I have been photographing these old apple trees for over ten years now. Relics of an outdated rural economy.

Location – Mountain View Road, Boonville, Anderson Valley, northern California. The valley is now increasingly dominated by vineyards.

Visiting with Bianca (Carpeneti).

As pure a contrast between the Classical and Gothic Romantic as can be imagined.

Here is something I have written to appear in my forthcoming book “The Archaeological Imagination” – to my embarrassment and frustration still in (final) revision.

Sir Charles Monck decided not to restore his family castle of Belsay in the south east of Northumberland. This very fine fourteenth century tower was extended with a Jacobean wing after the union of the crowns in the early seventeenth century and was the home of the Middleton family. Monck inherited in 1795 together with another estate from his maternal grandfather (which prompted his change of name from Middleton to Monck). In 1804 he set off on a two year honeymoon that included a tour through Germany and a long stay in Greece. He had had a traditional classical education at Rugby school and clearly got caught up in the current enthusiasm for all things ancient and Greek: his sketched various new neo-Classical buildings in Germany, and in Athens fell in with William Gell at the time of his publication of his Topography of Troy and when he was working on what was to be his Itinerary of Greece. The experience was revelatory: on his return to Belsay Monck set about designing a new house inspired by his first hand experience of Classical Greek architecture. Ten years of building produced one of the most consistent applications of contemporary understanding of the geometry of ancient Greek architecture to a modern residence.

The two hundred and more drawings for the project that still remain — the plans and ideas that lay behind the house — show that this was very much a personal project. One architectural drawing for the hall was by Gell, though Monck’s zeal for accuracy led to something quite different to the optical consistency I have discussed in Gell’s topography. The theme is the Doric order, very much interpreted in what is almost a meditation on proportion and geometry. The house is exactly one hundred feet square. Exactly — Monck insisted that the proportional ratios of the design were calculated to three decimal places, forcing masons to abandon their conventional measurements in eighths of an inch.There are few direct quotations from the original Greek, though the Tower of the Winds appears at Belsay as the octagonal lantern on the stables. This is more a rationalist reworking of what people like Monck and Gell (and William Wilkins, another antiquary and architect friend) thought that Greek architecture represented. The fronts of the house are exceptionally severe, wholly plain apart from the fluted Doric columns at the entrance and the pilasters: the emphasis is simply on proportion, line and surface; the roof was low-pitched so as to be invisible from ground level, kept from intruding upon the rectangular geometry. There is even evidence that the library bookcases echo the proportions of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens, as measured by Monck.

The nearby village was demolished and the site turned over to being a quarry for building stone; the locals were rehoused in a model village on the main road between Newcastle and Jedburgh. Monck abandoned the castle and old house, turning them into a ruin. The quarry was then converted into a garden, connecting the new house with the ruin: it looks like a painting by Salvator Rosa, on the wild side of the picturesque, tumble-down grottoes, seating niches by springs in the rock faces, and a look of natural abandon in the ferns and undergrowth. Formal gardens immediately around the house become parkland in the manner of Capability Brown and Repton, as at Alnwick, with much use of ha-has that open up views across the estate, and to the hillside opposite, forested with exotic conifers, Scot’s Pine and native hardwoods. Monck’s variation on the Theseion in Athens, his temple to rational system, is a focus of human order in a landscape that was less cultivated and more suggestive of chaos and decay the further it was from the house, just as the modern finds new life in the ancient, and the ruin of history becomes a charming after-dinner walk through the picturesque.

The theme in the archaeological imagination given different inflection in these building projects is one of the possibility, feasibility and, crucially, the desirability of rebuilding the past, making good the loss of time and ruin. A key archaeological task is to sort through the debris of history. And then what? To witness the loss by consolidating ruins as just that, ruins in a new landscape. To rebuild and restore, to fill in the gaps. To replicate exactly. Or to build again, incorporating the past into the present. Does authenticity lie in the original fragment, the broken stone statue itself, or in the principles of proportion and order of an ancient culture? Or even in a sentiment such as baronial splendor?

