Sharing Little Sparta with poet Peter Manson

SHARING LI L S AR A With poet Pete

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Peter (born Glasgow, 1969) is a poet and translator of poetry. His books include English in Mallarmé (Blart Books), Poems of Frank Rupture (Sancho Panza Press), Adjunct: an Undigest and For the Good of Liars (both from Barque Press), and Between up and Lip (Miami University Press, Ohio).

Miami UP also publish his book of translations, téphane Mallarmé: he Poems in erse. Peter was one of three artists on the Sharing Little Sparta residency programme in 2016.

This publication is based on blog posts first published in August and September 2016.

petermanson.wordpress.com

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Canmore 221813 Little Sparta Maybe nothing survives. Maybe everything survives. Maybe everything survives and nobody is left to know it. If every cubic centimetre of icecap were to melt, and it will, Glasgow would be reduced to a sparse archipelago of golf courses, cemeteries and Bishopbriggs. Little Sparta, 280 metres above sea level, will never be drowned. A direct hit from a meteorite could defeat it, but probably won’t. It’s miles from any infrastructure, so an unlikely target for nuclear weapons, unless some aggressor in the Great Patriotic War of 15th August 2026 should realise how seriously it would annoy Scotland, just at that moment, to have its single greatest artwork destroyed.

Maybe the tentacles of half-submerged Edinburgh, reaching south from the Gulf of Newbattle, will stretch as far as Dunsyre, assimilating Little Sparta and turning it into an Urban Park.

Maybe familiarity will lead to vandalism, and someone will take the difficult decision to bury the garden, or its stones at least, for protection, as the Cochno Stone in Faifley, with its ancient cup and ring carvings, was buried in 1964 by archaeologists from Glasgow University, to protect it from Faifley.

It may be that nothing which survives into the very near future can ever really be lost. We are nowhere near being able to upload a human consciousness to a computer, but relatively simple things, like works of art, are not hard to digitise. Little Sparta has already been mapped quite carefully in GPS, the 3D laser scanner is now a standard part of the academic archaeologist’s toolkit, and advances in geophysics may one day allow for the digital excavation of long-destroyed sites. I imagine the space above a buried Little Sparta given over to an immersive virtual reconstruction of the garden, with virtual lichen growing on ray-traced stones, the season always summer, though often wet, with random fractal trees and clouds of cellular-automaton midges that buzz but can’t yet bite. The head gardener, George Gilliland, takes us on a tour – the recording was made in 2056, George is old now, brought out of retirement to share half a lifetime’s knowledge of the place.

They made the poor man give his tour ten times over, recording every nuance and variation for aleatoric playback.

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Canmore 221813 Little Sparta

Little Sparta sits in an old landscape, where stone has always been valued, if not respected.

Many of the prehistoric cairns and structures recorded there in the nineteenth century are no longer visible, robbed out for the material of sheep-folds and walls. The few old carved stones which survive did so by having been placed temporarily beyond reach of erosion and the attentions of the living. A carved panel was found at Wester Yardhouses, near Carnwath, a few miles west of Little Sparta, in a cairn which was destroyed around 1870

From ankin, D . (1875) Notice of a sculptured stone cist-lid and clay urn found in Carnwath Moor , Proc oc Anti cot, vol. 10, 1872-4, p.62.

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Canmore 221813 Little Sparta

The carvings are older than the cairn, their style more characteristic of Irish passage-grave art of the third millennium BC. At some point, the panel was trimmed and re-used as the lid of a burial cist, the carvings facing inwards, as usual, as if this art had been chosen for the connoisseurship of the dead. It’s now in the National Museum of Scotland. Another stone, carved with cups and rings, was found in 2010 by a worker repairing a drystane dyke on Easton Farm, three farms east of Little Sparta

Cup and ring marked stone from Easton Farm, in Biggar Museum.

Biggar Upper Clydesdale Museum.

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Canmore 221813 Little Sparta

The stone had been trimmed to fit the wall, with no regard paid to the carving, but the carved side was protected from erosion by its position inside the wall the back and one edge of the stone are heavily weathered. It’s now in Biggar Museum. It’s a wonderful museum, and there’s not much you can do with portable antiquities other than put them in a museum, or bury them, but history tells me this stone is doomed. The archaeological literature is littered with descriptions of carved rocks which are sketched, contextualised, taken into private or collective ownership and then disappear without trace. If a carved rock isn’t earthfast, it has a half-life in captivity of perhaps fifty years. If it is, and is exposed to the elements, it erodes, often within a few decades.

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There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones Hugh MacD a On a Raised ea

I want to cry out for the ruined carved stones of Scotland, but MacDiarmid would tell me, Those count as buildings too, Dummkopf .

Should we bury them all Should we each take a stone down with us for protection, so the temporary sanctity of our burial places might rub off on the stones, granting them a stay of execution and confusing the hell out of future archaeologists, virtual or visceral Obviously, yes.

But about Little Sparta ...

Nether Millstone

The Shabako Stone The Trustees of the British Museum

In the British Museum there is a rectangular conglomerate slab, known as the Shabako Stone, which is partly covered in Egyptian Hieroglyphics. The damaged inscription claims to be the transcription of a text from an ancient and worm-eaten papyrus onto a more permanent substrate.

The text pertains to the god Ptah, whose words created the world and the gods. The stone was later repurposed as a millstone.

The poet on Silliman is fond of the maxim Hard copy is truth, which he sometimes attributes to archaeologists and sometimes to librarians, though the precise formulation seems to be his own.

If you can’t dig it up in 5,000 years, Silliman asks, did it ever exist Ian Hamilton Finlay, with his stone-carved minimal texts, may outlast us all.

The stone texts at Little Sparta stand at an interesting angle to the age-old argument between the permanence of poetry and the permanence of sculpture.

Sculpture has the edge in that its plastic aspects can survive a culture whose language or written records have died beyond recovery. Poetry has the advantage of numbers, the song in the thousand mouths of a living tradition, the book dispersed in an edition so large that not every copy can be burnt, and then the reprints. The stones at Little Sparta exist in something closer to a scribal tradition than a sculptural one. Nobody expects them to last forever their presence in the garden is the outcome of a continuing process of conservation, evaluation, repair and, when necessary, remaking, drawing on the skills and memories of Finlay’s surviving collaborators and the documents and photographs which record the garden in its many phases.

Like my grandfather’s guillotine which has had three new blades and two new frames, the garden is always itself, more or less, in the summer season when we get to see it, as if time had read it for a ruin and excused it from further decay. Immense effort and good judgement goes into making it so the monthly reports of the gardeners are a fascinating education.

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Nether Millstone

But statues also die, and in Little Sparta, their life, which is their meaning, is a variably fragile thing.

Their languages will survive, even if no-one speaks English or French, German or Latin in the next-millennium-but-one. We can (I can’t) still read the almost telegraphic Latin of the milestones and inscriptions which have been found along the length of the Antonine Wall, though seldom left there. Much of the language in the garden is self-reflective, or reflects in some way on its material context, and such language time-travels with ease.

The SEA PIN mosaic, the SEA in blue letters, the PIN in pink, emerges from a future muddy dig with a jolt of recognition, and if the name of the flower survives, a further small shock. The Panzer Leader tortoises, if fibreglass should prove indestructable, will still get a laugh, though I can imagine a world in its second innocence, where Panzer is no longer a name, just a word meaning armour or shell .

The skull and crossbones with ACHTUNG MINEN might be taken literally it marks the spot where electricity cables enter the garden, and the unfamiliar structure below might cause the dig to be halted and the front garden destroyed by a controlled explosion.

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Much will be lost, or turn abstract and mysterious. The French evolution and the Third eich will still be known, and their names and insignia noted, but they might come to seem almost simultaneous events, the last moves in an endgame whose upshot was ruin for the garden and everything outside it. What will survive will be the sense of this as a place where connections are made, between cultures and languages, across time, a concentration of finds, a small holding evidence of a community of craftspeople working to a common purpose.

Maybe a religious site.

