Flow Country

FLOW COUNTRY

Jasper Coppes & Daniel Lee

Flow Country

Publication Studio Glasgow Glasgow

Preface Flow Country does not exist. To say this is the only way to do Flow Country justice. This is because all language is fraud and cannot overcome its distance from the real Flow Country. But to make such a daring statement, alas, we have to turn, once more, to language – and fail again to reveal any lasting truth.

Flow Country, one might propose, is both a figment of the imagination and it is not. It is both real and allegoric. To describe Flow Country is to transform a topological journey into a metaphysical quest. It is a terrain to which one must return yet never reach, over and over, in the hope that perhaps out of the very fabric of all those unsuccessful attempts to acquaint oneself with its landscape, from all those defeats and misunderstandings, rises a texture replete with furrows and folds that might one day become the land we hope to find. Let us therefore form a new point of view that opposes those that came before us; all those attempts 9

to designate this vast expanse. Flow Country is not one of the largest peat blankets in the world. It is not the picturesque landscape with a golden glow that settles on desolate fields of yellow grasses. It has not been shaped by glaciers that melted to make way for small trees that grew three thousand years ago. It was not the last battle zone for the Highland Clearances and was not affected by sheep farming and deer hunting that replaced the old crofting grounds. Flow Country did not host a nuclear power plant and was not considered a possible dump yard for its toxic waste. Its endless undulating fields were not used for the plantation of cheap pine wood, and last but not least, it has not become one of the largest areas in the U.K. for the protection of birds. This at least has to be made clear before reading this book. These are estimations, claims made without any real substance. They are merely ephemeral viewpoints.

They are what we commonly accept as historiography; the simplified, boiled down version of the mystery of life, seen in retrospect. Each title or description 10

is political and thus based on temporal agendas; ideas and opinions that change with the ebb and flow of dominant regimes. Flow Country does not adhere to any of these regimes, be they dominant or subversive, nor does it listen to any of its descriptions or names.

And yet, it does not exclude them either – such is the unbearable paradox we have to face. Flow Country is a plane of speculation. It is all these transformation narratives compiled, but at the same time it transcends them all. To enter Flow Country is to step into a state of being.

Or to be more precise, to step into the state of many beings that exist at the same time. Have you ever experienced such a state of flow? Do you care what category of consciousness has been used to label your experience? Did you wonder who you were when you were in it? Probably not. Because to be in Flow Country is to be absorbed into being, not to think about what it is to be. It means to experience a certain boundlessness of time and space in which anything is possible. Anything can happen and you are passionately involved, immersed in the unknown.

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The work we present to you, dear reader, extends likewise in time and space and does not obey any chronological order or terrestrial organisation. We hold before us the various attempts that tried to recount, and record, the terrain of Flow Country – each a transformation narrative, including the one that lies before you now. All of these are evidence of transformation, not just of the land, but of ourselves. They testify to the influence of Flow Country, to its emptiness, to its eternal possibility.

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From the sky the Forest appears as a green patch amidst a yellow streak of empty land. From our cold and distant point of view, hovering above this patch at noon, we descend. We want to be nearer to the Forest, observe it from up close, find cover in it perhaps, enjoy its shadows and protection from the open air. Bam! The Forest suddenly disappears.

Our descent seems to have cracked through a time barrier. As we approach the present, the Forest appears to have been removed. In its place we now see rows of grey matter. Pixels lined up in thin bars of grey and yellow, as if those trees had turned into an ancient script.

A musical notation. Slightly below this graphic space we see black holes that perforate the field resembling some kind of torn tissue, skin ripped open, a knee scratching over gravel, lacerated land. We have no way of knowing if our interpretations are correct. We are, after all, still detached; an objective point of view, hovering in mid-air. There is not a space, no single thing that escapes 15

our omnipresent, omniscient, gaze.

Billions of cold, dark and mechanical eyes penetrate the globe, tearing up its surface. They give us this vision of the absent Forest. They translate every bit of it into a coherent code. The code weaves a suffocating net of signs and signatures around everything that breathes and sways, the way a spider mummifies its prey. But we are going to shift our perspective away from this administrative, standardised, rationalised spider web. We are going to turn the surface back into a warm plasma. We are going to replace the authoritative angles of the Ordnance Survey with our own subjective stance, to gain territory for everything that is contradictory, unpredictable and perpetually unknown.

We will regain this unknown territory that eludes the work of planning, of narrative territorialisation.

To write this ambiguous ground is to be ‘forced to march through enemy territory, in the very area where loss prevails’, as Michel de Certeau once wrote. We will venture ‘beyond the protected domain that had been 16

delimited by the act of localising death elsewhere.’ We will ‘produce sentences with the lexicon of the mortal, in proximity to and even within the space of death’.1 The traces we follow through the forest of signs are grey and elongated; they appear as a space created by decomposing trees. An entire forest levelled to the ground, horizontal, now left to decay. This dead forest offers us a new way out of the coded space, it provides a fragmented and incompatible platform. It enables us to transform the imprints that the scriptural enterprise has stamped into this landscape. We will turn these traces into a liminal space, a space always in movement and transition.

A space in which the differences between life and death will fall away – before our very eyes.

1. Michel De Certeau discusses the technological appropriation of the world in a section called The Unnameable. De Certeau proposes to employ the writer’s own death as something that might hinder the chain of production and consumption that governs everyday life. Michel De Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Life” (University of California Press, 1988), 198.

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It’s already several years ago: one morning we found ourselves immersed in strange boglands. So unfamiliar that we could not estimate their limits.

We repeatedly returned to the vast, seductive yet peculiar appeal that this landscape offers, regardless of the weather. We became bogwomen and bogmen, held within the warm embrace of fossil fuel; an embrace, that is, of archaic fields of peat. Even in winter, in sub-zero temperatures, its gentle glow could still be felt underneath the surface as if the yearly heather burn was still smouldering below. Over the course of those years we made notes, took photographs, wrote survey reports and created film recordings. The landscape became a bewildered friend. We were obsessed with the idea that if we could get close enough, dive deep enough into these grasslands and pools, that we would find a key to unlock its many secrets, a cure for its schizophrenic nature. We imagined, as in a baroque hallucination, an entire world of bacteria and microbes under our feet; not unlike those drawn with austere symmetry by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. And 18

like him we were hoping to find proof of an evolution in which humans and nature were not separate. We were convinced that deep down they both obeyed one and the same harmonious law.

In retrospect, this seems such an anachronistic attempt, so reminiscent of the industrial world and its never ending pursuit of efficiency and progress; the hope of discovering a patterned language behind it all, so suspicious of everything that divides and excludes.

Only much later did we come to the realisation, as Saint Augustine keenly observed, that we were indeed too eagerly impressed by what we saw merely with the naked eye, too readily subsumed in our admiration of ‘the summits of mountains and the vast billows of sea and the broadest rivers and the expanses of the ocean and the revolutions of the stars’. And as Augustine predicted: we overlooked ourselves.2

2. Saint Augustine writes these lines in his Confessions, between 397 and 400 AD. His reflections on our relationship to internal and external landscapes seem to inspire 19

Our observations had to be re-adjusted by the minute – once steering away from classification and deterministic ideology, once more from absentminded admiration and jaw-dropping wonderment. To write an autobiography of this land we had to, somehow, look both within and without; both at our wanderings across the vast Flow Country but also at the ‘vast cloisters of memory’ to which Augustine finally turned. This internal universe would appear to comprise of an equally limitless terrain, including pine mountains and millions of stars.3

Christian leaders to this day. Pope Francis provides a more contemporary version of the statement when he says: ‘The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast.’

Pope Francis, “Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home” (UK: Catholic Truth Society, 2015), 158.

3. The comparison is certainly not limited to Christian traditions. Kabir, a 15thcentury Indian mystic poet and saint, writes about how pine mountains and millions of stars can be found inside a clay jug – by which he presumably refers to the human body. Kabir, “The Kabir Book: 20

An archaeology of the Flow Country would not just be an archaeology of the physical land that lay before us. It would also be an archaeology of ourselves.

