The walks took place, in-person and virtually, on 4 / 5 August 2022, 1pm
At Chestnut Street, Granton Harbour, Edinburgh, walking to Waterfront Avenue. (The exact meeting place was What 3 Words: ///talent.dads.dots and co-ordinates: 55.983248,-3.229066) and around the world.
The Absent Trees of Granton cordially invited you to walk without them.
Your presence was requested on a walk from the reclaimed wastelands of Middle Harbour, Edinburgh (“Million Tree City”[1]) where trees grew before development, to the building site of Waterfront Avenue where trees have been felled for housing. We Wish We Were Here. We are in spirit. Or are we?
Once it was water then a hive of industrial and human activity. Cargo was shipped in from all over the globe, and transported out by rail to the city, Lothians and beyond
Our in-person route
I co-led with Charlotte Rooney and group activities focused on the touch, smell and taste of trees.
Charlotte Rooney
In her blog (see link above) Charlotte wrote about:
Symbiosis
Reciprocity
Listening
“My breath feels grubby today, a bit noxious, and it’s uncomfortable, until I remember that this is exactly what the tree needs. My breath is a treasure.”
Charlotte Rooney
Looking back towards the harbour – Waterfront Avenue
What happens when you change the name of a place?
Posing questions about the importance of naming and local history in ‘belonging’, we walked streets that had other names before now. Their new ones come from the City Council’s list, so Chestnut Street has no relationship to Chesnut (sic) Rock which is shown on the old maps, and Granton Station is not where it once was; its name has been given to a different building entirely, thoroughly confusing local people who once played there as children.
Exactly how much earth is needed?
We asked how much earth we all need to thrive on, and this question brought about tension between the need for new housing and the necessity of trees. 20 per cent of the new Harbour development is planned to be affordable, but the rest includes a 4 star spa hotel and luxury flats with free dog washing facilities. Is that a good balance? Architectural plans show that new trees will be planted in pots, and a development which took place 10 years ago now sports rows of quite established Limes and substantial manicured hedges. The trees which have been ripped up against local people’s wishes have left raw land behind the new Granton Station. Is all this enough – for repairing the environment, for our need of a little ‘wildness’, for the psychogeographer’s bent towards some chaos in an otherwise geometrical world?
Artists from Scotland, Australia and England RSVP-ed
Deborah Roberts, Sophie Cunningham Dawe, and Richard Keating posted or sent me images
Deborah Roberts – New shoots growing from a felled ash
Richard Keating
what happens in the mysterious space/place between gaze and subject of gaze, observer/participant?
Richard Keating
Sophie Cunningham DaweSophie Cunningham Dawe
Your project offered me a simple way to spend time with my mother’s beautiful tree… I am grateful for the drawings I made, simple gestures/ memento artefacts, a gentle marking of a significant time/place/memory
Sophie Cunningham Dawe, Melbourne, Australia
But where are the Chestnut Trees?Quite a contrast from this chestnut tree in a leafy Kentish village
This was a community event with Tamsin Grainger and guests, and we were happy to have Ruthe, Arboricultural Officer at the City of Edinburgh Council with us to hear our concerns and offer her expertise. No-one from the new Granton Development answered the invitation.
From….to…
Disorientating, shocking, disrespectful
Now we were here, now we are not
Ffrom one minute to the next, such immense changes, such age and service, uprooted overnight
There is a spiritual-political-geographical link between Edinburgh, Scotland where I live, and Cataluña in the Iberian Peninsula where the Encounters are taking place (Girona, Olot and Vic). In both countries, we have long been engaged in matters of self-determination, with debates over separation and unity, community, national and inter-national relationships. Whilst primarily represented as a battle fought in law courts and parliaments, or between opposing protesters on the streets, this has often been a binary approach. It is necessary to spend time listening, sharing and making work with artists and members of the community in order to understand each other better and find possible ways forward.
Europe is defined, in many ways, by borders. They speak of crumbled empires, shifting boundaries – most of them, …. speak of unimaginable suffering.
Kerri ni Dochartaigh ‘Thin Places’ p17
As a walking artist, secular pilgrim, feminist and outdoor performer, I will carry the awareness of these issues from the Scottish hills to the Cataluñian mountains, from Edinburgh’s extinct volcanoes (Arthur’s Seat, Calton Hill and Castle Rock) to the volcanic land of Olot, and between the Oak Wood in Dalkeith Country Park and the oak trees of the Plain of Vic.
