Palimpsest

On a fine spring day in April, we were all gathered at the University of Stirling for a conference, ‘Environmental Histories of Scotland: Mapping Out A Way Forward’, a diverse gathering of historians, geographers, archaeologists, policy makers and writers setting out to reflect on and understand the key challenges facing Scotland’s environment, policy and practitioner responses. At lunch, we sat outside in the courtyard, parks and lovely open-air spaces within the University parkland, conversed, thought and wrote.

These condensed and evocative pieces were made for Imagined Spaces by some of those who attended the conference. Their subject skills and expertise shine through the words of these creative responses to the idea of the environment as a palimpsest of traces left by humans and non-humans, words outlining the surfaces and contours of earth and trees and waters to show present, past and future… All as one.

Do keep an eye on this space in our website for more of these moments of retrospection and imagination that were made outside in the air and sunshine.

Nature as it should be,
or so the thinking went, and goes…
Not the environment,
not ‘our surroundings’, but “Landscape” —

what we see, as we have been instructed
to make a frame around the picture.
Whatever was here before —
a hollow in the hillside, perhaps a little boggier,
insufficiently aesthetic. Untidy.
It must be a lake (sorry, a loch) — and it must be just so.

If we cannot adjust ourselves to the nature we inherit,
we must adjust nature to ourselves.
A distinction made between
water and earth, level and slope.
Teach the land to make the natural beautiful. 

Ian MacLellan

Now

The tall yet adolescent sequoia shifts quietly and softly in the cool spring breeze, wrinkles in its porous bark standing in sharp relief. The sound of voices mixes with the wind's shhhh-ing through the needles; smells of damp well-trodden earth where new paths overlay old tracks rises. Past into the present.

Then

The small, tight cone seed, lifted and brought from the new country to the old, planted into new earth; these borders between the plant and human worlds are porous. Wrinkled hands hold the cone as the plant hunter moves softly through the endless Pacific woods,
watched silently by the people there. The wind shhh-ing through the needles in warning of what is coming for them.

What if… ?

The now old sequoia sways over what used to be a buzzing, busy human place; its old and wrinkled bark soft in the wet spring air. It speaks of deep time, of far away places; the past always flowing into the present. Porous borders like the earth it is rooted in: shifting, shhh-ing, settling.

Annie Tindley

30,000BCE
Rivers of ice and water:
restore and reset,
cleaning away…
Recreating nature's blank canvas.

Rivers of water
bring rivers of people, boats;
roads, rivers, cars, and rail—
resetting in man's image.
Recreating scapes of human desire and need.

30,000 years hence 
Rivers of ice? Water or sand?
Restore and reset, 
recreate and reclaim nature's own.
People gone. Where? Time will tell.
Palimpsest erased.

Steve Carver

Photo by Vitya_maly

There is a particular shade of blue that colours the Stirling sky. No match on the pallet that will capture it, but the colour draws this historian into its radiance. This is the environment of William Wallace, a champion of Scotland who lived a few short years at the end of the thirteenth century, now commemorated by a tower sat atop Abbey Craig on Stirling’s edge. The monument is simple: an upright skyward mark that pushes forward the colouring of history. It’s been there a shade over two and a half centuries. But it nearly didn’t happen. Nearby, there is another heroic structure new to the landscape, one that is a little older, castellated, and very yellow. Stirling Castle holds stories of a late medieval king, the one known as the Bruce. Both sites overlook where a bridge once spanned the meandering River Forth, a river that circles and bends across the landscape between the two modest hills upon which the structures were built.  

The battle of Stirling Bridge took place over 700 years ago. Countless stories of Wallace – a brigand, a thief, a lover, a hero. Some from Glasgow, some from Edinburgh chose to mark the spot where a hero was made. Bruce was not there. He would come into this story at a different place, one not too far away in distance or time, but a world away in colour.  

Falkirk was where Wallace came unstuck, leading red blood to flow into the dank brown of the earth. Wallace, the blue, would run away to France (possibly), to high jinks on the English channel (possibly), and then home to saviour clear air somewhere in Torwood forest. The Bruce, always ‘the’, would turn yellow in the gaze of blue eyes. Across the river Carron, Heroic Wallace chastised the Yellow Bruce for raining indecision, not arrows, on the other side. The historian will not vouch for the veracity of possibly their one and only meeting, but its tone colours our Past.  

It is not just the past. Our Present is here, in Stirling, in this place of knowledge, in a building dedicated to the Humanities in a University that is overlooked – or looked after, by Wallace… by History. This historian in the present is faced with grey, with the challenge of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. But science is art, the environment is art, our present is artful-- blue, with yellow and brown. 

The historian’s environment is all colours, all pasts. And in the shadow of another hero – Janus – the past holds our future. In the palette of Wallace, we reveal something about our future selves. Wallace lived a short life. His death was prolonged and came in stages. He left in red and grey, under torture, with some yellow in the flame before him. The body is long dead, yet Wallace never left us. He will always be impermeable to the colours of historians and other folk mythologies; they stay within him. Those Victorian builders knew a thing or two about foundations. They dug down 700 years. They dug across 700 years, digging until they found what remained of a hero’s memory. What they found is the historian’s future in all its colours.  

Graeme Morton