In the garden there is a group of eleven massive limestone blocks, set on a hillside, each block bearing one carved word of a sentence and its author’s two names, both of them also words

THE P ESENT O DE IS THE DISO DE OF THE FUTU E SAINT- UST

Nether Millstone

This is good stone, it will be robbed and re-used, but the stones are too heavy to travel far. The stones will be understood to belong together, and to have to do with order, or disorder, but their grouping will remain conjectural, an index-list of one-word poems of the kind Ian Hamilton Finlay didn’t write, lacking either title or epigraphic context

DISO DE FUTU E IS UST OF O DE P ESENT SAINTTHE THE THE We know what each of these words means we do not know what they said.

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Nether Millstone

Biggar Upper Clydesdale Museum

A sort of makeshift cist urial enclosing the skeleton of a man of shorter than a erage height l ing on his right side knees raised to chin the head pointing west A conjectural reconstruction of the man s features has een made and is now in the museum at Biggar uns re Man he od is surrounded a scattering of trilo ite fossils mostl orth American and uite out of conte t two of the fossils were found in positions suggesting that the had een swallowed the man some hours efore his death which the ma indeed ha e caused Forming the west end of the partiall destro ed roof of the cist are two hea irregular limestone sla s with car ed inscriptions on the inner at surfaces At least one of the sla s has een trimmed to t the cist he two part inscription reading from the head end down is

ESENT O DE

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Inspired by Thankerton Man, Biggar

Upper Clydesdale Museum.

Corticolous and Saxicolous Communities

The dull necessity of weeding arises, because every healthy plant is a racist and an imperialist every daisy (even) wishes to establish for itself an Empire on which the sun never sets.

Ian Hamilton Finlay etached entences on Gardening

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It may be that of all the plants at Little Sparta, only the algal cells inside the all-pervasive lichen have no designs on this inland empire.

Their fusion with fungal cells into a single organism seems entirely unbigoted, a mutually-beneficial collaboration between two distinct kingdoms of eukaryote life. But the mutualism isn’t clear-cut – it may be that the algae get nothing out of the association, and by some measures they suffer by it, algal cells dying to feed the fungal net which traps them, individual cells pierced by structures which in other fungi are the tools of

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unarguable parasitism. Unlike the fungal symbiont of a lichen, the algal or cyanobacterial symbiont can live independently, by photosynthesis, and often grows faster on its own than when incorporated into a lichen.

Lichens are fungi that have discovered agriculture Trevor Goward

Corticolous and Saxicolous Communities

And lichen too are imperialists. As ground cover, their secretions are thought to inhibit not only fungal growth but the germination of the seeds of higher plants, encouraging a monoculture of lichen, which nevertheless helps build the soil. They have a taste for polyester resin, so the little boat moored by Lochan Eck is not safe, and the garden’s fibreglass

tortoises may one day be reduced to a mesh of inedible silica. They love rock art and sculpture equally.

I thought of them as purely destructive, until I saw in Finlay’s library a copy of the minor classic Pan er arfare: Rules For Mass Armor Battles of with mall cale Miniature Figures by Brian Blume (TS ules, 1975 price 4.00). The frontispiece

shows a group of toy tanks, in the shade of two clumps of fruticose lichen, making shift for trees or netting. Lichen as camouflage a well-aged garden is less susceptible to air-strikes.

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As a child in the 1970s, I was very fond of Observer’s Books, the series of pocket hardbacks published by Frederick Warne Co. I think the first one I got was the 1975 edition of the ser er s Book of Unmanned pace ight, though a few, including the ser er s Book of acti, have a unicorn bookplate pasted in with my name on, printed in sharp pencil on the Book of pace ight, tentatively joined-up and in blue pen on the Book of acti. I had thirty or so, almost all about nature or biology or geology I would never have asked for the

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ser er s Book of Modern Art, or of Folk ong or a , though I still wonder what those books could have been like. The only one I ever received unexpectedly was the ser er s Book of Lichens, brought home by my mother from a jumble sale, priced 30p, at a time when the new books cost 1.50 or so. I don’t think either of us knew what lichen were, but she knew I liked the books, and I remember the weird excitement of its evening arrival. I remember too the slight strangeness of the object, the design a bit different, the dust-jacket not quite uniform

Corticolous and Saxicolous Communities

with the others on the shelf. I read it, of course, but there weren’t really any lichen to see in Glasgow in the 1970s, when petrol was still leaded. It felt like an exercise in the acquiring of a purely abstract knowledge, the vocabulary of thallus, isidium, soralium, lecanorine not readily transferable, though I’ve used thallus once or twice. I gave the book away many years later, when some friends took up hill-walking and became interested in the lichen they saw.

I always kind of regretted this, especially as lichen started appearing closer to home (I even have lichen on my windowsill in

Ancroft Street now). When I arrived at Little Sparta, I knew I needed a guide to lichen – of all the volunteer laureates of the garden, the rosebay willowherb and the fringe cups, only the lichen are entirely anonymous to me. I bought a copy of he ser er s Book of Lichens on abebooks. It’s an earlier edition, from the 1960s, not as good as the 1977 one I had (which is described, in he ser er s Book of ser er s Books, as The best beginner’s guide to lichens available, and one of the best nature titles in the series ).

I still don’t know one lichen from another.

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Battleships, for Ian Hamilton Finlay

From Mason E. Hale, r., he Biolog of Lichens (2nd edition London Edward Arnold 1974).

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n oy our Ne Shoes

Bookmark in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s copy of he Granite Pail by Lorine Niedecker.

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nmoored Stones A Cup and ing Stone in a Cage Puts all Canmore in a age

Cup and ring marked boulder at Glencorse Parish Church, near Penicuik.

The stone is said to have been found on a hill near the 17th century Glencorse Old irk, and moved to the new church when it was built in the 1880s. Another cup-marked stone was reported at the Old irk, but has been lost, and the Old irk itself is now difficult to access, having become part of the backdrop to an upmarket wedding venue at Glencorse House. Yet another cup-marked stone was built into

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the wall of an iron age earth house or souterrain, dug into the ramparts of Castle Law hill fort, now on the edge of a military training area a mile or so north-west of Glencorse.

The Glencorse stone sits between two parking spots, inside a low iron fence, presumably protecting it from the cars, or the cars from it, though the symbolism of a pre-Christian monument caged by

nmoored Stones

the wall of a church doesn’t need pointing. Nobody really knows what the cup and ring marked stones mean – the current best guess seems to be that they mark places where gold or copper was mined in Neolithic or Chalcolithic times. Like the stones carved with single words or names at Little Sparta, their meaning is a composite of the properties of the carved stone and its context in the landscape – a context which this uprooted stone no longer has. Even for a latter-day stone-botherer, much of the impact of rock art depends on its environment. The carvings are often indistinct, and best viewed in low, slanting sunlight, which is a scarce visitor to the north-east facing wall of Glencorse Parish Church.

It seems to me that there’s a basic human discomfort with artefacts which clearly had a meaning for the people who made them, but whose meaning is now a void to be filled with our own conjectures. onald W.B. Morris, the great expert on British rock art, has compiled a list of over a hundred theories as to the meaning of cup and ring marks, from star-maps and sun symbols to designs for tattoos and representations of sacred cow-pats. In the absence of certainty, a kind of pressure builds to push away or defuse the challenge of the stones. Some are caged or put in museums. Some, like this stone on Tormain Hill, near atho, have been improved

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nmoored Stones

The cup marks are certainly ancient, but the stone is right on the lip of an old quarry, its edges trimmed square, and the rough carved cross on top may be a relatively recent example of Christianising join-the-dots, turning a disquieting idol into a monument to be left alone.

Even famous stones can disappear quite suddenly.

The Cleuch Stone on Cathcart Castle Golf Course got its picture in the Glasgow erald in 1930

The article is by Ludovic MacLellan Mann, a celebrity amateur archaeologist of the time, and interprets the stone as a record of the solar eclipse of 2983 BC, which it probably isn’t. As if in embarrassment, the stone disappeared. According to Canmore, the club secretary was able (in 2007) to point to a grass-grown outcrop as a place where the carvings ma once ha e een2. The archived site reports on Canmore often read like reports of a kind of very slow weather, with stones appearing and disappearing, lost and found, mislocated and relocated at intervals of decades or centuries.