But set against the slow breathing in and breathing out of the bog over decades, these selves, we already knew, would not be the end product of purely cerebral individuals, absorbed in private contemplation. We would be beings composed of the incessant interruptions and interrelations between minute organisms that each have their own ‘reason’ to exist. These selves would be the result of the unpredictable behaviour of a complex collective endeavour between incalculable distinct creatures, none of which could be defined as strictly individual.4

Forty-four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir” (Beacon Press, 1977).

4. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan paraphrase Walt Whitman when they state that we are multicellular beings that contain multitudes. Mixotricha paradoxa, for instance, is a species of protozoan that lives inside the gut of an Australian termite. They have five genomes, as they form very close symbiotic relationships 21

This being, this self, would oppose the entire idea of a ‘model organism’.

The emergent factor we call consciousness would rise up from the rubbing, frothing and wriggling of microorganisms in the gut, on skin and brain – in fertile pool and squashy moss, on metallic film and acrylic compound.

It would include the extended nervous system that stretches its tentacles throughout the entire body to feel into the atmosphere. We would not walk on or over, but only through and within.

Take one step into Flow Country and you will know why. With each step you are sucked into its substance, and each time you have to haul yourself from it.

There is no other landscape that slows down your pace so much. There is no landscape that forces one so strongly to become undone. Your body is struggling to stay autonomous as it is pulled into a state of being with.

And thus we gradually became beings in service of the land, mixing its seeds with four types of bacteria. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, “The Beast with Five Genomes” (Natural History, 2001) 38–41.

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in the swampy earth, inhaling and exhaling its tiny drifting particles of pollen in the air. Our minds, too, progressively needed to be defined by our relationships with other creatures, including those bodies without legs or organs. Our individual human mind would be really a process of interaction; between the brain, the body and everything we touch, everyone with whom we relate. This meant that wherever we pointed our recording devices, we would immediately turn these devices towards ourselves and exclaim: ‘none of what we think and feel is actually us, it’s all part of a much more complex process. We are a field of relations, an entire community of beings that all constitute their territories and interests – they are responsible for these recordings, not us!’

‘But what is this?!’ You might exclaim in return. ‘This smells of spiritualism; occult, esoteric mockery. This dissolution of the self is a complete hypocrisy.

We are, after all, still individuals with responsibility for our actions in the world.’ And of course, we would reply, 23

you are completely right. This is precisely why we should not overlook ourselves, as Augustine suggested. We should pay close attention to the seemingly insignificant, the minutest workings of our bodies and brains, as we continue our journey into the open field. Because these miniature particles of our sense of self might turn out to be intimately interwoven with the characteristics of that open land beyond.

In the past the human mind has sometimes been compared to the mechanism of a film camera. William James compared visual perception to the flickering images of the zoetrope; Henri Bergson compared it to the brief illumination of movie frames as they pass through the projector.

The film registers what happens outside and stores it on a film roll (memory) which can later be reviewed.

Visual perception and memory are directly linked. Now, with our new model, we could turn this idea around and oppose the notion of the landscape as a machine. We could say that the 24

process of making a film is enabled by its relations. The production of a film has to be considered in terms of the entanglement and interaction between minerals and chemicals and microorganisms of which we, humans, are one particular emanation. These creatures inhabit the camera, as well as our eyes behind the lens. Our minds and bodies that clumsily stumble over the bog are part of the exchange with that rich terrain, teeming with life, in front of the camera. Any film, then, is a co-production of organisms!

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We came to see our endeavours as a preparation for the liquid land to come.

We needed to rehearse and practice all we could, in order to adjust to a terrain that is never stagnant, that is constantly adrift. On shuddering bog, on quaking mire, the boundaries of the body will become a little less fixed, slightly more fluid. Thoughts become a little more porous, less isolated within the individual mind. The turbidity of thinking yields towards a certain excitability of minerals such as those found in fertile soil. Since these minerals are sensitive to radiation in the same manner as plant and animal organisms, we too are affected by the radiance of things.5

5. The German physician W. Hellpach made a similar observation, which became a benchmark for the movement of environmental psychology. Hellpach noted how sensitive the human mind is to atmospheric conditions. He defines several constitutional reaction types; ways in which the climate stimulates our 27

The quality of air and the substance of the earth determine the character and mood of the human subject, the German physician W. Hellpach keenly observed. They shape our psychopathological behaviour.

Because the soil is full of humours and the sky permuted by psychological idiosyncrasies. To recognise this, we need only turn our heads towards the grey that drifts over moorland after a storm. We, human organisms, are born into and traverse the same active ground.6

psycho-physical changes. Alterations in the weather effect the way we experience ourselves. Willy Hellpach, “Geopsyche” (Leipzig : Wilhelm Engelmann, 1939).

6. Historian and theorist Spyros Papapetros refers to the views of Hellpach in his essay “Future Skins”. Central to the book is a text written in 1926 by Bauhaus student Siegfried Ebeling, in which he explores architecture as a material envelope that grows organically from the human body, uniting its skin with the periphery or fabric of a city. Siegfried Ebeling; Spyros Papapetros, “Space as Membrane” (Architectural Association Publications, 2010).

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But could we say that this coming together of particles is some sort of assemblage? Certainly not. Do you think our thoughts are merely assembled? Can you distinguish one thought from the next? Can you separate someone else’s thoughts from yours?

The coming together of mental content is, just like a landscape, not something that is arranged by the force an external hand; by someone in charge of the final edit. Whatever comes together does so in an entirely arbitrary fashion. And none of it is meant to stay. The elements are not just stitched together as in a patchwork of common knowledge.

At close inspection the individual parts of experience cannot be told apart.7 7. The sequence of a film, seen from this new point of view, would not be an assemblage in the sense of a mere collection of images of the external world pasted together. It would be an assemblage in the terms with which Deleuze and Guattari describe it. By contrast, stratification is the process of creating hierarchal bodies, while territorialization is the ordering of those bodies in ‘assemblages’, that is to say, 29

What we are speaking of is more like a meshwork, a process of chemistry, of repulsion and attraction.

A thermodynamic flow that generates its own internal state, growing and evolving all the time – an amorphous jelly continuously at drift. The constellation can grow in any direction in an entirely unexpected way because new reactors constantly enter the system.8 When we speak of Flow Country we must speak of a process of cementing together: a slow accumulation of minerals, a chemistry fuelled by flows of meaning that are activated by differences rather than similarities. Because an emergent unity joining together heterogeneous bodies in a ‘consistency’.

Daniel Smith and John Protevi, “Gilles Deleuze” (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring Edition 2018).

8. Manuel De Landa gives a detailed analysis of this dynamic, stating that: ‘the growth of the system is constrained by the environment only in a proscriptive way (what not to do), rather than in a prescriptive way (what to do)’. Manuel De Landa, “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History” (Zone Books, 2000) 63.

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differences clash, and in doing so they produce a lot of heat. The deeper we dive into things the hotter it gets. Think for instance of magma. This hot fluid continuously whirls below what might be properly called the zone of admixture: that miraculous surface of bio-energetic and atmospheric shifts through which life streams.9 We ourselves are simply added to the mix. This landscape surface is not solid. It is a complex surface; waterlogged, soft, springy, sinkable, sink in-able. A zone to walk through, not over or upon. Liquid surface extends to capillaries of vegetation with height, reaching up into the thick air and light.

A surface to walk through, wade through and swim through. A surface which thins with height into the upper atmosphere.

However much we might consider it unlikely, we become part of this

9. Tim Ingold refers to the zone of admixture. His essay provides insightful arguments of how knowledge of the world arises in the process of engaging with the world. Tim Ingold, “Footprints through the weather-world; walking, breathing, knowing� (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2010) 121-139.

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non-human place. But the term admixture might still sound too mechanical. Too much borrowed from the industrial paradigm, too cool. We could, therefore, also call it the universal soup. Or, to borrow a term from the insect kingdom: Royal Jelly. Immersing oneself in this jelly is delicious and deeply fulfilling, like bathing in honey.

We should speak of immersing and saturating rather than disintegrating.