The walk through the quarry garden

Original painted plaster in the great hall of the medieval tower

Topic – archaeology, ruins and the picturesque landscape.

The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché.

How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today?

Should I just give up photography? As a tainted medium?

This is too simple a response (not least, it doesn’t make sense to say that media can be wholly compromised). Though for a long while I worked with the arts company Brith Gof [Link], and we explored relationships with place through site specific performance – see my book with Mike Pearson Theatre/Archaeology [Link] and his new book Site-Specific Performance [Link].

In our conversation in that archetypical English pub in Durham, Bianca, Chris and I decided to avoid the search for a definitive solution, and adopt instead an attitude taken from design thinking -

be mindful

and embrace the contradictions – for they are at the heart of how we connect with (archaeological) landscapes

- be mindful and work with the contradictions (iteratively – for there never is a definitive solution).

How?

• acknowledge and break the rules, reveal the constraints
  (eg break the framing in a time series, collage or some other manner)
• interrupt the work performed by the aesthetic with commentary or annotation
  (eg break the illusion, Brecht-like)
• recontextualize
  (eg use the images in an incongruous setting, or as a series that supplies a critical setting)
• intervene, use the images actively as engagement with a place and re-presentation rather than treat them as simple descriptive document
  (Mike Pearson and I adopted this tactic in many “performed lectures” we presented in the mid 1990s).

This all takes me back to a paper I published (very obscurely) a long while back – Critical romanticism on a visit to the past [Link].

I included a discussion of both Turner (see the previous entry [Link]) and another archetypical romantic, Wordsworth.

Wordsworth walked. His poem on Tintern Abbey deals not with the ruin so much as the synaesthetic and constitutive imagination – how place engenders certain responses in us, particularly through memory, but is dependent upon our creative apprehension that organizes the very substance of experience. As one walks and looks. Both Turner and Wordworth dealt with the topology of time – the folding of time, how pasts and presents meet in the composition of the “figure in the landscape”. And how this encounter is ultimately incomprehensible – sublime – prompting us to restlessly experiment with our responses, representations, reflections.

Here is how I summarised a critically romantic attitude:

• local self-assertion as opposed to universal systems (offering definitive solutions);
• an attention to the ordinary and the particular;
• an interest in the darker side of experience in the sense of that remainder which always escapes the claims of a rational system;
• defamiliarising what is taken as given, revealing the equivocality of things and experience;
• reality conceived, genealogically, as historical process;
• an attitude critical and suspicious of orthodoxy, because of the impossibility of any final account of things.

Norham Castle

To continue with the concern that I shared yesterday – the ideology of land, property and labor transformed into aesthetic form – landscape.

Images that disguise history?

(guilty pleasures of the sublime picturesque) [Link]

It is not difficult to identify various components of this aesthetic. (I recall dealing with a lot of this in a couple of classes I ran on landscape [Link])

Consider Turner’s Norham (1798) - [Link]

Key concepts

pastoral | bucolic | the idyll | picturesque | sublime | beauty

Psychology

Ask – What are the pleasures/gratifications of these landscapes?

Ask – How are they connected to people’s sense of identity? National, personal, ethnic?

Emplotment

Some narratives/scenarios embedded in landscape – return and retreat into repose (nostos) | adventure | the frisson of risk, looking over the precipice | escape into melancholy | the walk to eden | sporting pleasures | agricultural labor

Components of a landscape aesthetic

Techniques for mobilizing this ideological field:

• The figure in a setting – person | monument | ruin | artifact

(see my blog category – figure in a landscape [Link])

• Contrast/tension/justaposition/transition – in tone or tonal range (eg shadow and highlight) | in scale | in form (horizontal/vertical, textures/smooth, natural/cultural eg ruin, town, bridge)
• Formalization – making aesthetic through: framing (the proscenium arch) | abstraction | mannerism (especially over-stylization and in the use of color)
• Composition – framing | perspective (linear and atmospheric) | layered planes, stratigraphy, viewpoint (the viewer set back and up from the composition, as audience, never fully involved)

So Turner’s compositions are framed windows or proscenium arches with staged dramaturgies – backdrop, three side flats (two on the right), stage forming the river winding into the distance.