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I wrote this in 2016. The Cleuch Stone has since been rediscovered and is due to be excavated and 3D scanned.

nmoored Stones

One of the more alien-looking of Scottish cup-marked stones is at Dalgarven Mill in Ayrshire, and is now represented above-ground by a reproduction

Photo by osser1954

The stone was reported in 1895 as forming part of a pavement, but by the 1950s had disappeared from view NS 2965 4581. A workman at the mill, who pointed out it s position stated that the stone was built into the culvert of the lade some years ago, and is covered by the road which runs over it. isited by OS ( LD) 31 August 1956

Enquiry at Dalgarven Mill confirms that the stone is still placed as stated. Its approximate position in the culvert, some 20m long, is not known. isited by OS (

L) 28 October 1982

I can imagine the two stones, original and reproduction, meeting again at the general resurrection of stones, when we have bombed or drowned ourselves back to a time where stone is what we mostly have to work with. The reproduction stone, protected only by the cover of turf which will soon overtake it, will be barely legible the much older original, a portrait-in-the-culvert, may look as suspiciously fresh as it did in 1895, maybe trimmed just a bit to fit the culvert. We’ll smash them both to red gravel and make a path.

This is a post about Ian Hamilton Finlay if I say so.

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Between a rock and a hard place Display of cup and ring marked stones in the basement of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The lower stone is from the actually-existing village of Lamancha, 12 miles east of Little Sparta; behind it, partly obscured by the Lamancha stone, is the cist cover from Wester Yardhouses, 2 miles west of Little Sparta. Little Sparta cannot be seen.

Photo, by kind permission of National Museums Scotland.

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Enter title here “He learned to read of an old dame, whom his poem of the ‘Schoolmistress’ has delivered to posterity; and soon received such delight from books, that he was always calling for fresh entertainment, and expected that, when any of the family went to market, a new book should be brought him, which, when it came, was in fondness carried to bed and laid by him. It is said, that, when his request had been neglected, his mother wrapped up a piece of wood of the same form, and pacified him for the night.”

Samuel Johnson, Life of William Shenstone Late in life, Stéphane Mallarmé answered an interviewer’s question by saying that he was “profondément et scrupuleusement syntaxier” – profoundly and scrupulously a “syntaxer”. I’ve either spent too much, or not enough, of my life trying to look at the world, and at language, through Mallarmé’s eyes, but a syntaxer is what I would be too.

Everything follows from syntax. It makes the rhythms of spoken language possible, it makes argument possible, and if you push hard enough at it, you realise it’s unstable. There tends to be more than one possible syntactic path through a given string of words, and the more you develop an ear for syntactic instability, the more the possibilities seem to snowball ahead of you. The ambient linguistic environment tends to explode into a hilarity of linguistic pratfalls, sentences which end up meaning something quite other

than their authors intended. The act of reading poetry – especially out loud – becomes a vertiginous real-time set of decisions on how to collapse ambiguity into the specific syntactic and intonational choices of this particular reading, a performance never repeatable in quite the same way. I love complexity, and I love irreducibility – the feeling that there is a thing in the world which I can never claim to know completely, even if I made it myself. I love performance, the specificity of one person’s voice and accent bringing the whole of their personal and social history to bear on an object which they bring to life for others. I love the sound language makes, and I love not knowing what I mean by that, since the phonological structure of my accent is not the same as yours, and the pattern in sound made by the same poem in our two mouths will be quite different.

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All of which is to say that I’m not really an identikit fan of concrete and minimal poetry. I’ve often felt it as an attempt to shut down possibility, to narrow the field of view to a scene where everything has its place and stands in controlled relation to everything else. There’s an element of the narcissism of small differences in this – I don’t find myself much exercised by the existence of wistfully anecdotal mainstream poetry, but when yet another generation of Scottish poets discovers the avant-garde, and it turns out to be the avant-garde of the 1950s, I want to cry. The presence in Scotland of two major innovators in concrete poetry, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan, has made that art-form more visible here than it has been in most places, and more of an influence on younger poets.

And so often, what gets produced here is either deliberate or unconscious pastiche of Finlay or Morgan, as if concrete poetry, at its origin the most internationalist movement in modern art, was simply another Scottish tradition.

It’s complicated. When Finlay produced his first concrete poems in the early 1960s, he had already been publishing stories, plays and poems in relatively traditional forms for several years. He hit a crisis, described in a well-known letter to Pierre Garnier: 2

‘Concrete’ began for me with the extraordinary (since wholly unexpected) sense that the syntax I had been using, the movement of language in me, at a physical level was no longer there – so it had to be replaced with something else, with a syntax and movement that would be true to the new feeling (which existed only in the vaguest way, since I had, then, no form for it ...)

It’s a crisis that could have destroyed him completely, but instead he figured out how to continue writing poems, their mood and image-world and humour entirely of a piece with his earlier work, but silent, meant for the reader’s eye and intelligence. Finlay clearly never gave up on either syntactically-regular language or on loud sound – his finely-turned “Detached Sentences” show him to be as accomplished a syntaxer as Mallarmé, he once promised to play Edwin Morgan ‘a lovely Elvis Presley record’ if he came to visit, and the sound of flowing and falling water is a carefully-choreographed element of the experience of Little Sparta.

There’s a pervasive equating of spoken language with noise, though, and of both with a threat arriving from the outside world.

Finlay was born in the Bahamas, and sent abruptly to school in Helensburgh at the age of six, where his accent must have set him apart at once. In all his early workings with Scottish speech, especially Glasgow speech, Finlay

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operates at a weird remove.

Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd haw, an Inseks, an, aw, a Fush is a pioneering book, and a lot of fun, but it’s as if the language is heard from outside, by a slightly cloth ear – its abiding associations for Finlay seem to be cartoon and music-hall, Bud Neill and Stanley Baxter (Finlay once thought of releasing a Wild Hawthorn Press record of Baxter reading his poems). And Finlay survived the terror of the Clydebank Blit , hiding under the table. There’s a wonderful early letter to Stephen Bann (born 19 ), where he writes A certain rigidity in my quickstepping, once led me to dance very slowly and deliberately over a number of records, laid on the floor: that old waxen sort, which crack with a sound like remote mortar fire on a misty evening. (If you are familiar with that).

It’s the gentlest imaginable shot across the bow – to have believed you were about to be bombed, and then conscripted into the war that had nearly killed you, is not something most of us, in Scotland today, are familiar with. It must have permanently altered Finlay’s relationship with, and ability to trust, the outside world.

And then there were the loud, angry poets: Hugh MacDiarmid’s charmless pamphlet The Ugly Birds Without Wings, attacking

Finlay and his younger associates, seems an extraordinary over-reaction to the obvious gentleness and good humour of Glasgow Beasts and Poor.Old Tired.Horse. I wonder what it must have felt like to be the real person, Ian Hamilton Finlay, suffering real distress at the hands of the pseudonymic construct Hugh MacDiarmid, and knowing that there was no person there to be hurt in return. Finlay’s response was perfect: he created the rumour of a protest march and eppelin raid on Edinburgh, and the press and the authorities believed him.

I’ve had the chance of holding, paging through, and reading a lot of Finlay’s publications in the last few weeks, in the Mitchell Library and the Scottish Poetry library, and the experience has been extraordinary. I knew a lot of the work at second hand, through reproductions or selected works, but nothing quite prepares you for the absolute freshness of the original editions. The smallness of the objects, the single small gestures made entirely separately, out on their own in a context carefully chosen for the occasion, the endless fertility of the formal imagination, the constant re-thinking and re-framing of favourite motifs over decades of work, so that new meanings accrete. I don’t think I’d ever 2

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really seen Finlay’s work before: I needed to be slowed down to something like its own pace. Even the library isn’t slow enough, you have to imagine these things arriving in the post, at irregular intervals, when nothing like them existed in the world. The kinetic booklets of the 1960s are my favourites – O ean Stri e Series (1965), its minimal text ticking over from ark to ar , then a rainbow of blank, coloured pages at the end.

Wa e (1969), a tiny flicker-book implementation of a formal theme Finlay returned to again and again in various media – the transformation of one word into another, letter by letter, using the proof-reading symbol for the transposition of letters. I’m fascinated and impressed by Little Sparta, but it’s these tiny books which really move me. Little Sparta was above all a place where Finlay and his family could live, and the tone is much lower-key, as if the works in the garden were reminders – I imagine the poet taking a walk in his own garden to remind himself who he is, and that he is, and the alternate solace and challenge of having all that so close at hand, outside of his head. The printed work has such an immediate, fugitive vitality – there’s colour everywhere, and a kind of absolute unheaviness

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that disarms me completely.

