strong links between landscape and memory/historical research
Simon Schama Landscape and Memory – ‘archive of the feet’
‘thinking of history as something that happened in negotiations between humans and hills, valleys, rain, wind and sea’
Shetland: ‘These islands are drowned mountains. […] The islands of Shetland were peaks of Himalayan majesty, before aeons of erosion ground them to their cores. This mountain heritage shapes Shetland’s modern character: the ocean floor falls away from these ‘erosional remnants’ faster than from most of Britain, so that a depth is reached in half a mile that takes a hundred miles to reach from many English shores. The behaviour of the ocean and the distribution of fish or oil are all defined by those underwater inclines.’
‘When I gazed up at many mainland cliffs, I was staring through cross-sections of those ancient hills, with an access to the distant past that is rarely possible from land. The vast variety of rocks – including granite, marble, limestone, gabbro and sandstone – generates the diversity of foliage above.’
‘I was separated from writhing magma only by time.’
‘We wish there was still a great auk to see. We hope that people won’t have to build more cairns like this to remember things we see alive now. We humans gave a name to this bird, now only the name is left. If you who are reading this message are not human, remember us with kindness as we remember the great auk.’
‘If timelessness exists anywhere on the earth, it is not in sight of the sea.’
‘I kayaked through freaks of deep time. Wherever the joins in the Devonian sandstone are weak, caves, arches and gloups have formed. The grey, cream and ochre bands of rock – perfectly horizontal – are deeply pitted, leaving narrow pillars of stone, striped like Neopolitan ice cream, to support the cliff face. An airy space, the galleries of a dark drowned Parthenon, stands behind. The gaps between pillars have old, dramatic names like the Kilns of Brin Novan. The largest such ‘kiln’ is thirty metres deep by fifteen wide: within it, swells churns until it bubbles as if boiling.’
‘These geological creations felt like the imaginary future ruins of a civilisation lost to the rising seas of the Anthropocene.’
‘The landscape is the hardest of all documents to read since each century scrawled new text on its defenceless surface’ (Veronica Wedgwood)
‘…an era when coastlines were remoulded in the aftermath of the last Ice Age. Land rose, rebounding from the weight of ice, but at the same time glacier melt engorged the oceans. Earthquakes accommodated land and sea to their new relations. Not just rock, but forests, herds, shoals and then people moved with the rhythms of the changing earth. Plants arrived in slow, stuttering waves. Trees observed a strict system of social class. First came the ‘labourer’ trees which did the work that claimed and tamed the land: stunted by hardship and bent double by exposure to the elements, these were dwarf and least willow that formed thickets wherever the ice receded. Soon, ‘bourgeois’ trees set up their shrubby suburbs: hazels flaunted their wealth in rich nuts cast across the forest floor. These trees fed humans like middle-class Britons feed the birds, and vast quantities of burned hazel shell are often found at Mesolithic sites. Last of all came towering tree lords: the oaks and pines. They only deigned to thrust their grasping roots into the deepest earth, and in those favoured spots they flung tall crowns above the canopy.’
places, particularly those that have been disrupted by violence, have ‘potential histories’ (Ariella Azoulay) – ‘the present is part of unfinished pasts
‘The past is never dead but is a series of latent possibilities fracturing a present that would otherwise seem impossible to resist or undermine.’
‘…reject the past and imagine new lines of connection to the future from the past’
when engraving replaced drawing as the primary method for map-making (seventeenth century), symbols became universal rather than local and there was a shift towards roads as the focus – ‘And yet these are seen simply as objective maps, rather than as plottings tailored to a civilisation whose relationship to the natural world is utterly and perhaps fatally mediated by cars.’ (Robert Harbison)
‘For the last century and a half, all official mapping has treated the strand-line as a barrier. In maps where the land is rich with detail the sea is a waste; in those that delineate the sea’s features, the land is void. All that crosses the tideline – all interaction of communities with the sea – has become unrepresentable. The situation is both consequence and cause of our society’s breach between land knowledge and sea knowledge. Our maps make us chronically sea-blind but even more drastically shore-blind.’
in the process of anlicising place names in Ireland meaning became lost in attempts at phonetic translation (e.g. ‘Illaunanaur’)
along Connacht and Munster coasts ‘counter-maps’ have been produced to try and ‘collate the resources of place-lore to geographically construct their many histories’
‘every scrap of shore speaks of centuries’
‘where land and sea entwine their twisted fingers’
Tim Robinson made sure to include cliff faces on his maps of Aran – a flaw in the traditional bird’s eye view map is it overlooks important sheer drops such as this – ‘A heady plunge becomes a space five millimetres wide, thick enough to swathe in place-lore. This is one example of how precision is misleading and inaccuracy most closely represents the truth.’
‘The immensities in which each little place is wrapped.’
‘cryptic with granite’
There’s no experience I know that compares with being locked in the gaze of creatures that seem to live on planes of existence so remote from ours.’
‘The tides were a revolving door for pilgrims whose bones now enrich the earth’
‘To infiltrate venerable histories with the intimate present in ways that strip the past of pomposity while never diminishing its dignity’
Peter Lanyon – ‘There is only air and never sky in his paintings, and only rock, never cliffs.’ (but his oceans are ‘always ocean, never water) – he insisted abstraction was ‘a tool for rendering land and sea as experiences not as objects’
‘The busy fractals of the west slow the eye (like Lanyon’s net-inspired tangles) in contrast to the short easy sweeps of south and east’
‘Artists, such as the freediver Janeanne Gilchrist, create exhibits to challenge the idea of human control and self-possession. In Gilchrist’s photographs, plastic bags are suspended in shifting oceans and thus appear animate: though the intended purpose of these objects, she insists, lasts only for moments, they take on lives of their own once discarded and live long afterlives outside of their relation with humans. With a few notable exceptions, however, historians still write as though humans controlled the things they construct. Histories thus have blind spots that mirror the gaps left by urban outlooks on the present: they, too often, assume historical processes end at the boundaries of human society.’
‘Far from instilling an alternative vision to the naïve romanticism I set out with, the journey had shown me that a romanticism which delves into the natures of humans and their fellow species, finding wonder while rooted in the real, might not be so naïve after all.’
Anna Harris 