The tensions and contradictions

Past and present | city and country | real and ideal | celebration and regret | melancholy and comedy (the bucolic) | distance and intimacy | alienation and redemption | the everyday and the allegorical

Ask – How is the artist working with and against a set of media conventions and constraints?

Temporality

References to an indeterminate historical time | to a lost golden age | nostalgia | a celebration of the saturated present moment (the sublime moment of controlled shock, and/or of calm repose)| memory as actuality – the juxtaposition of different times in the now

The politics

An absence of any working community in landscape | the status of the observer (usually abstracted from what is being represented) | an escapism (from social reality) |  a contrast between the viewer and the anonymous (sublime) popular masses – vernacular human detail.

Watercolor from 1823 (Scotland is on the left bank)

Norham sunrise – oil 1845 (an exercise in form)

The cultural politics of this aesthetic have long fascinated me. This is not just a new elite aesthetic. Turner was very aware of the politics, manipulating the well-established theatrical scenography to organize his landscapes, staging vernacular dramaturgies of rural life and sporting pursuits, combining both with an experimental and rationalist realism. Like many in Romanticism, he was working with new conceptions of place, time, and relationships between the viewing visitor and the land and its objects, manifested in how travel is organized, where one stops to look at a view, how one looks at the land, what is brought to bear on this apprehension, how one builds landscapes.

The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché.

How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today?

I will take up this question in another post [Link]

One of the images that is concerning me – a landscape in the central section of Hadrian’s Wall – largely the work of John Clayton’s conservation efforts in the mid nineteenth century, continued currently by the National Trust

In conversation with Bianca (Carpeneti).

My early morning runs are troubling me deeply …

these encounters with a sublime picturesque [Link] [Link] [Link]

Photo – dawn on Holy Island. Watercolor – J.M.W. Turner (exhibited 1829) (the castle in the background)

Turner’s figures in the landscape (they are on the shore by Cuthbert’s island) indicate more going on than the conjunction of wind, sky and sea.

My concern – something of an ascetic moment, a methodist moment -
guilty pleasures
in landscapes and ruins that attest not to the realities of history, but to what the wealthy and powerful have done to turn labor on the land (and sea) into aesthetic allure.

The politics of land and ownership turned into a pleasant vista.

As I mentioned the other day [Link], Lindisfarne castle is a sixteenth century military fort by a nineteenth century industrial facility turned into a wealthy man’s holiday home (Edward Hudson, proprietor of magazine “Country Life”, commissioned Edwin Lutyens to oversee the tasteful conversion); Gertrude Jekyll added a walled garden.

How can we deny the taste, and this form of the landscape?

Lindisfarne – stairs and kitchen by Edwin Lutyens

The site in the 1900s, when Hudson bought the castle, was still dominated by an industrial facility – what was left of a substantial lime kiln works that had produced agricultural fertilizer. Over by the small harbor (the Ouse) were fish processing plants (mainly for gutting herring – and there are still some remains of the great fishing boats upturned on the shore – [Link]).

And, in a remarkable design gesture, Lutyens took the bricks used as ballast in the boats brought to carry the lime and used them, herringbone, for the new floors of the castle:

Here is how Thomas Girtin, contemporary of Turner, dealt with this conjunction of picturesque history and industry:

My concern

how do we deal with this now?

More thoughts to follow … [Link]

Field season 2011. Staying by Hadrian’s Wall – Peel Bothy, Once Brewed (built/restored by John Clayton in the nineteenth century as part of his reconstruction of the Wall). Two more early morning runs – refusing to succumb to jet lag.

(Use the controls to navigate through the panorama)

Peel Bothy is a renovated workers’ cottage right by one of the turrets in this infamous central section of Hadrian’s Wall. This week I have been staying there.

Another morning run.

Out running – jet lag gets me up rather early – here at about 5.30 am local time.

Lindisfarne, Northumberland – sixteenth century military architecture and a nineteenth century industrial facility turned into a wealthy man’s holiday home (Edward Hudson, proprietor of magazine “Country Life” commissioned Edwin Lutyens to oversee the conversion – very tasteful).