Things that I might pass over as one-liners in a collected edition turn into immensely well-crafted good jokes, and slowly you realise the energy and communal labour that went into making these objects. Almost all of them were made with the collaboration of visual artists or letterers, and simply to have got them printed so well, at a time when there wasn’t really anything you could point to as a template, is an ama ing achievement, more like that of a film-maker in charge of a production crew than a poet.

Everyone gets a credit.

It’s bittersweet to realise that research libraries will always be the only place most of us can get to see this work. Finlay did everything he could to make the work available and affordable when it was published – these things didn’t enter the world as fine art multiples, they were small-press poetry and they cost pennies or a few shillings at most, cheap enough to sometimes give away. But Finlay became known as a visual artist, and the most ephemeral of his early booklets is now a collector’s item. It’s possible to interact with most artworks without physically damaging them, but you need to handle a book to

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make it work, and every time someone touches one of Finlay’s books in a library, it deteriorates.

It’s progressive, and inevitable, and fewer and fewer people will be allowed to make Finlay’s books work as the years pass. I’m really lucky to have had such free access to them at the SPL. The Finlay books in the Mitchell and SPL are from Edwin Morgan’s collection, and one of the pleasures of browsing is noticing the evidences of friendship, and the small marks of Morgan’s interaction with the material. He would tick off publications from

the publisher’s checklist, consciously building his collection; he would often sign the booklets, sometimes with his EM monogram (three hori ontal lines, then three vertical ones); he would pencil in dates on undated publications, and would sometimes correct the typos in larger or less-limited editions.

Here’s an early dedication from Finlay to Morgan, from the small, graceful concertina-fold booklet called on ertina, made in homage to Pat uinn, a small, graceful reserve in the Scotland football team:

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Unconnected thoughts near Finlay Seeing again the colophon of Gael Turnbull and Michael Shayer’s Migrant Press, the publishers of Finlay’s The an ers Inherit the Party (1960):

mimeographed and distributed

by MIG ANT – it’s the least self-important self-description imaginable, telling us what they do rather than what they are.

Maybe it didn’t quite feel like publishing. So many of these presses functioned as part of an international exchange network maga ines like igrant which didn’t really do subscriptions, you just sent a postcard and were added to the

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list, though donations were welcome and, if you were a writer, you probably sent your own books and maga ines in return. It was still just about possible to run a little maga ine of this kind entirely by snail mail in the 1990s, when obin Purves and I edited O e t Permanen e. I still have a notebook full of postage calculations, what I could afford to post out this week and what would have to wait.

Unconnected thoughts near Finlay

Postage costs, especially international postage, have increased so much that it would be very hard to make a maga ine the same way now, without funding.

People find ways to do it, of course: publications can be made very small and light, bigger publications can now be printed on demand in the buyer’s own country, and increasingly, whole print runs cross the Atlantic in poets’ luggage for local distribution. More and more work finds its way on the internet, but so much of that work eventually disappears, in a way that print publications rarely do. I’ve sometimes wondered if anyone still had copies of The ommuter Skim, an email-only journal edited by eston Sutherland in the late 1990s. I used to have them on my hard drive, and maybe eston still does, but the only place they show up on the web is as printed copies in the papers of John M. Bennett at hio State niversity . Maybe he printed them off to skim on the commute. Hard copy really is truth.

Note, February 2021: as if to prove my point, the finding aid to John M. Bennett s archive has now disappeared from the web.

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Unconnected thoughts near Finlay

I love the small evidences of friendship and common interest that are everywhere in the library at Stonypath. I’ve sent a couple of friends photographs of their dedications in books given to Finlay, one of them made nearly fifty years ago. Every time, I wonder if it’s the right thing to do: I think I’d crawl into bed and cry if someone did that to me. My favourite thing in the library so far is this book by Diter ot, sent to Finlay in the hope that he would swap it for issues of Poor.Old.Tired.Horse:

Dieter oth Estate, Courtesy Hauser

Wirth

Note the POSH for POTH, the S a fortuitous mirror-image of Finlay’s beloved proof-reading symbol for transposing letters:

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It’s a radically strange book, with minimal text, lettering and linear graphics often working together through the thickness of the page (so you can only see the complete image by holding a page up to the light). I’m now wondering if ot(h)’s 196 artwork P. .TH.A.A. FB (Portrait of the artist as a ogelfutterb ste birdseed bust ) might be a subtle tribute to Finlay and POTH.

Unconnected thoughts near Finlay

It’s always interesting to see how someone interacts with the books they have owned. I used to sign the flyleaf of every book I bought, but stopped doing that circa 199 , when I first got into the small press books and pamphlets which are now crowding me out of the flat. I signed a few of those, then started to feel I was defacing something I shouldn’t, and I never did it again.

I rarely used to make notes in the margins of my books, but when I was working on my Mallarmé translations, that turned out to be the easiest way to keep track of my reading. I only seem to do this when my reading comes to feel like research – and now I find I’m marking passages in pencil in the margins of my books by and about Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Edwin Morgan was a lifelong keeper of scrapbooks, and many of the books in the Edwin Morgan Library in the Mitchell have something of the scrapbook about them. He would often swell their pages with newspaper cuttings relating to their content, and would sometimes add small, mordant comments or question marks in the margins. The flyleaf of his copy of Hugh MacDiarmid’s pamphlet The Ugly Birds Without Wings has a sheet pasted on. It’s cut from an auction catalogue, illustrating part of MacDiarmid’s manuscript of the pamphlet.

Morgan doesn’t comment, but the page shows that MacDiarmid originally included an aside about his having been best man at Finlay’s first wedding, and about Finlay having been a guest in his house. That personal touch might have undercut the rhetoric, and it was crossed out, but Morgan puts it back in place, and so do I.

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Unconnected thoughts near Finlay

And to tantalise: the only copy I’ve ever seen of W.S. Graham’s first book, age Without Grie an e, in the library at Stonypath, with the pencil draft of a poem, heavily crossed-out in ink, on the front paste-down:

1

Unconnected thoughts near Finlay

(Fu y photo, sorry). I’m usually good at reading erased text, but all I can get here is I am what tears tear down and yet this and all sorrow is where the ocean blinks through your eyelid No less than this I am what bells Toll and tell and hold against my I am what tears tear down And yet my

begins

To speak through this and all Whoever almost-wrote that (probably the young Finlay, channelling the young Graham), really, really didn’t want to see it again, or for me to see it, or you, and I know I should respect that, and leave it covered, but it’s hard not to return to this one book every time, to take another blurred photo under the library’s multiple dim lights and their inescapable shadows, to make one more descent under ink, the only kind of archaeological dig I will ever take part in.

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Oats at 2 o’clock Plain text transcriptions of the book and newspaper scans from this section can be found in the appendix on page 5 .

Stonypath from the 6 inch S map of Lanarkshire (Sheet 21, surveyed 1 59, published 1 6 ) showing mill dam and thrashing mill.

From To ogra hi al i tionary of S otland and of the Islands in the British Seas, vol.1. London: Nicol, 1 1 .

Oats at 2 o’clock

From The ew Statisti al ount of S otland, ol I Lanark . Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1 5.

From the Glasgow Herald, 1 December 1 5 .

Mr James McDonald of Stonypath contributes 5 shillings to the oyal Patriotic Fund for the Crimean War.

Oats at 2 o’clock

From the Glasgow Herald, 1 ctober 1 61, notice of a land improvement loan for Stonypath.

From the Hamilton d ertiser, 1 April 1 6 : Stonypath farm to let. ailway coming soon.

5

Oats at 2 o’clock

From the Hamilton d ertiser, 19 September 1 6 , sale of oats at Stonypath.

From the Hamilton d ertiser, ctober 1 6 , Stonypath farm to let.

From the Hamilton d ertiser, 0 April 1 6 , Displenishing sale of farm stock at Stonypath.

6

Oats at 2 o’clock

From the Hamilton d ertiser, 2 April 1 0, two-bodied rabbit born at Stonypath.

From Transa tions of the So iety of nti uaries of S otland, vol (1 1), notice of a donation to the Society by Mr. James Graham of Stonypath.

Oats at 2 o’clock

Stonypath from the 6 inch S map of Lanarkshire (Sheet 21, revised 1 96, published 1 99), still showing mill dam.

