The White Mounth
The
White Mount
Place-names
provide the methodology for this eco-poetic mapping of Am Monadh Ruadh, the
russet
or
red hills, now commonly
known as The Cairngorms, Upper Déeside, The White Mounth,
and The White Mounth.
The place-names are from Adam Watson’s collections: The
Place Names of Upper Deeside (1984) compiled with Elizabeth Allan; the follow-up, Place-names in Much of North-east Scotland (2013); and a recent
collaboration with Ian Murray, Place Name
Discoveries on Upper Deeside and the far Highlands (2015). That
we have so many names available to us for this fascinating region, where
Gaelic, Scots, Pictish and English inter-mingle, is largely down to the
diligence of Adam, his collaborators, and informants.
Adam’s name collections make
a significant contribution to Scottish folk-culture. They total over 7,000
place-names covering almost every field, ruined croft, shieling, hill, corrie,
burn, and wood, gathered from 260 local people. The names are commonsense and, occasionally,
mytho-poetic; they convey ways of seeing and preferred formulations. In adding
a sub-stratum to the Ordnance Survey they offer a radical class based
‘eco-poetic’ alternative to Landranger and
Explorer maps. This perspective on the landscape has a contribution to make in terms of current land
use debates – the movement initiated by Frank Fraser Darling, maintained by
Adam Watson and Dick Balharry, and re-ignited by Andy Whightman – they have
always combined a social and ecological perspective. They also offer a new path
for eco-poetics, and add to what I like to call the hutopian movement, and
place-aware walking – a term I coined for this project. In other words, they
belong within that renewal of interest in the wild, innovative mapping, foraging,
marginal gardening, and the blending of commons and crafting. The blogs will
touch on these, along with more traditional practices, like stalking, hiking
and climbing – always by way of names.
Compare the level of coverage these
place-names provide with the paucity of today’s automobile-centric maps, and Google-Earth, which impoverish place-names
and represents the non-urban landscape as a beige desert or wood of a green no
leaf has borne.
(AF)
A name is a place
and its absence. How rare it is to be present at the moment a name is coined? There are place-names that record a
fleeting moment – the presence of a bull in a field, a landslide, or the death
of someone out on the hill – and there are names that seem to refer to an ever-present
– the mountain upon which a snow wreath rests deep into summer.
If
we choose to see the world through names and their meanings then a vast
field of reference awaits us – a world characterized by flux. Words change when they become names;
names change when speech is written down; speech changes with the incursion of
new language communities and flattening effects of popular culture.
The
old Gaelic names of Deeside were liable to be Frenchified, Scottified, and
Latinised, long before they were Anglified and mapped by the Ordnance Survey.
We have to listen in to the hidden sounds that reverberate within them if we
wish to understand, or guess at, their meaning. Today’s English-speaking hikers
like to salt their speech with corries, bens and bealachs. John Murray, author
of the touchstone Reading the Gaelic
Landscape, lists some of the Gaelic toponyms absorbed
into English and Scots: brae (bràigh), cairn (càrn), craig (creag), glen
(glean) and knock (cnoc). Not
everyone will recognise other borrowings: gob, trousers, smidgen, bother,
teaming, smashing, and slogan. The study of names is
a matter of linguistic archaeology, but we should never forget that naming is a
creative and, sometimes, unconscious act. It is less interesting to reduce
names to the words they once were, than to attempt to follow the passage
through which they have been altered and, sometimes, transformed. Names are
about our belongingness: how we belong changes. Names are a guide to human
time, human space, stewardship, and loss.
When
I was invited to work with Hauser & Wirth – the generous collaborative
teams they assemble ensures it is with,
not for – I decided that place-names would be my guide to the region. In
particular, I wanted to work with the remarkable catalogues of names collected
by Dr. Adam Watson.
It was in one of Adam’s
books that I first read the name of a burn, Allt Phouple, named for a ruined
sheiling – a summer pasture – in the upper Gairn. Adam’s translation is ‘the
burn of the booth’ – like the búðir
the Icelanders used for their temporary huts of stone and skin coverings that
were set up around the Alþing every
summer, at Þingvellir. I have given this
translation:
Allt
Phouple
Shelter Burn
I was lucky enough to be guided out to the
ruins by local guide Ian Murray, who has written three books on the region,
drawing on the folk memory of some of the same informants as Adam – folk such
as Rob Bain of Ardoch. What Ian and I made of the name Allt Phouple, and its
meaning, will be the subject of a future post. One of the name labels that I
used in my initial field research is included above.