What is left of the nineteenth-century wooden jetty. In the distance – Bamburgh – royal seat from the eighth century.

All too nice through HDR Pro on an Apple iPhone.

In todays Guardian – an evocative “Country Diary” set in Borth, near Aberystwyth, west Wales, where we used to live. Another petrified forest on the coast and taking us back to the days of the Welsh epic sagas.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Herbert

After the long winter, with its numbing cold and sustained snowfall, few things raise the spirits as much as walking under a deep blue sky with the afternoon sun warming your back. Add to this a long stretch of empty beach and the scope for improvement becomes vanishingly small. My visit to Borth was timed to coincide with a spring tide, whose dramatic range exposes at low water much that is usually covered by a confusion of surf. Winter storms scour the beach dramatically, and a visit in early spring often yields previously hidden elements – including new areas of the ancient sunken forest for which the beach is well-known.

The especially low tide revealed a part of the forest I hadn’t seen before. A dozen feet or so below the peak high-water mark, stumps of trees and jumbled arrays of prostrate trunks stood out from the scalloped ripples of the beach. Beyond them I could see tangled shallow root systems set in a glossy, eroded matrix of clay and woody peat. Some newly exposed trees had surprisingly well-preserved bark still in place, and several were immediately recognisable as birch. Dated at around 5,000 years old, these trees appear to have lost a battle with rising sea levels after the last ice age. Welsh legend carries intriguing tales of the lost land of Cantre’r Gwaelod (the Lowland Hundred), a fruitful tract beyond the present shoreline whose sea defences were inundated through either poor maintenance or drunken error.

Could this be a folk memory carried by word of mouth for thousands of years, or is it a later tale devised to account for the same evidence of change visible today? Opinions appear divided, but as I watched the incoming tide gently moving the individual sand grains of the beach it was clear that change is the natural state of the coastline – whether we like it or not.

Here I am up the Tyne Valley – where the Roman bridge crossed the river, carrying Hadrian’s Wall.

Jeff Dexter. Rocking C’s Ranch, Montana. Cattle country. Looking for Cooler Cave: full of bison bones.

Petroglyph. Dry Range, Rocking C’s.

My first visit to this vast landscape of the American sublime.

Faint and evocative traces of the Native American past everywhere.

(Use the controls to navigate through the panorama.)

In the North East of England for the Binchester excavations – Vinovium.org.

Just to the north of our site.

Looking southwest, the Stanegate (Roman, named “stone road” in early medieval times) runs from the left of the picture, through the fort of Vindolanda and then straight up the rising ground beyond; Hadrian’s Wall is on the skyline running in from the right.

One of the few remaining Roman milestones still sits where the Stanegate enters the fort.

Hadrian’s Wall, edge of the built environment

Coquetdale – a remarkable valley to the north of Hadrian’s Wall. A fascinating archaeological landscape.

Lordenshaws – prehistoric rock carvings and hill fort.

Shillmoor – from when the borders settled down in the eighteenth century.

Harbottle – feudal border stronghold, motte and bailey; the Drake Stone, center skyline – a druidic “Draak” stone? [Link]

Woodhouses Bastle – fortified homestead from the days of the raiding Moss Troopers (Holystone Grange in the background)

Magical – Whitton Dean, in the middle ground, is noted for its fairy community, Simonside Hills, to the left, for its mischievous elves.

See also the entry on Chew Green.

One of those staged viewpoints.

We are little different from the days of the Claude Glass – a tinted convex mirror through which the tourist or artist of the picturesque and sublime could see a composed and painterly image.

Now we have the wide angle lens, saturated color (after Fuji Velvia), and the LCD of the digital camera.

Boonville, Dan’s radio station.

Fuji Fortia (super saturated color transparency for the tastes of the Japanese market), old stock.

Casado pinhole camera.

Five minutes off the tourist trail.

In the tracks of northern antiquaries, summer 2007

Part of the estate of the second Earl Grey (1832 Reform Bill) on the Northumberland coast, UK.

Winter’s Gibbet, Elsdon, Northumberland.