Stonypath from the 6 inch S map of Lanarkshire (Sheet 21, revised 1910, published 1912).

Mill pond seems to have gone.

Missing data What I like most about Finlay is the way he manages to sidestep the decorative use of metaphor and simile, instead reinventing metaphor as something more like literal transformation. His first book of poems, The an ers Inherit the Party (1960), manages to be both plain-spoken and gently surreal – the strangeness is partly in the off-kilter negotiation of the often rhymed forms, partly in the precarious comic bleakness of the lives in it and the landscapes they have to make the best of. These are the poems that drew an immediate response from American poets like obert Creeley, Lorine Niedecker and Louis ukofsky – Niedecker at first thought he must have read some of her early poems. That’s how influence works, of course. You don’t start writing in a particular way because you’ve read somebody’s poetry, you find yourself reading and responding to that poetry because you’ve arrived at a point in your own writing where you’re able to understand how it works from inside. The an ers is subtitled “Selected Poems by Ian Hamilton Finlay”. Not many first books of poetry come with the label “Selected Poems” – it’s a double signal, telling us he has significant

9

history as a poet (there’s a poem in the CP Sele tions dated 19 ), but also that he’s drawing a line here, summing things up, and has already moved on to a different kind of writing.

Within a year, all hell breaks loose.

Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd haw, an Inseks, an, aw, a Fush (1961) literalises the is of metaphor to follow the voice of a single me, reincarnated serially as a fox, a mouse, a bed-bug, a minnie, a ebra, a midgie, a heilan coo, a budgie, a clegg, a giraffe and a coal-horse:

Missing data

The pressure of the wordplay pushes all the way out of the language and into the illustrations (papercuts by John Picking and Pete McGinn) – and it pretty much stayed there, language, visual context and material substrate interacting in variably-complex ways for the rest of Finlay’s life, and still at work for the rest of us. The tiny, exuberant on ertina, from 1962, literally a concertina-fold booklet, makes quite a visual din for such a small object (the pictures, again, are by John Picking):

0

Missing data

1

Missing data

The extreme landscape format of anal Stri e Series (196 ) becomes the perfect place for a landscape poem in the Dutch manner:

It’s somehow more immediately there in the process of turning these pages than in its incarnation at Little Sparta, where one pair of inscribed drystone walls gives way to another, hori on after hori on, as you walk through, with an actual hori on for afters.

2

Missing data

When a given poem exists both as a paper publication and a structure in the garden, it’s often the paper version that is the more self-contained object. Finlay often adds a line or two of contextualising information, at the end of the booklet or on the back of the card, some essential reference that makes the work jolt into meaning. You can’t really do that with a piece of sculpture in a garden, so part of the meaning of the works at Little Sparta has to be brought to them from outside, whether from the isual Primer or by a friend in the know. There’s a kind of “Ah ” that you hear often at Little Sparta, the sound of someone suddenly getting the reference – I’ve emitted that sound, and I’ve caused a few other people to emit it in their turn, but I have awful problems with that “Ah ” It feels too much like the reaction to a punchline, too much like the moment when the physicality of the artwork evaporates and is replaced by an idea. It’s seductive to find yourself able to unlock a work of art for another person, but I also sometimes feel drawn into an uncomfortable complicity with the work. Finlay’s art invites explication, and clearly benefits from it, while most of the art and writing I love best is deeply

resistant to explication, and tends to make the critical work that surrounds it look obviously inadequate or partial or forced. I suppose my basic working fantasy as a language artist is that I might be able to make a work of some complexity whose meaning would largely arise from the shared matter of the language, the meanings of words that we could all be expected to know and their patterned interaction as the poem, a thing to be sounded out time and again but never completely known, not replaceable by anyone’s idea of it. Maybe Little Sparta makes me uncomfortable because it knows that my working fantasy is a fantasy, and a self-isolating one at that. We bring an immense amount of culturally-specific knowledge to everything and everyone we interact with, and Finlay’s work is completely honest about that.

Feeling the pressure to share what knowledge we have, and feeling pleasure in passing it on, is a mark of our being alive to our own enjoyment, not a sign that we’ve entered a clique. The missing data in Little Sparta mark the points where the garden becomes a social space, and those “Ah ”s are entirely convivial.

The sign of the boomerang

Ian Hamilton Finlay, He S oke Like an e (with ichard Healy, 19 ).

The sign of the boomerang

It’s hard to learn about the French evolution or the Third eich from Finlay’s work, though you do end up learning about them, if you have any curiosity at all. It s not quite enough to say that these are things which were once common knowledge and dropped out of public awareness quite recently.

That works, up to a point, with the Classical references – far more people of Finlay’s generation than mine would have known Latin and read vid and irgil, though the ones who did would probably have gone to grammar schools or private ones. Finlay’s other focal interests seem much more idiosyncratic, or at least the kind of focus that he brings to bear on them seems to force much of

5

the rest of the world into a blurred margin. That may be a generational thing, unavoidable if you were born in 1925, bombed as a kid and conscripted before the end of the war – I think of the way the Second World War pops up again and again in Spike Milligan’s television comedy of the 19 0s, with Hitler lampooned in every episode as if he was still a contemporary.

The sign of the boomerang

There’s something really troubling about work that is as belligerent as Finlay’s became, but whose battles were art events staged in the service of a personal philosophy. eal wars continued to happen, real people died, but you hardly see them in Finlay’s work – the Little Spartan wars were the main event. There’s a tiny booklet called S U , dated March 1991, just after the first Gulf War. The booklet comprises two definitions from Chambers s Dictionary (the other is Scud, . to spank ):

Fingers: model’s own. There’s a weird kind of double disconnect here, both from the deadly seriousness of the actual mass bombing, and from the language itself (people did find the word ‘Scud’ funny – for younger iewers, it s the name of a missile – but those two definitions weren’t what they were laughing at). I find that booklet ama ingly upsetting.

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The sign of the boomerang

Finlay’s basic mode of working, after the very early 1960s, involved the making of artworks as limited, discrete gestures, deliberately never building into a linear narrative or argument, but accumulating meaning in relation to every other artwork he made. It works beautifully until he gets really angry, at which point you wish for his own sake that he would allow himself more mental space than the successive axe-chops of the bulletins issued under the aegis of the ommittee of Pu li Safety, Little S arta. The best of these are guillotine-sharp:

(This is an early response to the mention of Stonypath in the ational Trust Guide to Follies, whose editors found the garden insufficiently “manly” for their tastes. Finlay made at least seven other artworks against the Guide, and this was a fairly minor skirmish in a long and angry decade).

The sign of the boomerang

Too often in the 19 0s, Finlay seems like a man who has taken a vow of silence which he tries to circumvent by holding up incendiary placards. It can’t have been that frightening to be on the receiving end of this ire – the publications still read as calculated formal gestures, almost always involving visual artist collaborators – but you sense that Finlay wants them to strike home in a way they rarely do, and you sense the frustration and hurt behind them, channelled into more and more self-defeatingly aggressive works. ne of Finlay’s best and funniest earlier pieces is the 19 1 card The Sign of the udge, made with Michael Harvey:

It’s a gently apocalyptic literal nudge, intended to encourage recipients who owed Finlay money to pay up. The crooked elbow is also a scythe (a shape that takes part in an incredibly complex network of metamorphoses in Finlay’s later work), but I can’t help thinking it looks like a boomerang too. If your boomerang comes back, you know it hasn’t hit anything but you.

The sign of the boomerang

It didn’t have to be like that. Finlay was capable of immensely subtle responses to the work of artists he respected but didn’t quite agree with. It took me several visits to Little Sparta before I realised there was a homage to Mallarmé in the garden – a cinerary urn in Portland stone, with the inscription “ NE E E P E” (carved by Nicholas Sloan, .19 2). The reference is to Mallarmé’s essay “Crise de vers”, the quote “L’oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du po te, qui c de l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés; ils s’allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelle tra née de feux sur des pierreries, rempla ant la respiration perceptible en l’ancien souffle lyrique ou la direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase” “The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who cedes the initiative to the words, mobilised by the clash of their inequality; they illuminate one another with reciprocal reflections like a virtual

9

trail of light upon precious stones, replacing the respiration perceptible in the old lyric breath or the enthusiastic personal directing of the sentence” . Finlay, like Mallarmé, was a seeker after a certain kind of purity in art, but the disappearance of the poet as speaker implies death – maybe the really pure work would prove as inert as our ashes.