Integration is what we mean; merging, blending, intermingling.10

10. How do we estimate the success with which these elements are joined together?

How do we appreciate the level at which we become immersed in an ‘other’ environment? David Siegel’s perspective on integration might be relevant here.

David Siegel, “The Developing Mind” (The Guilford Press, 2015).

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But how do we surrender to something we don’t really know?

How can we merge with an environment of which only a small percentage is accessible to the naked eye? Why would we want to merge with the dark side of things? Wasn’t it our intention to write from that part of reality that is not monitored? But do things even have a dark or hidden side? Only humans hide.

Only humans have reasons to do so.

Why would something want to hide? Out of shame? Because it is afraid of being rejected? Afraid to die, to disappear?

Things don’t really hide from anything.

And they certainly don’t have anything to hide. They are quite comfortable the way they are, completely what they are. We might not be able to perceive this kind of completeness, but that is merely at our own request. A deficiency of our own perceptual apparatus. Not a restraint felt by things. Still, to say that what we don’t perceive does not exist would be to overestimate the role of our perception.

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Things do exceed our capacity to know them and they always will. Take the landscape before us: the field of our direct perception stretches to a couple of hundred metres or so. What lies beneath our feet we do not know.

This is, quite literally, Dark Matter.11 We could push instruments into the peat, to extend our perception in space and time, as science does.12 But that would not give access to the things themselves beneath the surface, those things that writhe and squirm in squashy bog. It would only give access to numbers, and – anyone would agree – numbers are not the same as things. They are ontologically different.

The life of things happens mostly in the dark, that is, outside our line of vision.

If we dig out a thing we can guess about its previous dark life under the earth.

11. Donald S. Murray, “The Dark Stuff” (Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2018).

12. See page 36 & 37: Adaptation of pollen percentage diagrams of the Cross Lochs.

Based on Daniel J. Charman, “Late‐glacial and Holocene vegetation history of the Flow Country, northern Scotland” (New Phytologist, Volume 127, 1994). 155-168.

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But is it still the same thing when we hold it to the light? Will it stay the same thing after our investigation? What is a thing when we do not perceive it? What is it when we are not aware of it? We simply do not know! We can only know a thing within the limits of our definitions. That much is clear. And that definition of a thing is the result of our interaction with it. Which means that in the moment we perceive a thing we really get to know ourselves. Instead of speaking of things as if they were individuals that have their own ‘own-ness’, an outside face and a hidden interior, we should consider ourselves more as things – complex beings, complete in every moment, but never one thing alone.13 We are, each one of us, an entire dark universe and we are always expanding, always changing shape.

13. This view is, to some degree, in contrast with Graham Harman’s object oriënted ontology. Graham Harman, “Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory” (Polity, 2016).

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Awareness of the world happens in a progressive manner. Thoughts don’t develop in an abstract, unspecified, isolated space. Our minds don’t exist in a vacuum. They operate in a continuously shifting environment.

As such, thinking is similar to walking.

The more room to walk, the wider the reach of our thoughts. Ideas pop up along the way. There is a reciprocal relationship between our minds and our environment.14 Both our environment and ourselves are mutually affect-able,

14. Heinrich von Kleist famously argued that thoughts don’t actually exist before they are shared with another human being. von Kleist advises: ‘If there is something you want to know and cannot discover by meditation, then, my dear, ingenious friend, I advise you to discuss it with the first acquaintance whom you happen to meet.’ Heinrich von Kleist, “On the gradual construction of thoughts during speech” (trans. Michael Hamburger, first published in the third programme of the BBC, 1951) 1.

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irritable, sensitive. Walking is thinking in movement, and so we are capable of being moved. But walking is also inherently social, as we tend to cross the paths of other beings that have been, or still appear, on the path we’re on ourselves. If we are in an isolated space all the time, our thinking becomes cut off from others, and eventually even divorced from ourselves.

When we surround ourselves with mathematical equations and computers, our world becomes repeatable, repetitive. When we look at the world through a camera, our thinking will take on the characteristics of that very medium – our thoughts will appear as representations, second-hand experience, projections. So to say that thinking is like walking is not entirely correct. Thinking itself can be anything.

It will take on any shape, depending on the environment you provide it with.

This means that the outcome of thinking will be determined - more than anything else - by the medium, the instrument, or the environment, through which you develop a thought. The outcome of your investigation produces a deeper 42

understanding of the medium, rather than an understanding of the subject about which you wanted to know more.

To produce knowledge of the world by using a film camera will result in more knowledge about the medium of film.15 Producing knowledge by walking around results in walking-knowledge. Our bodies become containers of psychosomatic understanding. Because to write about the production of knowledge through walking, produces another type of insight than the weight we feel in our legs after a long day’s walk. Any knowledge of the world is really knowledge about the mode with which we investigate it.

Epistemological models are worldviews, stories, narratives. These worldviews do not necessarily overlap. They are not necessarily compatible. But they don’t exclude each other either. The

15. This view seems to be in line with what Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed.

The form of a medium embeds itself in any message it would transmit or convey, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. Marshall McLuhan, “Medium is the Message” (Bantam, 1967).

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choice of a specific mode of knowledge production, the choice of a specific narrative, is essentially based on subjective preference – and that is what makes this choice strictly personal.

One chooses to relate to the world in a certain way. One chooses to walk or to stay in the office.

The big question we are arriving at, of course, is the following: is there a world outside at all? Aren’t we humans so deeply limited by our ‘narrative’ relation with the world, that the world itself is fundamentally out of reach? Does any aspect of the world ever penetrate this linguistic shell? Does it ever seep into the internal universe we call the self? This is a very central question to our project: can a landscape tell its own story? Can our method of investigation be based on the language of the land? Can Flow Country itself produce a model with which we acquire knowledge about Flow Country?

‘All things are engaged in writing their history’, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote down in 1850, ‘The ground is all 44

memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.’16 How does Flow Country register itself?

What shape does its narrative take in the land? Could this self-registration provide us with a model, a worldview that is written by the land itself?

Let’s first look at what characterises our own narrative approach to the environment. What pattern underlies our interpretative tendency? Based on observations of layers of substrate, our models of thinking can be viewed as existing of lines.17 Lines of the traces we

16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson Vol. IV” (Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1904) 17. Vilem Flusser makes an interesting, almost visionary, observation in this regard in his essay “Line and Surface”: ‘we have not yet learned how to read films and TV programs. We still read them as if they were written lines, and fail to grasp their inherent surface quality.’ Vilem Flusser, “Writings” (trans. Andreas Ströhl, University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 25.

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leave behind on the surface, lines that cut through it, or lines piled on top of each other like layers in a rock. Lines of flight drawn towards the horizon, lines drawn to conquer territory on a map, borderlines. Lines arranged as text on the page, delineating our thinking. We go from A to B. From the past to the future. From worse to better, or better to worse. From ignorance to ever more understanding. Such is the dominant model with which we navigate through life. We are trained to follow lines of inquiry. There is always more to be found elsewhere. More knowledge, more wealth, more progress. No wonder that so much of our world looks like an excel sheet! Full of lines. Forest plantations cover the globe, all lined up in neatly arranged trenches, along easy access roads. Aha! Now we know what we need to change. The linear approach needs to be abolished. Forests bulldozed to the ground, dead trees will fill up the linear trenches. In time they will turn lines into an open field. The trees are grown over by moss and lichen. Round pools will start to pattern the field of our experience. The Wetlands will have their 46

return. The liquid lands are back.

What happens next? Our viewpoint opens and widens and stretches until we arrive, finally, at the endless surface of Flow Country.

Does the bog forget these linear words like others might? Or are they embedded into the surface, cushioned on the peaty mass below; memories in multiple surfaces? Let us learn to speak this strange language, get to know the glossary of Flow Country that knows no lines. Learn the movement of clouds and the shadows they cast on moorland on a bright and windy day. Let us speak of the mirage caused by mist or haze rising from the ground. Let us learn about the watercourse running through peat, often dry in the summer. How to read this form which resembles veins or sinews? How to read the sedge that grows on wet moor and produces tufts of white silky hair? The people living here were called the Cat people. In Scots, the native language of this land, ‘Flow’ means ‘springy, mossy ground’ - ‘Moss’ translates to bog. The English word bog comes from Gaelic and is still 47

to be found in its original form in Bog na Gaoithe ‘bog of the wind’. Like water, Flow Country is not limited to a linguistic border. It flows from one river mouth to the next. The word ‘fliuch’, with which a Gaelic walker would perhaps describe this land, basically means ‘wet’.

