Stuff Stuff

The Gallops by Kenmore are a great row of gnarled beeches. Many of them bear the scars of old age, rot, hollows, fused branches, mast (in a flurry to reproduce before they die?). Quite a few have carved names, some by soldiers posted at Taymouth Castle during the war. Corp. Gaston, 1946 must have spent hours carving out his name with an arch of flowers to finish it off. Even though it’s more than 60 years old the carvings still look fresh and raw. The tree doesn’t seem very bothered by it, it just makes a bit of scar tissue to stop the bugs getting in and carries on growing in its own slow and peculiar way.

I have been trying to get rid of stuff and it’s bloody difficult. I try and take responsibility for the junk I buy and the stuff I get rid of but it’s not easy. Recycling in this area is pitiable and there’s so much stuff around it’s even more difficult to give it away. All this stuff pollutes in one way or another, most of it is marginally useful or completely useless and it all needs money to buy it. Electronic tat particularly is a bugbear. Though having said that I’m on my computer just now and have just been contemplating buying a new digital camera! I walked along the Gallops a few days ago with a friend and was feeling in a particularly anti-consumerist mood, hence this picture.

The beech drawing has a carving, stuff stuff, my anti-consumerist slogan!

Take a look at this one. Tree leaves don't figure here, just the flotsam from the floor of a birch wood in late autumn. I like the arching polypody over the bracken and the assorted shapes and colours of the feather, twigs, lichen, moss and fungus. The background is a knitted shawl, a mark of my presence, since it was knitted by me many moons ago.

The Cleaven Dyke and Beech trees

A week later and I’ve just been on a foray to lowland Perthshire, via the Hermitage to draw beeches. The Cleaven Dyke is a 2 km long cursus, a five and a half thousand year old monument to something, who knows what. It runs through the middle of a scots pine plantation and a swathe of trees have been cut back about 20 metres on each side, giving a great sense of the straight line it cuts through the landscape. It’s not far from Meikleour and is well used by dog walkers and runners. There are paths and forestry tracks across or through it and the A93 cuts off the south-eastern end with a stream of tarmac and traffic but it still feels remarkably complete. An article in British Archaeology (see http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba44/ba44feat.html) talks about it as a sacred river. Who knows? There is certainly the feeling of processing as you walk along it (I went north-west to south-east, which seemed right somehow, walking the other way was just retracing my steps). But I felt very much on land, not water. It must have been an unusual experience to walk in straight line in the far past. We are used to walking on gridlines in city streets but ancient paths and ways were not straight, they meandered with the landscape, following contours, cutting through gaps in the hills and avoiding fast-running rivers and soggy bottoms.
I wonder what stories have been told about it. It is still conspicuous now and it must always have been seen as something worth speculating about. The guidebooks/internet say that until recently it was thought to be Roman. They were well know for their obsession with straight lines, making them a good bet as its builders. They knew what they were doing, the Romans when they built their roads and walls, a good way of asserting power on the landscape and thereby on the people who lived there. But there will be other stories to tell about it. Why is it the cleaven dyke? Who or what cleaved it?
I drew a couple of beeches. Even if they are not in their natural range up here they certainly seem to thrive and have no problem setting seed. They are everywhere, and rocks and slopes are great for forcing them into strange contortions, or just elegant buttresses to keep them upright.

Setting out

This is a new venture for me, into the world of blogging. It seems to makes sense to use it to put my thoughts into order and to put out some of the artwork I’ve been doing into the big wide world. It also makes sense to put it into a diary form, given my recent forays in the hills and woods of the upper Tay valley. I’m trying to get out and about once a week, walking, sketching and observing: birds, especially crows, rooks, jackdaws and ravens, trees and their leaves, stones, cup-marked and standing or piled into walls and the shades and forms of the landscape. So I’m going to try and put some of this stuff here now, instead of keeping it in my head or hidden in my tiny sketchbook.

This blog is also about a project set by Richard Demarco after the art masterclass he taught at The Watermill a few weeks ago. We met in the Birks, Aberfeldy on an October morning. Pick up seven leaves and draw them he said. Then he sent us home to paint them and set them against a background. I did my homework and brought it in a week later. ‘Go away and do it again, every two weeks’ he said. So, like a good girl, I’ve been doing my homework. Three pictures on and I’ve learnt something about painting with watercolours (they’re tricky) and about marking the passing season. We’re in winter now and the spectacular October leaves are turning into a soggy rotten mess as the frost starts to do its work. I suspect it will be more and more of a challenge to find something to paint as winter goes on and ferns, lichens and twigs may well become the main theme, as they are in my latest painting.

The thing with spending more time looking is that you start to see more, and then the challenge becomes setting boundaries and making decisions about what to dwell on. Trees are an obvious subject around here but I want to limit myself to one species, beech, and really take a close look. Beech trees are remarkably plastic, swirling and moulding into ridiculously complex forms and their smooth grey bark, that looks more like skin than any other tree, brings all sorts of human shapes to mind. But I want to look at them as Richard Mabey suggests in Beechcombing, for what they are, not what they represent. I tried drawing one yesterday, and it was hard work, there was so much to it. And I only looked at the bottom bit, the holdfast that they so often develop, helping it cling into the rock face it perched on.