The sign of the boomerang

ne of the most unexpectable things Finlay ever made was the 196 booklet O ean Stri e . The booklet juxtaposes brief quotations from essays on sound poetry by urt Schwitters, Ernst Jandl and Paul de ree with photographs of boats at sea, taken from issues of Fishing ews:

50

The sign of the boomerang

The booklet ends with a Posts ri t, a sound poem by Schwitters: Finlay was anything but a sound poet, stressing that any apparently rhythmic repetitions in his early visual poems were a kind of silent patterning meant for the eye, not calling to be voiced. He liked Schwitters, though – for his humour, his domesticity and, here, for the parallel between Schwitters’s jawbreaking consonant clusters and Finlay’s own fascination with the letter codes painted on fishing boats, a kind of abstract sound poetry linking them to their ports of origin. It’s a book of silent pictures of often stormy seas (the cover shows a turbulent sea and sky with no boats visible). The sounds of wind (through trees) and (falling) water were the only sounds engineered into the garden at Little Sparta, and there’s a playful sense here of the theorisings of the sound poets being outpractised by nature. Schwitters, de ree and Jandl are all at sea, but only Finlay knows how to sail a boat.

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25 inch map I found a much more detailed 25 inch S map of Stonypath on the NLS website: Lanark Sheet I.1 (Dunsyre). Survey date: 1 59 Publication date: 1 6 . The thrashing mill would have occupied the old barn which is now a hortus on lusus, the last work planned by Finlay for Little Sparta, and realised after his death. Notice the multiple instances of the long S symbol, a mirror-image of the proofreading symbol for transposition of letters.

These are “area brace” symbols, showing that the lands on either side of a linear feature (stream, fence, path etc.) were part of the same parcel of land.

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A self burying artwork In January 200 , a storm blew down a mature sitka spruce in the Forestry Commission plantation at Achnabreck, near Lochgilphead. The falling tree took another three trees down with it, and their root plates lifted the thin layer of soil up with them, leaving a patch of bedrock almost clean. A passer-by named Sally Wilkin noticed cup and ring markings on the bedrock, and reported the find to ilmartin House Museum. The whole area is full of rock art, with at least two more sites nearby at Achnabreck, another group less than a mile to the west at Cairnbaan, and many more sites in ilmartin Glen.

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A self burying artwork

Little trace remains of Little Sparta.

The books in the library were taken into a public collection, maybe digitised before they fell apart, maybe not, their data lost, in any case, within a single human lifetime, to digital obsolescence.

A few trees survive, none of them growing particularly old before dying of exposure on this land which always wanted to revert to rough gra ing, and did so. None of the ponds ever really wanted to be a pond; they have all dried up and the streams which fed them have returned to their original courses. Maybe a few surreptitious votive offerings, of coins or trilobites or whatever, survive in the soil where the ponds used to be, to mark this as a place of contemplation or wishful thinking.

Lochan Eck has dried up too, but its sheer si e and the depth of rammed clay beneath it mean that it survives as a crop-mark of sorts, showing up in dry weather as a patch of slightly more lush grass, the shape of an old-fashioned flat-iron seen in perspective. The name Lochan Eck made it onto the S map, and perhaps some memory of that name might survive, maybe attached to another feature in the landscape once the

lochan is gone, maybe processed or mutated through whichever languages, if any, pass this way after Gaelic and English have left.

The stones are mostly gone, robbed out and re-used, to patch a dyke or embellish a rockery, or dug up after centuries and placed in a museum, next to the prehistoric and oman remains of South Lanarkshire, the museum falling to ruin in its turn, resurfacing after yet more centuries as a curated assemblage of objects which makes no historical sense at all. The foundations of the farm buildings remain, and this place will probably be read as a farm, ornamented or not. The barn that was once a thrashing mill, then a ruin, then a walled garden, will be read as a barn. The people who lived here will be known by what they threw away. The main focus of archaeological interest will be the disused quarry to the south east of Stonypath, used as a rubbish dump by the farmer and others, with layers of compacted agricultural refuse and one narrow stratum of late 20th century stuff, maybe children’s toys, maybe adults’; small plastic things that will never biodegrade, glass marbles, model tanks.

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A self burying artwork

In an area of rough pasture which was once a donkey paddock, and later an English parkland, a mature lime tree, Tilia euro aea, has fallen down. The root plate of the tree lifted like a lid, revealing a circular plaque of Caithness stone beneath it. The outline of the stone is impressed on the lifted roots – it may be that the presence of the stone limited the growth of the tree’s roots, making it prone to topple. An inscription on the stone reads ILLI TILIAE AT E BE IMA PIN S T E IN FL E N P MIS SE FE TILIS A B S IND E AT T TIDEM A T MN MAT A TENEBAT

Illi Tiliae t ue U errima Pinus (detail) Ian Hamilton Finlay and Peter Coates, 199 .

55

A self burying artwork

If anyone can still read this (I never could), they will recognise it as a quote from irgil’s Georgi s, book 6 : He had lime trees and a most luxuriant pine and all the fruit his bountiful tree took on at its first blooming it kept to its ripening in autumn.

The soil around the plaque holds traces of many other trees, generation after generation of lime tree and pine, at one time a closely-packed circle of trees, each acting as a windbreak to shelter its neighbour from the worst of the effects of the fresh air. The trees slowly built up a thick layer of leaf mould, burying the plaque, and the circle of trees became a clump, which gradually thinned out, until only the one old lime tree remained, out on its own and vulnerable to the Pentland storms.

When it fell, a gravestone appeared with its name on it.

There’s a person there too, rendered namelessly by a Latin pronoun, ILLI – and if irgil survives, we will know that nameless pronoun for an old man who built a garden on a few acres of neglected land.

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Thanks to Thanks are due to the Little Sparta Trust for this residency, part of the Sharing Little Sparta programme. My particular thanks to Alexia Holt, Laura obertson and George Gilliland.

Thanks also to Julie Johnstone and the Scottish Poetry Library, and to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow for access to the Finlay works in their collections.

I’ve got a lot out of conversations with David Bellingham, Thomas A. Clark, Alec Finlay, Gerry Loose and Sarah ose.

Thanks to Lynne Maclagan for turning my blog posts into an eBook.

I thank the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay for the permission to reproduce the included quotations, poems from booklets and cards of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

petermanson wordpress com

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Oats at 2 o’clock Plain text transcriptions from book and newspaper scans on pages

to

.

Page 33. D NSY E, in the pper Ward, and Shire of LANA : formerly a ectory, the Stipend of which, in 1 11, was, from the lands of L C HA T, of arnwath, 6..1 ..1 in money, 22 bolls 1 firlot 2 pecks 2 5 lippies of meal, and bolls firlots 2 pecks 2 5 lippies of bear; and, from the lands of B YCE, of Stony Path, 0..19.. . in money, bolls of meal, and 2 bolls of bear; together with ..6.. . for Communion elements, and .. ..

by Parliamentary augmentation: the manse was built in 1 56: the glebe consists of more than the legal extent: Patron, The Crown, but the Minister is Titular of the Tythes: The Church is old, but in tolerable repair. It is in the Presbytery of Biggar, and Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale. The esident Population of this Parish, in 1 01, was 52, and, in 1 11, was 5. It is 5 m. S.W. from Linton. This Parish is about 5 miles in length, and the same in breadth. The soil is indifferent, and the general appearance of the country is naked, and bleak. The air is pretty good, though rather moist. Peats are abundant. It is watered by the small river edwin. pon the edge of a muir, is a row of sepulchral cairns; some of which have been opened, and found to contain human bones and urns.

From

To ogra hi al

i tionary of S otland and of the Islands in the British Seas, ol. . London

i ol,

.

Page 34. du ation.– The School and dwelling-house are very comfortable and commodious. The salary is L.26, and the wages yield about L.15. William Brown, about 165 , mortified four acres of land, now worth L. , for behoof of the schoolmaster, and 1000 merks, the interest of which is paid him for educating poor scholars. He mortified 200 merks, the interest to be paid to the poor. He also mortified two acres of land to the minister, which has not been possessed by him since the revolution. Mr Bowie laid out 000 merks for the lands of Stonypath; and in 1 59 he mortified them to the minister and kirk-session, to be disposed of as follows: 100 merks to the schoolmaster for educating 20 scholars; 100 merks for educating any lad of a bright genius, to be allowed for six years, whom failing, to pay apprentice-fees; 50 merks, either to be distributed among the poor of the parish, or to be laid out in buying books for the poor scholars; and 50 merks to the minister, with all the other profits arising from the lands, to compensate for his trouble as factor.