Some local inhabitants speak of ‘Flouw’ Country rather than ‘Flow’. Besides Gaelic and Scots, Norse explorers walked these lands as well. Their reading of the landscape can be found in place names such as Forsinard and Forsinain - fors being a Norse loanword, as in the paired Fors na h-Àirde ‘the waterfall of the high ground’ and Fors an Fhàine ‘the waterfall of the low ground’.18 Within this line of inquiry, let us reconsider the word ‘wild’. If we trace its lineage down the system of linguistic roots we find it has its origin, again, in Norway. But it

18. These insights are generously offered in: Ruairidh MacIlleathain (Roddy Maclean), “Gaelic and Norse in the Landscape Place names in Caithness and Sutherland A’ Ghàidhlig is Lochlannais air Aghaidh na Tìre Ainmean-àite ann an Gallaibh, Cataibh is Dùthaich” (Scottish Natural Heritage) 17.

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is cognate with the German word ‘Wald’, which is used for woods.19

19. At a broad level, there are similarities between modern plantations in the Flow Country and 18th century landscape gardens. Both are neoliberal landscapes crafted by capitalist forces. These are designed landscapes. Landscape gardens, designed by pioneers like Capability Brown, were created out of the profits of empire and inheritance as a tool for social display and power. Such gardens sought to control and shape the environment to provide vistas, walks and new experiences as gentry moved along avenues and explored follies. In the same way, forestry plantations invite you to walk along a maze of fire breaks, glimpsing the odd deer with framed views to the landscape beyond. New lines of trees follow parts of the topography, steep slopes and burns, but cut across others. These landscapes were crafted out of forestry subsidies and tax breaks in the 1980s and 1990s that financed nearly 90% of new forests in Scotland. Trees and avenues were created by government policy, the tax return and the desire for reliable revenue streams.

Landscapes defined as assets. Rarely visited, never felled for profit, these are landscape gardens for the deer and birds alone. K. Jan Oosthoek, “Conquering the Highlands: A History of afforestation of the Scottish uplands” (Australian National University E Press, 2013) 151.

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Will the reforesting of barren landscapes, with which many countries today redeem their guilt in the face of environmental crisis, foster a re-wilding of our environment? Or should we plant our sense of wilderness in another image, one that does not include the use of woods?20

20. Capitalism creates and destroys structures. Some landscapes are winners, others losers, in the neoliberal machine.

In an urban context, we see the ‘largescale landscape transformation of industrial areas’ epitomised by the Urban Development Corporations in the London Docklands, Teeside and Merseyside of the early 1980s. At the same time, in a rural context, the same neoliberal machine was actually industrialising the far north of Scotland with the state subsidised planting of coniferous forests in the Flow Country, promoting those that owned land and the forestry industry. Penrose, following Schumpeter, describes the idea of ‘Creative Destruction’ which captures the innovation and negative impacts on society and the economy inherent in dynamic economic development. Could the planting of the northern forests be termed as ‘Creative Destruction’?

Certainly, market forces and privatisation 50

led to the destruction of the peatlands to enable further economic growth, however the true ‘Creative Destruction’ is actually being undertaken by the RSPB in their programme of deindustrialisation through the deforestation and restoration of the peatlands – change, creation and transformation. In felling the neoliberal forests they are transforming one artefact or commodity into another; bog, to forest-capital, to restored-bog-capital.

The latter has more social value, as a ‘wilderness area’ and bird reserve, but still plays to an agenda. The industrial landscape has been ‘absorbed, expanded, refurbished and redeveloped’ – part of a larger global post-industrial worldview.

This re-wilding has created something new and innovative at the expense of the forest.

K. Jan Oosthoek, “Conquering the Highlands: A History of afforestation of the Scottish uplands” (Australian National University E Press, ,2013).

S. Penrose, “Creative destruction and Neoliberal landscapes: postindustrial archaeologies beyond ruins” In L. McAtackney & K. Ryzewski (eds) “Contemporary Archaeology and the city: Creativity, ruination and political action” (Oxford University Press, 2017) 171-189.

J. Shumpeter, “Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy” (New York: Harper Perennial, 1942 ,1975).

N. Brenner & N. Theodore, “Cities and the geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’” (Antipodes 34, 2002) 349-379.

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Flow Country’s place names such as Helmsdale ‘Hjalmund’s dale’ and Halladale ‘holy dale’ point to its transcendence of these questions; a landscape both of the soil and of the heavens. And up there we can list the discourse of birds. The slow, slurred whistle of the Golden Plover that plaintively calls in the mist. The short fluty tue-tue-tue of the Greenshank from amidst the Bogbean. The check-checkcheck of the Hen Harrier in his display flight. The odd chirp of fighting rats. At what stage will the cawing of birds, their beeping, cackling and coughing, their gobbling and booming, intermingle with our own incessant chatter?21 Because the murmur of the world is unstoppable.

So little of what we say to each other makes any sense! Do our hand-gestures and facial expressions communicate

21. ‘All these stammerings, exclamations, slurrings, murmurs, rumblings, cooings, and laughter,’ [...] ‘all this noise we make when we are together makes it possible to view us as struggling, together, to jam the unequivocal voice of the outsider’.

Alphonso Lingis. “The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common” (Indiana University Press, 1994) 104-05.

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more meaning? Does the wiggle-dance of bees compose a more significant exchange? Or even beyond the body, do the lives of sentient beings – in their entirety - not express certain thoughts as well?22 To be ‘yourself’ in a landscape, is already to communicate with the many ‘selves’ that make up the environment of plant and animal life.

Walking through the ‘Flows’ is to join in with the murmuring chorus, to become absorbed in the messages it sends.

Our meandering path is not so different from the snaking of a hillside burn; our pauses are not so different from the upright silence of a stag. Our presence stands before the elements of sun, bog and water. We are all part of the same

22. This idea we borrow from Eduardo Kohn. In his book Kohn introduces the intriguing perspective that ‘to be’ is already ‘to be in communication’.

Being, as a human being, or an animal or non-animal being, is already ‘to be’ semantically. Semantics here, it seems, is not so much a translation or mediation of an external reality, but the language of reality itself. Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think” (University of California Press, 2013) 99.

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semiotic system. But the water that flows in the burn meanders not only through space, it also traverses through time; across the entire globe, it’s always been the same water. It is the same water that passes through our veins. The water on which Flow Country drifts is cyclical: ombrotrophic bog to ocean. It has moved through the same stages for billions of years: river, fog, cloud, rain and ice.

It was absorbed by the bog after rainfall and evaporated in the air on sunny days.

What does the water remember of its journey through the bowels of worms?

What does it recall from the moths that drink the tears of sleeping birds? In our attempt to speak the mother tongue of this land, we will have to speak cyclically: of resilience and blossoming as much as we must speak of rot and of decay.23

23. Margaret Wheatley states that we should look at human social evolution in terms of cycles, rather than as a continuous lines of progress. According to Wheatley we are currently in a ‘season’ of decline – a moment in which old structures start to dismantle, to rot and ferment just as they do in nature.

Rather than resisting this inclination 54

to digress, we should engage together with compassion and discernment, selfdetermining our way forward. Margaret Wheatley, “Who Do We Choose To Be?�

(McGraw-Hill Education, 2017).

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Speaking on behalf of these elements; of the ecological, meteorological and geological world, is not yet speaking in the name of Flow Country. In fact, it might be questionable if we can, and should, speak in the name of anyone or anything at all. Because, isn’t speaking on behalf of a way of denying the represented their own voice? Isn’t speaking ‘on behalf of’ actually speaking ‘as if we were something or someone else’? There are people who speak on behalf of the forest and promote its prosperity and continuity as if our own lives depended on it. There are those who speak on behalf of the birds – birds that prefer the open plane. They tweet and twitter about the benefits of a landscape without forest, on which our lives equally seem to depend. These forms of interspecies representation are based on old and deeply engrained relationships between ourselves and the trees, between humans and birds.