We are no longer summer-walkers, but our minds remain tailored to identify
marks in the landscape. Standing stones and
significant skylines are evidence of a belief system – what Hanna Tuulikki
calls ‘memnonic topography’ – that
adapts the landscape into a seasonal clock, essential for managing the
agricultural calendar and making the best of what’s available.
Carn
nam Blàithean
Wee-blossom
Hill
Torr nam Fiann
Crowberry Knowe
Adam’s survey of local names defines a poetics – or eco-poetics – of the bioregion of the Dee, tracing flora, fauna, lost forests, and
deer-tracks, making common cause with Walter Benjamin’s thought:
‘Isn’t every region governed by a unique
confluence of plants and animals, and isn’t every local name a cipher behind
which flora and fauna meet for the first and last time.’
A shift of the
gaze can change what we perceive and, in a similar way, knowing the meaning of
a name can bring a shock of recognition. Names travel us through time,
unraveling their meanings, revealing the ciphers: this was once the lair of the
wolf, here is where the stags gather:
The All-mhad Barn
Wolf Rock
Lag an Daimh
Stag Nook
These blog posts
bring together two projects. The eco-poetic mapping will become artworks for the
Fife Arms, Braemar, along with a publication that including maps, photography,
poems, and prose, some of which you can read here. As ever, I am working with a
team of people – some local, others from farther afield – identifying
place-aware walks and other ways to appreciate the complexity of the landscape
of Upper Deeside.
Collaborators
include Hannah Devereux, the primary photographer on the project, who worked on
the Taigh memorial at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and
Gill Russell, who worked with me on the colour walks in Some Colour Trends, and is creating watershed
maps and working with me on conspectus. Place-names guide our attempt to
represent the ways that locals and visitors experience the Monadh Ruadh –
stalking, climbing, walking, ecology, history, deer, and pinewoods, each
perspective is a different vision and our interest lies in allowing these to
speak to one another, sometimes agreeing, sometimes arguing.
The field research
is extended by a parallel artist
residency at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, where
I will share ideas with Jo Vergunst, Tim Ingold, Alan Macpherson, and others; as well as working with the poet
David Wheatley, who teaches creative writing in the School of Language and
Literature. Having got to know these
peers outside of their offices through shared conversations at Deveron Arts
I will do my best to
erase departmental markers.
Jo and I share an
interest in new walking practices, such as my own place-aware walks, viewing,
and conspectus, which are partly inspired, or necessitated, by the limits
illness imposes on my walking. And we will also explore Caledonian pinewood regeneration, looking at
sites on Invercauld and Mar Lodge Estates.
Some of these ideas, in
particular those connected with walking and viewing, are also being explored in
a new journey project with Ken Cockburn, The Perthshire Tour: follies, views & wild gardens. Other previous journey and mapping projects are listed in
the blog roll.
In the posts and
publication the English translations of the names are my own, based on Adam
Watson’s, and with reference to other sources and contemporary experts – referenced
in the bibliographies that feature at the end of the posts. Adam’s translations are available as a definitive
record and, of course, the interpretations I have given will never supplant his
greater scholarship and working knowledge of local Gaelic. My English versions
of the names are ‘poems’; for example, conventional English translations from
Gaelic would give ‘burn of the X’ or ‘hill of Y’ and, although these are
accurate, I chose to work as a translator
of poetry would, bringing the expression over into English, giving a sense of
the broader meanings, using words appropriate to a local toponymic feature,
especially where I was able to view the site.
bibliography
William Alexander:
The Place-Names of Aberdeenshire
Peter Drummond:
email to Alec Finlay, 2015
Adam Watson: The
Place Names of Upper Deeside
Adam Watson: Place-names in much of
North-east Scotland
photography
The White Mounth
from The Strone: Hannah Devereux, 2015
Glen an t-Slugain: Hannah Devereux, 2015
Tullochcoy
sign: Hannah Devereux, 2016
Allt Phouple:
AF, 2015
The All-mhad
Barn, Creag Nordie: Hannah Devereux,
2015
Pine, Invercauld: Hannah Devereux, 2016
Bog-cotton:
Hannah Devereux, 2015
Gathering was commissioned by Hauser & Wirth, for the
Fife Arms Hotel, Braemar; the project was launched in 2015 and will conclude in
2018.
The artist
residency at University of Aberdeen is funded by The Leverhulme Trust; the
project was launched in July 2016 and will conclude May 2017.
