Recording the True Places

Visual artists JON MACLEOD and ANNE CAMPBELL describe their work on their A-Mach an Gleann (A Known Wilderness) project on the moors of Lewis

JON MACLEOD: A 19th century Australian newspaper once described the interior of that country as ‘the hideous blank’. A more recent commentator referred to the centre of Lewis as ‘miles and miles of nothing’. It seems that these wild empty places are either loved or loathed.

Perhaps, as the American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan commented, ‘it is precisely what is invisible in the land that makes what is merely empty space to one person a place to another’.

The project was conceived in response to a need to record some of the knowledge and names associated with the Lewis moorland. A strong link to the land seemed to be in danger of being lost, not only because of the passing of many of the older members of the community, but also through the potential destruction of the land itself through ‘development’.

It is often the case that once a knowledge of the land has been lost it becomes thought of as wilderness, only valued as a habitat for wildlife. Central to the project has been an attempt to record names not written down on the OS map (as Herman Melville said in Moby Dick, “true places never are”).

These names define the landscape through the experiences of individuals whose lives have been concerned with the moor. They have been unrecorded in ‘the memory of the white paper’, as the printed page has been called.

In my work for the project I have tried to convey a sense of intimacy about the moor that comes from walking it. This is how the first islanders and the generations that followed them experienced the place.

Leaving the bus on the Barvas road on a summer’s day feels like parachuting out of a plane, stepping into the vast openness of racing cloud shadows and blowing grass. I wanted to put an essence of this into a contemporary language.

I took familiar groupings of lochs and breunlachan and turned them into a camouflage print. I wanted to see these places that I had walked in a solitary landscape take life in street culture.

I also wanted to present some elements of the moor in the way a Victorian collector might, bringing back artefacts from journeys to far flung amazing places and showing them in the context of a returned expedition. The moor is one of those places.

ANNE CAMPBELL: My parents both spent their childhood summers on the shieling, and they passed their love of the moor on to me. I grew up thinking of it as an exciting and mysterious place. There was a sense of adventure in setting out in the morning with my father to look for sheep in that vast expanse.

To him it was known, familiar territory, and he would point out names and features along the way: shielings and anecdotes about the people who lived in them, massive stock walls, cairns, paths, stepping stones, fish traps, salmon pools.

No-one knows what lies under the peat. It is hard to explain the effect the wide open moors have on the mind; they have a presence that remains with you long after you’ve left them. The sense of freedom of being out there amongst the golden plover, the deer, the eagles and the wind, is hard to beat.

The Lewis moorland is also internationally important both environmentally and culturally. The peatland has been growing for thousands of years, and it is one of the largest and most intact known areas of blanket bog in the world. It is designated as a UN Ramsar Site (Wetland of International Importance) and an EU Special Area of Conservation and Special Protection Area.

It is also a major carbon store and sink. Peatlands are the single largest terrestrial store of carbon, storing more carbon than the vegetation of the whole world and equivalent to 75% of all carbon in the atmosphere. Western Europe has lost over 90% of its functioning peatland, making the conservation of the remainder especially important.

Culturally, the Lewis moor has been used by people throughout its history, and traces of their presence remain. For centuries transhumance was practiced, with people and cattle moving to shielings on the “lonely, lovely brown moors” for the summer months.

These shielings can be seen scattered all over the interior of Lewis and some are still in use. For many people these summer days on the shieling were the happiest of their lives. Many Lewis families have lived in the same area for generations, perhaps since the first settlers arrived on the island, and the strong psychological link which the people of rural Lewis have with their land is rare in the Western world. It echoes through their poems and songs.

(A-Mach an Gleann (A Known Wilderness) can be seen at An Lanntair in Stornoway until 18 August, alongside the A’Mhointeach (The Moor) exhibition, with additional work by Kate Whiteford, and will be seen at Taigh Chearsabhagh in North Uist later this year).

© Jon Macleod & Anne Campbell, 2007

Links

• An Lanntair