But what about sphagnum moss? Who 57

represents that? Carbon reduction campaigns will speak in its name.

The moss absorbs carbon quicker than a tropical rainforest! But what about bacteria or worms? Do we not also rely on these non-charismatic beings?

Should we not form an alliance with the less handsome creatures that squirm in these liquid lands? What would Flow Country look like if every single particle of it had a representative in the human realm, to lobby for its cause?24 What wars would be fought between these different species? On what grounds would they be fought, what reasons would they have to exist at the expense of others? Flow Country results from the cacophony of sounds that each of these lobbies express, trying to convince all the others. Flow Country is the fundamental difference between

24. Bruno Latour elaborates on his proposal of the ‘parliament of things’.

Rather striking is his emphasis on war as a basic acknowledgement of the fact that the earth is not a harmonious unity or neutral arbiter, but a battlefield between species. Bruno Latour, “Facing Gaia” (Polity Press, 2017).

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them and yet the truth of each individual vantage point. It is also the inevitable landscape that emerges out of the mixture of vantage points.

It is always changing, forever in flux.

The consequence of this truth is that we too, as archaeologists and artists, need to choose our political stance.

Who are we really lobbying for? Whose side are we on? Do we side with the Black Throated Diver that leisurely bathes in round and murky puddles?

Or do we prefer the neoliberal forest that dries and acidifies the soil? Who do we choose?

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Before we choose sides, let’s linger on this question. Much of the history of human existence is a result of premature decisions. We choose sides much too easily. Some would claim that this is what drives our evolution as a species. That we energise our evolution by jumping into things unprepared. When we jump into things unawares we create a situation in which we have no choice but to deal with the consequences of our ignorance.

We humans are creatures of paradox: we are smart because we are inherently stupid. We create long-term problems we consequently need to solve. And this, in turn, is what propels our awareness as a species. We have no other choice but to expand our knowledge to deal with the new – troubling - situation.25

25. The Dutch philosopher of history Eelco Runia, writes about the way in which humans energise their own evolution. Eelco Runia, “Moved by the Past” (Columbia University Press, 2014).

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Our survival depends on it. But if survival is dependent on stress, it is only so because we deeply believe that our actions happen in response to an external, malignant, environment.

There is no time to think things over.

Someone or something else will take your place.

Flow Country offers an alternative.

It is not something external to us, not something in which we have to survive. What, then, happens to our decisions? Can we still jump ahead of things? If we acknowledge our own impressionability? Flow Country defies the everyday rush and offers long and far-reaching perspectives.

It enables thoughts of eternity.26

26. Here we refer to the 1937 poem by Neil M. Gunn: ‘Here the actual picture is like a picture in a supernatural mind and comes upon the human eye with the surprise that delights and transcends memory. Gradually the stillness of the far prospect grows unearthly. Light is silence. And nothing listens where all is of eternity’. Neil M. Gunn, “Highland River” (Canongate Classics, 2001, 1937).

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To belong in Flow Country is to shoot out roots like sphagnum moss: shallow roots in liquid land. To form a cushiony clump that floats on top of water after all the wars between species are over. It is to find oneself in a landscape that was there both before and after the apocalypse, its crises perhaps not even registered in the long flow of time. Its presence continues regardless of our anxieties and worries, regardless of our ignorance. Let us get closer to Flow Country. Let us find out more about its personality, its traits.

How is it able to sustain this flow?

Instead of promoting stress as a factor for human evolution, we propose ecstasy.

We do not necessarily mean a romantic, subliminal, kind of bliss. There is a kind of ecstasy that is very ordinary and simple.

Very easy, in fact, to be found.

Ecstasy in Ancient Greek means to stand beside of something. To be in Flow Country, then, means to stand beside many things. In that sense Flow Country is the most remote place on earth.

When you’re in ecstasy you are not doing 63

your ordinary, everyday routines. You are stepping into an alternate reality.

You are completely engaged with this reality, completely involved. You don’t have any attention left to be aware of anything else that happens around you, you are completely absorbed. You can no longer think of anything else. You forget about the fact that you haven’t had any breakfast, that your feet are cold from your leaking boots. That your phone has been ringing for half an hour. That you have to get home before sunset.

You even forget about yourself. Your body seems devoid of itself. And you have nothing to do with what is happening.

Your identity disappears. You dissolve.

You don’t feel that you exist. Your existence is temporarily suspended. It’s like opening a door that’s floating in the middle of nowhere and all you have to do is go and turn the handle, open it, and let yourself sink in. You can’t particularly force yourself through. You just have to float. If there is any gravitational pull, it’s from the outside world trying to keep you away from Flow Country. You have to be completely involved with what you are doing, focussed and concentrated.

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You have to be willing to step outside of everyday reality. You’re thoroughly focussed on the present, hours seem to pass in a minute. Whatever produces this flow becomes its own reward.27

27.

Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, ‘What makes a life worth living?’ Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of ‘flow’.

Our description here is largely borrowed from the outcomes of his research. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow: The Psychology of Happiness” (Rider, 2002).

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Flow Country is not some kind of utopia though – not some ideal space that does not really exist. Not something that exists only in some elevated mental state that is very difficult to achieve. Not something in the head, accessible only to the very few that have the time to spend in idyllic contemplation. It is not the paradise that always resides behind the next hill, where we are promised a better life than the one we currently have. Flow Country is not a neutral screen on which we can project our detached and self-absorbed interests.

It is not the imperial landscape; not a terrain that has to be ‘discovered’ and exploited, optimised. It is fine as it is and it is already there. It is this hill, this forest, this blade of grass. Flow Country is made of plant matter. Impressionable by our footprints. As we step into the surface of the bog, we press-in, in-form, sink down. Water accumulates, the boot tilts forwards, the heel kicks up, suction releases. The toe lifts out, water levels 67

and heather slowly lift, moss slowly rises.

The dent of the footprint slowly levels out, but does not quite reach the same equilibrium. Slightly compressed, the bog remembers.

Flow Country is mysterious as dark matter; the dark matter we call peat.

It is made of the air we breathe and the rain on our skin. Sleet clattering on our frozen faces.

Flow Country is not a place in the distant future. Not our doom or delivery.

But neither is Flow Country a place that stems from the past. It is not a residue of something gone. The peat layers are not made up of the remnants of previous events, since everything is alive and active – these events still move as we walk. The humus of the earth is not its proxy data. No information left behind.

It is not an archaeological artefact in the conventional sense. Whenever or wherever Flow Country is, the fact is that we are in it. Flow Country is the present.

It is the very material of the present, everything the present is made of; it is presence. Flow Country is a zone, 68

not a border. It is always in transition.

It does not stop at one end and begin at another. It is not a historical period, not a delineated terrain. Flow Country is the threshold. It is the moving flux of life. The dreams we have in it. Flow Country is our wonderment in the broad daylight, the doubts we have at night, the shimmering of dusk. It is comprised of our constant meandering, our continuous search. Flow Country is the duration that we embody in the present. Its substance is made of the way in which we beings live forth and will continue to do so in ever changing forms and shapes. Always flowing, always unnameable.

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This is how we correct for the miscalculation. Flow Country does not consist of layers, one on top of the other, like geological strata; living layers on top of dead ones below. The body of a bog is much more alive. It functions as a unit. Lower layers feed those above.

In fact, Flow Country abolishes the entire notion of depth. Its dark puddles and root systems turn the idea of depth around and flip it over, fold it, chew on it, digest it and spit it back out – so that depth is not anywhere deeper, beyond or underground. Depth is all around us and always right at the surface. It is the surface. But how does this work?

What does it have to do with us, and our approach?

