Other traditions run through depictions of the British landscape, below and beyond romantic idealisations. Here, Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle trace the layers of human settlements in the hills of Aberdeenshire

Douglas, Anne

Fremantle, Chris

English

Open Access Institutional Repository at Robert Gordon University

   CREATOR(S):   TITLE:    YEAR:   Original citation:    OpenAIR citation:    Copyright statement:      OpenAIR takedown statement:   This   work   is   made   freelyavailable under open access.       This  is distributed under a CC ____________ license. ____________________________________________________ Section 6 of the “Repository policy for OpenAIR @ RGU” (available from http://www.rgu.ac.uk/staff-and-current-students/library/library-policies/repository-policies) provides guidance on the criteria under which RGU will consider withdrawing material from OpenAIR. If you believe that this item is subject to any of these criteria, or for any other reason should not be held on OpenAIR, then please contact openair-help@rgu.ac.uk with the details of the item and the nature of your complaint.  What is a landscape? – movement, energy, positioning, a way of orientating, connecting, a quality of space located outside of town centres and cities, a locus of rights and responsibility?  What does it mean to be part of a landscape?   “ …the landscape does not stand there itself; because we are moving, it must at least take on a counterpoint. Man has made the landscape able to move. The mobile forces, as it were, of man’s relation to the landscape. This is the mobile attitude we can take towards the landscape. What is close to us passes quickly; what is far away goes along with us ‘ (remains within our sphere of vision) Paul Klee The Thinking Eye p361  Klee’s idea of landscape is temporal, musical. For him landscape exists only in relation to human perception and movement.   This insight is resonant of a personal experience - living for twelve years in a village of 300 inhabitants in the Ladder Hills of Aberdeenshire. One might still walk through this landscape for seven days without encountering another soul across ancient routes from the ‘dreich’ treeless Cabrach (OS grid reference NJ3827) towards a forested, fertile Don valley (OS grid reference NJ35091320), a landscape that is both remote and rural.  Imagine traversing this terrain as if drawing through time. The drawing would configure the many discrete and visible signs of human inhabitation from 2,000 BC to the present. It would encircle the ancient security of the hill fort, then dip below ground to the archaic colony of an Iron Age souterrain, inhabited approximately in 400 BC. The line would continue on to enclose three further configurations.Five or so farms in a ‘fermtoun’ might form an organic microcosm. The line would then rest on a single point of an agrarian hearth, a lone tenant farmstead with a bothy for the workers. They had previously been occupants of the fermtouns and had been evicted and then hired back onto the land by tenant farmers.  The line circumvents itself. These places of rugged survival would stand in contrast to the arcadian enclosure of a walled garden and adjacent estate house. From the linear concentration of the current 19th century planned village, it might become apparent that only three people owned the horizon above the village whereas in the past people had lived all over the landscape.   Can we ever own land(scape)?    At the turn of the millennium Gavin Renwick worked with Chris Fremantle and me to develop a visual methodology for understanding changing patterns of inhabitation, drawing on Patrick Geddes (Inthrow 2000-2004). This research resulted in the configurations above. Had our drawing continued into the present, it would show the appearance of industrial scale wind farms necessary to renewable energy as well as housing estates that mimic the inner city, concentrated in a single field. “What is close to us passes quickly”  - the line of our drawing through time would indeed increase in pace, hurtling into the present and future. It would mark a growing tension with the speed of industrialisation, an increased angularity that would obliterate the traces of earlier patterns of inhabitation, the potential these represent for exploring alternative approaches and values.   What does it mean now to look after the land? Every city is reliant on its hinterland for water, food, timber, uranium even and oil. Does this imply ownership by a few or might it provoke a new configuration? Can we move through land and city in such a way that these become inextricably linked in a new direction?   591 words   Anne Douglas with Chris Fremantle, October 2015    

Walking in unquiet landscapes: layers of human settlements in the hills of Aberdeenshire.

https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/246307/1/DOUGLAS 2016 Walking in unquiet landscapes

Walking in unquiet landscapes: layers of human settlements in the hills of Aberdeenshire.

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