From The

ew Statisti al

ount of S otland, vol I (Lanark). Edinburgh: Blackwood 1

5.

5

Page 34 YAL PAT I TIC F ND. C NTY F LANA The Commissioners in Aid for the County of Lanark have to acknowledge the following Contributions from the Landward parts of the County:– His Grace the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon (in addition to Subscription in London) 200 0 0 The ight Hon. Lord Douglas of Douglas 200 0 0 The ight Hon. Lord Belhaven, c 50 0 0 William Lockhart, Esq. of Milton Lockhart, M.P 50 0 0 ––– Total 500 0 0 ––– Parish of Dunsyre ev. obert Waugh, Manse 0 10 0 Mr Waugh 1 0 0 Dr. Waugh 0 10 0 Mr William amsay and Family 0 5 0 Mr William Sanderson, South Tarbrax 0 5 6 Mr David Sanderson, Dykefoot 0 15 0 Mr Jas. Brown, Westhall 0 10 0 Mr William Whyte, Weston 1 0 0 Mr James McDonald, Stonypath 0 5 0 Mr T. Shaw, Anston 0 15 0 Messrs J. A. Brown, Dunsyre Mains 1 0 0 Mr Thomas Brown, Easton 0 5 0 Mr John Cossar 0 5 0 Mr Wm. Crawford 0 5 0 Sums under 5s.

11 0 ––– Total ... 11 1 6 From the Glasgow Herald, 1 December 1 5 . Mr James McDonald of Stonypath contributes 5 shillings to the oyal Patriotic Fund for the Crimean War. Page 35 THE LANDS IMP EMENT C MPANY HE EBY GI E N TICE That appication has been made by the everend J HN AIT N, D.D., Proprietor of Lands in the County of Lanark, for the advance of a Sum not exceeding that understated, by way of L AN, under the Provisions of “The Lands Improvement Company’s Acts,” to be applied to Improvements on the Lands understated, and to be epaid with Interest by way of ent-charge or Annuity, in the Terms of the said Acts.

Name of Estate: Stonypath.

Parish: Dunsyre.

County: Lanark.

Sum applied for – vi . the Maximum Amount proposed to be applied to the Improvements: 150.

Term of Years over which it is proposed the ent-charge shall be spread: 25 Years.

Witness my hand this d day of ctober, in the Year of our Lord WILLIAM NAPIE , Managing Director.

Lands Improvement Company, 2 ld Palace Yard, Westminster, S.W. Hunter, Blair Cowan, York Place, Edinburgh, the Company’s Agents for Scotland.

59

From the Glasgow Herald, 1

ctober 1 61.

ne Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixty-one.

Page 35 DESI ABLE SHEEP AND DAI Y FA M T BE LET, for Nineteen Years, from Martinmas next, 1 6 , as to the Arable Lands, and Whitsunday thereafter as to the Houses, Grass and Pasturage.

THE FA M F ST NYPATH in the PA ISH of D NSY E, Lanarkshire, consisting of about 119 Acres of Arable and Croft Land, besides a large extent of rough heathery Pasture along the edge of the Moor for about two miles, all but enclosed by a drystone dyke, and which an enterprising Tenant might much improve.

The Moor is capable of pasturing about Ten Score of Sheep and is surrounded for about five miles by a drystone dyke five feet high, with suitable and convenient gates.

By the time the Tenant enters, it is confidently expected that the ailway will be in working order, and a Station being within fifteen minutes walk of the house, will afford direct and speedy communication with both Edinburgh and Glasgow, offering the Tenant the best markets for the disposal of his Produce, and enabling him to bring Manures and Coals at moderate rates. There being a good supply of Limestone on the Farm, an enterprising Tenant, with adequate capital, might greatly improve the Land; and such will be preferred and encouraged.

The present Tenant, Mr McDonald, will give every information, and shew the Boundaries. Intending fferers may apply for further information to WILLIAM GEBBIE, Writer, Strathaven, and Written ffers will be received by Dr. J HN AIT N, Dolphinton Manse, by Noble House, till the 10th day of June next, 1 6 .

Strathaven, 1 th April, 1 6 .

From the Hamilton d ertiser, 1 April 1 6 .

Page 36 LIST F SALES. M . GIBS N, A CTI NEE , BIGGA , will Sell as under:– SEPTEMBE .

Saturday (To-Day) – At Stonypath Dunsyre. ats: at 2 o’clock.

Friday, 25th.– At Ass Park, Carnwath. Cows, Crop, c.; at 2 o’clock.

From the Hamilton d ertiser, 19 September 1 6 .

FA M IN THE PA ISH F D NSY E, LANA SHI E, T BE LET For Nineteen Years from Martinmas next as to the Arable Land, and from Whitsunday 1 6 as to the Houses and Grass. – THE FA M F ST NYPATH, consisting of about 119 acres of Arable and Croft Land, and a large extent of Hill Pasture.

The whole farm is enclosed by new Drystone Dykes, except a small part at the northern boundary of the Muir.

There are good roads to Carnwath, West Linton, Peebles, c., and it is expected that there will soon be direct railway communication both to Edinburgh and Glasgow, with a Station in the vicinity of the Steading, an Act of Parliament having been obtained for the line. There is good Limestone on the Farm.

Mr. McD NALD, the present tenant, and Mr P TE S, schoolmaster at Dunsyre, will give any necessary information; and written ffers will be received by Messrs J. H.G. GIBS N, W.S., 12, Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, till 15th ctober next.

Edinburgh, 11th September, 1 6 .

From the Hamilton d ertiser,

ctober 1 6 .

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Page 36 DISPLENISHING SALE F FA M ST C AT ST NYPATH –––– To be Sold, by Public oup, on the FA M F ST NYPATH, Parish of Dunsyre, on T ESDAY, 1 th May, 1 6 , C WS in Calf, Calving ueys, ne-year-old ueys, 1 Brown Horse, 1 Brown Filly years old, 1 Fat Pig, Sheep Troughs, 90 Flecks, 2 Iron Ploughs, 1 idging Plough, 2 Hurkles, 2 Close Carts, Harrows, 1 Pair Potato Harrows, 1 Turnip Drill Barrow (single), 2 Stone Troughs, 1 Pair Fanners, 1 Bushel Measure, 1 Meal Ark (hold 1 loads), a number of Grain Sacks, iddles, Forks, akes, Scythes, 2 Boilers, 2 Cheese Presses, Churn, Milk Sieves, Chessarts, Milk Boynes and Handies, Pitchers, Pails, Tubs, c. Also, the following Household Furniture:– Chest Drawers, Cupboard, Eight-day Clock, Shelf and Dresser, Beds, Tables, Chairs, the whole itchen tensils, and other Articles.

The usual Credit will be given, or Discount for Cash.

Sale to commence at Eleven o’Clock.

ALE . GIBS N, Auctioneer, Biggar.

2 d April, 1 6 .

From the Hamilton d ertiser, 0 April 1 6 .

Page 37 CA NWATH. THE BAILLIEST N C W.– ur Baillieston friends seem to be in raptures about their cow, with a quadruple birth.

In that particular we own beat; but we had a cow some time ago at Greenaton which had a calf with two heads; and in this current year, there was a rabbit born at Stonypath, Dunsyre, with two bodies and only one head – the single head sucked most beautifully for both bodies. We cannot match the cow, but we saw in a paper lately a statement that the lady of an English clergyman had four times uadru les – that is, sixteen children at four births. The ladies of Carnwath never had above three at a time.

From the Hamilton d ertiser, 2 April 1

0.

By Mr JAMES G AHAM, of Stonypath of Dunsyre.

Aug. . A Shilling of ueen Eli abeth, dated 1590.

From Transa tions of the So iety of nti uaries of S otland, vol.

Mr. James Graham of Stonypath.