Sigmund Freud, who blueprinted the notion of the self, pictured the human subject as a layered phenomenon. He took this model from the archaeologists of his time; archaeologist who thought of the past as something that lay before 71

them, deep down in the soil. They would kneel and go to work carefully, meticulously brushing away sand and mud. Just as the archaeologist removed layers of earth to excavate hidden objects from the past – so too, Freud thought, our personalities must be layered, and the more you wipe away at the surface the more hidden layers will be exposed. This image of the self has become widespread. Today it’s generally accepted. We have a hidden subconscious that sits somewhere in the dark of our personality, right at the core; a shadow-world of emotions, lurking like a submarine in an ocean under the surface of reality. We might lead shallow lives, but we all have deep and murky depths. Concealed beneath the everyday. But is this really true? What does our experience show? If you were looking for deeper layers of yourself, how did you manage the digging? How did you go to work? Did you, like the old archaeologist, destroy the upper layers of yourself to get to deeper ones? Were the things you found down there equally torn from their context like the artefacts we see in museums? Where did you put 72

them on display? Was your hidden self as fundamentally removed from the soil?

Was it equally extinct? Don’t the things you uncover about yourself continue to live on in some way?

Hence, let us consider the living bog. Instead of insisting on the old archaeological metaphor of our layered self, let us reverse the metaphor. Our sense of self is always based on what we feel right now. There is not a feeling of self lurking in the past. If the feeling is there it must be there now, right here in the present. Have you ever had a feeling that took place in the past?

Probably not. It would be more accurate to say that the past was never gone, never deep in the soil. It was and still is here at the surface. At least, it’s at the surface where you’ll meet it. If you think you can walk away from the past, this is a miscalculation. Try to walk away from what you feel and you will see why.

Whatever you feel inside you - anger, sadness, joy - it is always a feeling that is totally fresh, and deeply new, totally present. In fact, you cannot experience anything else but the present. No matter 73

how much your mind likes to think it can. Its thoughts always take place in the now, and therefore are never ‘from the past’. The same counts for feelings of self. Likewise, whatever fragments the archaeologist digs up down below, these objects are more from the present than they are ‘from the past’. In fact, to get to the heart of the matter, the archaeologist does not need to dig.

As we have now discovered, the depth of the world is already there at the surface. Depth is a drifting phenomenon that floats aboard the ship of time.

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This grounded perspective - that we are always part of the depth/surface of the soil - is not necessarily a vague idea. It is actually very realistic. More realistic, perhaps, than the worldview we’re used to. Unbearably realistic.

Mind bogglingly realistic. In the old archaeological fantasy, we imagined ourselves loose from the ground.

We literally stood above it. We were elevated from it. We were heroic, megalomaniac bipeds, that lowered ourselves to the ground to uncover the truth. We brought it to the surface from its murky hiding place. Just wait and see! But in our conviction that the past was hidden, we in fact covered it up. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: we always create the past that we uncover.

In reality it was never gone. Never hidden, never concealed. The more realistic perspective, in the most literal sense of the word, is to conceive of the

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past as ever-present.28 And we are made of the same substance, we are part of the same ground that we excavate.

The objects we find are our own notions, they are our ideas as they pop up in the present, our own joys and depressions – we’re looking at our own impressions in and of the soil.29 Flow Country is the terrain that encompasses this ground

28. Anthropologist Cristian Simonetti describes this ever-presence as an experience of the Australian Aboriginal people: ‘[They] experience life as being on the inside of an eternal moment of creation in which past, present and future are rolled into one another. [...]

Their history does not lie underneath in a vertical succession of flat events but is rather all around them.’ Cristian Simonetti, “Between the vertical and the horizontal: Time and space in archaeology” (History of the Human Sciences, 2013) 104.

29. Since the late glacial period matter has been laid down. After Loch silts, surface peats quietly collect. Habitats and ecosystems change over huge tracts of time (what is 10,000 years anyway?).

Open landscape, heath, open woodland, treeless, grasses, heather. Juniper, birch, birch-juniper, birch-hazel, pine, calluna. In places, nearly eight metres of liquid land exists below your feet.

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of impressions. The ground of our reasons; our own groundedness. We are always implicated in this ground that is Flow Country, this flowing and drifting ground. This liquid land. To say that our thoughts give shape to Flow Country would therefore be an understatement.

The blade of grass between our teeth is a thought. The bird that jumps up from the field is a feeling that literally transcends our limited sense of self.

The bend in the road is a new insight.

Flow Country is whatever we encounter, and what we encounter is the unfolding, the expansion, of what we are.

Anthropogenic activity is portrayed by macrofossil charcoal from considerable depth. All the while, invisible cascades of plant pollen have rained down onto the ombrotrophic mire; locked within the peat matrix and captured in a core. At the top, unrecorded, lie the minute particles of soot from the industrial revolution, the first atomic bomb, the neoliberal forest and the ghost of your footprint.

D. Charman, “Late-glacial and Holocene vegetation history of the Flow Country, northern Scotland� (New Phytologist 127, 1994) 155-168.

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At this point you might start to think that Flow Country is a land of complete symbiosis, a total merging of oneself with the environment. You want what it wants, and what it wants is exactly what you need. That all sounds quite familiar.

We’ve all been there, and we all long to return to this pleasant home where we were floating and drifting without a worry in the world. We equally desire to be wild and free, as we long to be relieved from our singular responsibilities. And in a way it is true that Flow Country exists by the grace of collaboration, it is a working together of many entities, a sympoiesis, a co-creative act.30 Flow Country arises as the cumulative faculty, the emergent phenomenon of that coproduction without end. No wonder that many

30. Donna Haraway develops the notion of sympoiesis quite wonderfully in her recent book. Donna Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble” (Duke University Press Books, 2016).

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cultures consider the ground to be their only real mother, the only environment to which they truly belong. But we are not born for no reason. If complete symbiosis was the goal, we never would have left the womb. We would remain very passive, like foetuses. It would all be just fine inside there. But Flow Country is not a womb. It is not a form of merged support, all warm and cosy; no utopian unity. Its terrain is vast and undomesticated. And as we saw before, it is not at war with us, it is not a battlefield between the species. Flow Country occupies the space between life and death, between foetus and zombie.

It is what we could call a mature landscape, at the Northern height of its lifecycle. Fully self-reliant and fully autonomous. We need autonomy for differentiation. We need it for things to be clear. Clear boundaries, clear limitations. Flow Country is, in fact, crystal clear. It is crisp as the dawn of day. Although we should emphasis again that it does not have any boundaries, its constituents determine its expanse.

The boundary of a creature is what turns that creature into a collaborator.

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Flow Country, in turn, is enriched by its difference. Every being that is part of Flow Country, every little microbe or mouse that passes through, is responsible for that richness. Its responsibility is to be distinctly itself.

The Golden Plover is responsible for being the Golden Plover instead of the fox. The fox is responsible for being different from the snail. The snail is different from the blade of grass. Just look at a patch of mossy ground in Flow Country. Within this patch are so many colours; yellow, green, red and brown.

So many creatures can be distinguished there. This moss is supple, that other patch is dry. This beetle is black, that other shimmers like a splotch of oil.

We do not say that all beings need each other. That would return us to the womb. No, beings don’t necessarily need each other, but neither are they rivals in a survival game. They are not competitors. Not, at least, seen from the perspective of Flow Country. All creatures are just different. They lead different lives, and express different needs. Flow Country has only one taste, and that taste is difference 83

itself. This is how Flow Country shows that it is not indifferent. Instead of being indifferent, the way we generally think of nature, Flow Country is the integration of difference. Its difference is its brilliance; it is its intelligence. Have you ever heard anything intelligent from supporters of unifying or generalist theories? Probably not. Intelligence is the substance of difference; it is the sharp edge of the spade that cuts out piles of peat. Difference is the signature of benevolence and care, because there is something to care about. In fact, there are many things to care about that are all quite distinctly good at being what they are, enabling each other to become that spontaneous and unpredictable terrain of Flow Country. Although access to Flow Country is available to all, at all times, the chances of an encounter with its aweinspiring terrain are becoming increasingly rare. This is not due to any aspect of the land itself, but to our current infrastructure. The roads just tend to lead elsewhere. And even if we would build roads like giant arteries leading to Flow Country, they would not necessarily reach it. Neither do we promote, therefore, 84

a strategy of abandonment. Re-wilding of Flow Country is unnecessary – since Flow Country does not exist within the demarcations of wild and tame.

