ‘inventory’ of the places themselves continued to grow (as did the number of staff – although Curle had resigned as Secretary in 1913 to take up the position of Director of the National Museum of Antiquities, he had continued to assist with the Royal Commission’s field surveys). But so too did all the material that went into creating and evidencing that inventory. The Royal Commission had become a kind of living archive. In capturing the traces of the human presence in the landscape, it was, in effect, reproducing itself – and the landscape – over and over again.
The parameters of what it was supposed to be recording kept changing too. During the Second World War, the threat of destruction from Luftwaffe air raids saw the date range for inclusion in the inventory shift by over a century, from 1707 to 1815, to ensure that it included Edinburgh’s New Town. After the war, the remit of the Royal Commission was extended again, incorporating the archive of the Scottish National Buildings Record, which was set up in 1941 to make an emergency record of the nation’s historic architecture. Before long, any date limit on what to record or...