61

(1

1), notice of a donation to the Society by

EFE E

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eferences are listed by page number 2

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flood.firetree.net canmore.org.uk/site/48842/little-sparta theurbanprehistorian.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/a-matter-of-trust www.aocarchaeology.com/news/article/ballochmyle-survey canmore.org.uk/site/49012/wester-yardhouses www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=26257 biggararchaeology.org.uk/biggar-archaeology-news-cup-and-ring-marked-stone-discovered The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Volume 1, eds. Michael Grieve and W.R. Aitken. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1985, p.425. www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA498 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabaka_Stone www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69457/2000-2009-the-decade-in-poetry www.gracecavalieri.com/significantPoets/ronSilliman.html en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus www.littlesparta.org.uk/gardeners-diary en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statues_Also_Die biggarmuseumtrust.co.uk Robin Gillanders, Little Sparta / Ian Hamilton Finlay, Detached Sentences.

Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery 1998, unpaginated. www.amazon.com/PANZER-WARFARE-Mass-Armor-Small-Scale-Miniature/product-reviews/ www.stellabooks.com/category/observers dobreead.startlogic.com/Checklist.html canmore.org.uk en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souterrain canmore.org.uk/site/51871/castle-law-glencorse canmore.org.uk/site/51869/glencorse en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalcolithic canmore.org.uk/site/50365/tormain-hill canmore.org.uk/file/image/1328547 Glasgow Herald, ‘The Eclipse in 2983 .C.,17 September 1930. www.bbc.co.uk blogs radioscotland 2012 0 past-lives-ludovic-mclellan-ma.shtml canmore.org.uk site 0 cleuch-stone-cathcart-castle-golf-course https: www.facebook.com 2019 6521 99 9 posts in-previous-posts-we-have-featuredsome-of-the-carved-rocks-north-side-of-glasgo 2 101 9205 10 canmore.org.uk/site/40972/dalgarven-mill www.ubu.com/concept/rauschenberg_portrait.html

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canmore.org.uk/site/51670/lamancha nms.scran.ac.uk/database/record.php?usi=000-100-035-756-C canmore.org.uk/site/49012/wester-yardhouses www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-M2hs3s Go 23 24 A Model of Order: Selected Letters on Poetry and Making, ed. Thomas A. Clark, Glasgow: WA 366, 2009, pages 21 and 44.

27 petermanson.wordpress.com/object-permanance 29 www.diterrot.com/catablog-items/bok-1956-59-1959-2 www.moma.org/collection/works/164482?locale=en 3 www.digitisingmorgan.org 33 maps.nls.uk/view/74427710 A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland and of the slands in the ritish Seas, vol 1. 40 London: Nicol, 1813.

34 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Patriotic_Fund_Corporation 3 maps.nls.uk/view/75651204 maps.nls.uk/view/75651201 39 www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520270596 42 www.alamy.com/stock-photo-little-sparta-scotland-the-garden-created-by-the-artistian-hamilton-90231380.html 43 www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?an=abriou sts=t tn=visual primer 4 www.myfonts.com/fonts/finefonts/scorpio 52 maps.nls.uk/view/74954164 www.littlesparta.org.uk/hortus-conclusus www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/finlayianhamilton/9475.html answers.yahoo.com/ uestion/inde ? id=20110227111014AAWkjne guccounter=1 53 www.kilmartin.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Achnabreck-DSR-Te t.pdf www.themodernanti uarian.com/site.php/11014/achnabreck_new_1.html www.kilmartin.org www.themodernanti uarian.com/site.php/144/achnabreck.html www.themodernanti uarian.com/site.php/147/cairnbaan.html www.themodernanti uarian.com/site.php/433/kilmartin_area.html 54 www.youtube.com/watch?v=20vi 3ZhjF4 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf? =305500 Y=648500 A=Y Z=115 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferme_orn e 55 commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fallen_Lime_Tree_and_oscillant_at_Spier s,_ eith. PG 56 Vergil, ucolics Aeneid and Georgics Of ergil, tr. . . Greenough. oston. Ginn Co. 1900 www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwNc d9 f9I

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T A EME T

Photos and drawings are by Peter Manson, unless otherwise attributed. Images of notes by or poems from booklets and cards of Ian Hamilton Finlay have been reproduced with permission from the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Acknowledgements and attributions are listed by page number.

3 4 6 9 2

3 5

6 7 9 2 2 27 29

From ankin, D . (1 5) Notice of a sculptured stone cist-lid and clay urn found in Carnwarth Moor , Pro So nti S ot, vol. 10, 1 2- , p.62.

Cup and ring marked stone from Easton Farm, in Biggar Museum. sed with kind permission of the Trustees of Biggar pper Clydesdale Museum.

The Shabako Stone. The Trustees of the British Museum.

Thankerton Man, sed with kind permission of the Trustees of Biggar pper Clydesdale Museum.

Pan er Warfare ules For ass rmor Battles of WW II with Small S ale iniature Figures

by Brian Blume and Gary Gygax (TS ules, 19 5; price .00). Photos by Wargamer’s Digest. Copyright 19 5 TS Games.

Lichens on artwork, Finlay, Ian Hamilton, Hi Ia et Par ulum uoddam ua Longiore er tum.

From Mason E. Hale, Jr., The Biology of Li hens (2nd edition; London: Edward Arnold 19 ). The image in this book was reproduced from an earlier journal article: obinson, H. ., ‘Lichen Succession in Abandoned Fields in the Piedmont of North Carolina’, The Bryologist, ol. 62, No. (Winter, 1959), pp. 25 -259.

Bookmark in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s copy of The Granite Pail by Lorine Niedecker.

Cup and ring marked boulder at Glencorse Parish Church, near Penicuik.

Drawing by Ludovic Mann from article by him in The Glasgow Herald, 1 September 19 0 canmore.org.uk file image 1 2 5 Photo by oger Griffith ( osser195 ), Creative Commons license. commons.wikimedia.org wiki File:Cupandring.JPG Cup and ring marked stones, by kind permission of National Museums Scotland.

Gael Turnbull and Michael Shayer, Migrant Press, colophon in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s The an ers Inherit the Party, 1960.

Dieter oth Estate, Courtesy Hauser Wirth.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, Wa e, 1969.

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3 33

34

35 36

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39 4 4 42 44 46 47 4 5 5 52

55

65

Scribbled out poem of uncertain origin.

Stonypath from the 6 inch S map of Lanarkshire (Sheet 21, surveyed 1 59, published 1 6 ) showing mill dam and thrashing mill.

To ogra hi al i tionary of S otland, and of the Islands in the British Seas, vol 1. 0, London: Nicol, 1 1 .

The ew Statisti al ount of S otland, vol I (Lanark). Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1 5.

Glasgow Herald, 1 December 1 5 . Mr James McDonald of Stonypath contributes 5 shillings to the oyal Patriotic Fund for the Crimean War. Glasgow Herald, 1 ctober 1 61, notice of a land improvement loan for Stonypath.

Hamilton d ertiser, 1 April 1 6 : Stonypath farm to let. ailway coming soon.

Hamilton d ertiser, 19 September 1 6 , sale of oats at Stonypath.

Hamilton d ertiser, ctober 1 6 , Stonypath farm to let.

Hamilton d ertiser, 0 April 1 6 , Displenishing sale of farm stock at Stonypath.

Hamilton d ertiser, 2 April 1 0, two-bodied rabbit born at Stonypath.

Transa tions of the So iety of nti uaries of S otland, vol (1 1), notice of a donation to the Society by Mr. James Graham of Stonypath.

Stonypath from the 6 inch S map of Lanarkshire (Sheet 21, revised 1 96, published 1 99), still showing mill dam.

Stonypath from the 6 inch S map of Lanarkshire (Sheet 21, revised 1910, published 1912). Mill pond seems to have gone.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd haw, an Inseks, an, aw, a Fush, 1961.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, on ertina, 1962.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, anal Stri e Series , 196 .

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, He S oke Like an e (with ichard Healy), 19 .

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, S U , 1991.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, The Garden is O en, 19 .

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, The Sign of the udge, 19 1.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, O ean Stri e , 196 .

25 inch S map of Stonypath on the NLS website: Lanark Sheet I.1 (Dunsyre).

Survey date: 1 59 Publication date: 1 6 . eproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, Illi Tiliae t ue U errima Pinus (detail) (with Peter Coates), 199 .

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