We propose a much more humanistic attitude: to re-wild our sense of self.

Let us blow the monoculture of feeling to bits by increasing the names with which we describe our internal landscape.

Let us find the lost words and language that the landscape remembers in our footprints. Let us drive the dominant narrators crazy by oversaturating them with our subjective experience. Until the land they keep in a stranglehold starts to mutate and thrive and live again. This is what the archaeology of presence looks like: it registers the performative acts of human and non-human engagements in and with the world, and considers them, including itself, as co-constitutive of that world. Different beings enact different realities and, hence, work to assemble different futures.31 31. This statement is inspired by Rodney Harrison’s article: Rodney Harrison, “Archaeologies of the emergent presents and futures” (Historical Archaeology, 2016) 170.

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We too enact our own constitution of the world. So rather than locating Flow Country within a detached symbolic structure, we propose the reverse: to locate ourselves as beings of Flow Country. The archaeologists of presence free representation from grand narratives and thereby free themselves.

By concentrating on their own presence and the presence of the environment they establish a point of contact with Flow Country. For all we know, the meaning of Flow Country itself is lost and will stay lost forever. Because it is something beyond the bounds of human signification. Flow Country is not a destination; it is our eternal point of departure.

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From inside the Field Centre the air looks crisp and promising, the sky tainted a light pink-blue.

The land is a golden yellow, full of invitation. It is an uplifting experience. But as soon as we reach the dog kennel down the road, we pick up a putrid stench. There must be something wrong with the sewage, we mutter. A single glove is stuck around a pole at the gate like a totemic claw, signalling the threshold. We are entering Flow Country. As soon as we’ve passed the gate we immerse ourselves in the bog. Crisp ground retreating into hollows from the strengthening sun. The surface of the bog is frozen, liquid land in stasis. The tips of frosty long grasses crunch joyfully under our wellies.

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After a few minutes we pass a dent in the field in which mechanical parts have been thrown, to rot. Thrownoff, one should say, perhaps, like the mechanical exoskeleton of an otherwise weak anthropic creature, ready for a new shell. Car parts strewn into a rocky hollow. Panels, tyres.

Wire. Glass. From the part numbers it looks like an old Ford; red. The colour of corroding metal blends in nicely with the shades of brown and orange of long grasses and heather.

One cannot see the dump from the road and even from up close it is hard to notice. That’s how much the bog has already absorbed its parts.

Moss and lichen covered seats have morphed back into rock. Covered with the same texture, matching with the same colour, these rocks are soft and springy like the back seats of an old Cortina. With excitement we admire this play of mimicry. What are we looking at? A car seat turned rock?

Or something entirely different?

Perhaps the seat has been laying here for ages. Perhaps its lifespan in the field exceeds its lifespan as a seat – 92

and should we therefore speak of a rock that long ago was once a part of a car?

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We pick up an old track which emerges from the wetlands and head to the skyline. The track has been raised from the bog and is firm underfoot. Parts have been claimed back as the bog washed over. The track has purpose, it has authority. The official way to cross the landscape. This route has clearly not been used for a long while and would be impassable to vehicles. Clearly the old estate road is redundant. We continue right from the road into the bog, squashing and squeezing supple moss under our wellies. Slimy fluorescent greens sway gently in dark puddles. Each step is waved after by algae that float in deep black pools. Knees have to be lifted high to plunge each foot from one steady-looking heap of moss, lipstick-red, onto the next, slightly different in colour; fresh green or pale yellow. Heading right from the track we find the burial site.

Traverse the heather to a distinctive mound in the middle distance, line up with the track on the horizon (or so memory said), walk 35 paces.

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There is no sign. We decide to re-join the track, and there it is, at our feet. A small rounded hole exposing dark peat below. Spoil to the side. At the bottom the earth is frozen. We feel it with our fingers, investigate and make note of this slight alteration in the landscape.

The marker flag is gone and something has been removed. We are too late. No traces. Rolling onwards, the landscape opens out.

A low rise up and over into the next small valley. We have now been swallowed up. Senses of scale begin to shift. To the south, a bank of fog appears to be slowly encroaching, fighting the sunshine. All the while a herd of deer has been watching us from an elevated mound in the distance. We are loud and everything can see and hear (and feel) us coming. Perhaps even the peat.

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A little further on we find an area fenced-off with barbed wire.

A gigantic sinkhole sits at its centre, gurgling water from a well below the surface. Mosses and algae wallow there in various degrees of decay. It is as if we are observing this choreography of decomposition indifferently, from the air. We follow it and are suddenly submerged in another vaporous event. Fog rolls in from over the hills like a ghostly wave swelling into the valley. It absorbs us for a moment – as the cool vapour enters our lungs, dewdrops form on our nostril hair and eyebrows. When we finally rise above the fog our perspective widens and opens to the undulating fields on which thousands of dead pines are lined up in trenches.

A striated battle zone that extends as far as the eye can see. When we stop talking, walking, and lower our breathing for a moment, there it is: silence. Early February is a quiet time of year. The birds have not yet returned; the wind has also gone (for now). A slight rumble, 96

to the right: a road? A plane? We walk on and through the surface of the bog, breathing, talking, rustling, squelching.

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Reaching the end of the track we find stratigraphy. A more recent forestry track cuts the end of the estate track; slicing through with a deep drainage ditch. This new track seems to continue in the line of the old, onwards and down. More stratigraphy exposed in the side of the ditch: ancient pine stumps finally exposed to the air. Dating from a time when the climate was slightly warmer and trees established themselves on the peat. They are now covered with a thick layer of bog when the climate turned colder again. The fog encroaches and retreats. At the intersection the view opens up to show that among purple heather and yellow grass, strips of green pine lay behind the dead forest. We take a seat on a small hill beside the track. Sitting down on our rain jackets, the frozen ground rapidly seeps into our legs and bottoms and again we become aware of the total absence of sound. There is absolutely nothing to hear. Not a breath of wind, no sign of life at all except the pulsating of our own 98

blood in our eardrums. What has happened here? From a distance, the odd spindly tree stands out on the skyline. Rows of bone-white trees flank the trackway, felled in lines, unidirectional, into the ditches.

Was it some huge wind wiping out the forest; a sonic blast close to the ground? Or some apocalyptic event, a test gone wrong? There were no fences to keep us out.

In places digger tracks can be seen on the ground surface in an attempt to flatten the trees and ditches out.

What are they trying to cover up?

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On the other side of the track the dead pines lay more exposed; shimmering like bones bleached under the winter sun. A decapitated landscape made of gleaming trunks facing the sky. Ditches have been blocked and areas swamped.

Walking is difficult. We hop from rotten trunk to rotten trunk as they crunch down with the weight.

Snapping branches feels cruel. But apparently lichen only grows where the air is pure, so not to worry.

Closer examination shows that the trees have been felled. All cut with a saw. Trunk ends now weathered to expose proud growth rings: 15 to 20 years old max. Side branches now point upwards. Realigned lichen finds a new horizontal. A blink of the eye in this post-glacial landscape.

Thousands of years of peat levelling up the terrain. Forests appear and disappear like blisters on the skin surface. Below the surface bleak chunks of wood are overgrown with fresh green sphagnum moss and lay submerged in mysterious pools of water – gene pools – 100

micro universes in which unknown organisms incessantly reproduce.

Thin layers of ice act like windows to these secret worlds, intermittently obscured by sharp angular patterns sculpted by gusts of wind into thin layers of ice.

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The zone of tree-bones shifts back into blanket bog. The landscape is immense in every direction.

Rolling beyond the horizon. A cloud moves over the sun disrupting the fine balance in air temperature. Air a little cooler, and the fog encroaches again, this time swallowing us up completely. Perspective blurs.

Land blurs into sky. Thick air joins with liquid land. Above, the blue sky opens up out of the thin fog layer. Air becomes surface, surface becomes air. The zone of admixture thickens. We breathe it in and out.

Cloud gone and the sun warms the air a fraction; enough to fragment the fog and beat it back for now.

Landscape re-emerges. The mixture thins and we exhale.

From the fog the future emerges, lunar-base-like. Antenna and solar panels nestled into the vast peat plain. Click click, click click. Sensors measure minute amounts of carbon released from the bog. Is the bog breathing in, or breathing out? The site has a history but is measuring 102

the future. A small wind turbine lays face down in the heather; power source now upgraded to solar. What damage has been done here by the forests and can it be repaired?

Assemblages of former experiments abandoned around the pond clusters.

An open air lab. Probes of unknown depth protrude into the surface. Gas measuring devices litter the edges of pools. Science abandoned.

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A metal grid holds up three solar panels next to a tripod supporting a long pole adorned with instruments. A network of wires surrounding the station spreads out like tentacles feeling into the field. These tentacles connect to individual circular shaped pods, pipes and more plastic instruments. It becomes clear that we’re walking on sensitive ground. Would the station pick up our movements?

Would it record our breaths; the (carbon) footprints we leave?

We have been transported from our sublunary existence into a field of speculation, of spatial and temporal ambivalence.

About fifty feet from the station we discover a square of blue-grey pulp. Upon closer observation, a piece of gaffa tape turns out to be stuck underneath it. What could this inorganic puddle have been? A stack of A4 papers? Research notes from our predecessors? Some chemical 104

residue? More importantly: what is it now?

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Back on the stone track we run into a large gate with a young pine forest beyond. We lift a plastic sign on the gate and find a graveyard for flies. At the bottom of the sign hundreds of them have been piling up, providing a feast for fungal spores which cover the pile in a thin white layer. Some flies are still alive, but slowed down either by old age or low temperatures. We take note of the print at the back of the board.

Who owns this forest? What is this person doing today? Would he or she be looking at diagrams of market value fluxes of this plot while we observe the bending of treetops on the actual terrain? We continue our way on the forest path. The limited company balance sheet changes the landscape. Open to closed. Along the track, through the gates and into the forest. Closely packed trees shrink the view to the immediate. Set out like some kind of ornate landscape garden with regular fire break avenues affording views to the bog-monument beyond.

Non-native sitka spruce, lodgepole 106

pine, Japanese larch, hybrid larch and conifer stand in dense blocks, fizzing in the light wind. Drainage ditches cut the surface of the peat and take water into the burns. Bog surface bleeds carbon. Access tracks cut the land, hopping between glacial mounds. The peat visibly thinning as the ground rises up to expose a loose moraine of rounded cobbles. Walk into the forest. Dense clawing branches. Ultra-closed, only a small patch of sky now above.

Follow the deer paths cutting across regular plough furrows. High fences have obviously failed to keep deer out. But what does the market say?

Assets losing value, company profits down. Time to sell. Zoom out and it’s gone.

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Lonely pieces of mist drift here in little clearings, as if singled out from the bigger wave of fog that had passed over just before.

We find more stratigraphy. Small stone structures overlain – or rather shrouded - by the forest.

The remains of old shielings show that there has been a more ancient past. The thick peat bog masks the remains of past human endeavours.

They are engulfed by the liquid land; they are not visible on the ground surface. Anyway, they do not concern us. We can only act upon what we find on the surface, we are not mining the land for evidence. These shielings attest to a more recent past. Late 19thcentury sheep grazing, the influence of the large landed estates, the pain of the Highland Clearances. Whilst communities were being displaced in the straths and glens, the sheep moved into moors. Bringing flocks of animals into the peatlands and hills during the summer months.

Grazing on the rare patches of grass in the burn valleys and confluences.

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A circular sheep pen like a stone crown lies in the burn valley. Then a treeless landscape, these are now cloaked in forest, unrecognisable to the herdy boys who lay for the night in the bothies under the stars.

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In front of an opening into the forest a single birch tree has been pulled from the ground. Slivers of an unknown plant lay around as if torn by a paper shredder.

The straight path into the pines is covered with a thick layer of soft, bulging, green moss. Every now and then we find the moss has been tugged-at to reveal underlying pink layers. It creates the impression that beneath the green this moss has a vulnerable fleshy tissue – a delicacy for passing deer. Lifting our heads, we spot one a few yards away.

The adolescent hind returns our staring with a frozen gaze. Between the pines the earth is covered by huge, springy layers of orange pine-needles. Between the barren branches a low sun sheds its light and is reflected by the forest floor.

Its alienating glow creates an almost ecclesiastical atmosphere; sanctified yet disconnected with the world.

When we reach the edge of the pine forest this same atmosphere seems to have chased us. The thin layer of mist overhanging the opening into 110

peat-land, infused with golden light, brings with it the association of incense.

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In front of the metal fence that delineates the Forest we discover the remains of a bird; a circle of feathers, the bird itself has disappeared. We notice the way the bog bounces back at every step. You can literally see the bog wobble and wave when you stamp on it. They call this ‘peat blanket’ but really it’s a peat mattress, a kind of natural memory foam, yielding and deeply impressionable. It’s not just squashy, but also supportive of our presence, obliging to it – it seems.

We cut back in the direction of the field station, but find another observatory. This time the site is characterised by a gathering of small ponds, up to twenty of them laying scattered about the field in varying shapes and sizes. Some of them have been hooked up to primitive instruments made out of plastic tubes, jerry-cans and metal wire mesh. Funnels are slotted into pipes that are stuck into the muddy bottoms of these puddles.

The site, again, appears to have 112

been abandoned for quite a while.

A plastic sheet is pinned to the peat with long iron nails, but has almost completely disintegrated. Moss and grass grow in between the wire meshes that surround the pools to create a makeshift footpath. Here and there a slimy wooden plank creates a bridge. Beyond the puddles we recognise the decapitated forest, we seem to have approached it from another angle.

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The sun begins to set, slowly, elongating our shadows which are getting longer and longer by the minute. Our stretched figures become immaterial statues, silhouetted against the radiating browns and oranges of the silent field. Our heads nearly touch a herd of deer that meander in the distance.

Barely seeming to make contact with the ground, they flock like a cloud that drifts low over the field. Instead of running away they appear to advance toward us, but then jut back behind a hill and eventually vanish into thin air.

It’s as if the air seeped into our heads and blew out all of its contents. We’ve become more and more silent as we progress.

As duskdescends the shapes and colours in the field start to disintegrate as well. Their contours become less discrete and more grainy, it’s getting difficult to spot wet areas on our path. A dark figure resting on a hill turns out to be a rotting log, an overflying shadow 114

turns out to be a crow. Yet with the lack of distinction comes a sense of ease as well. No goals to achieve, nothing special to notice anymore.

The eagerness of discovery has already gone to sleep as we ourselves blend into the atmosphere.

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At our arrival back at the Field Station we find the car-park covered with strips of white paper. A library of shredded fieldnotes has tumbled over. Like a cloud of white starlings these notations are now frolicking their way into the silent land.

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Site List Site 1 Site 2 Site 3 Site 4 Site 5 Site 6 Site 7 Site 8 Site 9 Site 10 Site 11 Site 12 Site 13 Site 14 118

: : : : : : : : : : : : : :

Trip scene, near Loch Strathy Plane crash site Boating on Loch Strathy Observation tower The Borg with deer Flux tower Felled trees Wind turbine The Unknown Tree saplings North Road A836 Bothy Film burial (cut) Dyke Forest

Acknowledgments Where do we begin with our acknowledgements? This book could not have been made without the collaborative effort of decomposing sitka spruce trees, the flora and microbes that live on it and the kind cooperation of the deer population of Flow Country. But just as much, we are grateful for our human friends and partners. We owe a great deal to Cristina Garriga for her wonderful design work, and to Antonia Thomas and Joanna Peace for their sharp eye and kind, considerate, feedback. Emil Lillo, Birthe Jorgensen, Dorian Braun for their comradery. Thanks to the University of the Highlands & Islands Archaeology Institute. Besides the animals of Flow Country, we would like to thank the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Forestry Commission for their support as well, since to a large degree the future of Flow Country lies in their caring hands.

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AUTHORS PUBLISHER DESIGN YEAR TYPEFACES ISBN

Jasper Coppes & Daniel Lee Publication Studio Glasgow My Bookcase 2018 Aperรงu & Butler 978-1-9995899-0-5

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