I have been walking the St Margaret’s Way through the carboniferous volcanic rocks of the Burntisland area in Fife, Scotland, and will be able to carry my experiences with me on the ancient spiritual path which unites each of the three conurbations where the Encounters are happening, the Camí de Sant Jaume (Camino Catalán).
Co-mingling of Oak and Beech
Separation and Unity
This is the artistic focus
in the human experience (notions of belonging and alienation, shared feeling and dislocation)
consideration of the other-than-human and our relationship to that realm; and in the landscape
Documentation:
Impromtu performance
Collecting words, images, marks, and sound segments
Mapping
Film and pamphlet on return to Edinburgh
Collaboration with delegates during the International Encounters will take the form of walking sections of the urban camino together in each of the three locations. This ritual series of three mini pilgrimages will be a way of considering the spiritual aspect (in the widest sense of the word), and the trinity of psychogeographical outings will form a unity between the three sites for the purpose of comparing sensations, ideas and feelings. Each walk will start with an embodied exercise for individuals, a group game for unification, and prompt = one hour in each place:
Girona: starts at the Catedral de Girona to Pont de L’Aguia 9pm for 40 minutes
Olot: starts at Plaça Major to Pont de Sant Roc 6.30pm for 30 minutes
Vic: starts at Catedral de Sant Pere de Vic to L’Atlàntida Centre des Arts (35 mins 6.30pm
Co-existence and mutual reliance
I will be making contact with women for whom this focus is pertinent, both in Scotland and Cataluña. As always I will seek Shiatsu practitioners with whom to exchange.
This month was my idea for the Walking the Land artists collective First Friday Walk. I had been reading about ‘dynamic stillness’, a term used by geographers and complementary therapists. Also, of course, I was following the war in Ukraine.
I wrote, ‘Let us walk in solidarity with the Ukrainian people who are walking away from their homes and home country, searching, looking for another place where they can be still, to re-find themselves and safe emplacements. We will set out from a still-point (perhaps the place where we live, where we feel secure), and search for “the embeddedness of the sensing subject”.
‘We will ask, ‘Where do we feel embedded?’ ‘Where can we find a moving or still emplacement in the walk, or in the place through, or to which, we are walking?’
Some of us walked alone and others in a group, and we were spread all over the UK.
Emplacement 1
At home
I sit in the sun and listen to the quiet, then a bee sounds by my ear and some birds chorus. When I stay myself some more, I hear the distant waves, and the odd car – one rattles, needs something doing to it. The tree has got my back. Do I feel safe here? Yes, mostly. This place is known, I’m within the boundaries of my garden, inside the gate. Gulls screech. I am grounded with my feet flat on the stones. Below them is the earth – I know that because there is a solitary primrose which has grown up through them. My sitting bones still hurt though.
On the wooden bench beside the Wheatley Elm tree
Sketching, I have a metallic taste in my mouth and frustration in my wrist as I try a third time to get the angles right. I am attempting to draw the smell of the dead brown Xmas tree which I keep meaning to take to the dump.
Dandelion heads like a bicycle wheels still spinning
1.05pm I begin my walk and am immediately struck by the fact that I am choosing to leave my home and the people of Ukraine have no choice. Yet, the dandelions are so cheery
Ominous skies and a horizontal rainbow – portents
As I walked, I thought about a story I watched last night on the Channel 4 news. A Ukrainian woman was knocked unconscious and trapped. When she came round, she dug out her husband and friend and they escaped from the bombed theatre in Mariupol. Hundreds were not so lucky. She said she felt no emotions, had no feelings. This, I know from my work, is a sign of trauma.
Doomed
In Edinburgh, I heard a woman speak on her phone as she passed me: “No time to think about such frivolous things”, she said. A child’s swing in a nearby garden squeaked as it swung.
There are no queues at the bus stop
Fallen blossom petals are strewn on the pavement. I hear a dog walker saying, “All present and correct. Have a nice day” as she leaves the park.
As I passed someone else walking her dogs, and this man repairing his boundary, I wondered if the people I am walking with in spirit had to leave their pets behind, and how long it would take them to repair their broken walls if they ever get home again
Gated for security. Will it keep out the invading forces? Protect the inhabitants from bombs?
Text 1 comes in from Richard Keating, my counterpart in Gloucestershire: “I’ve just walked a few miles from home, crossing the Nailsworth Valley and am now looking west towards May Hill. I have lived on this side of the valley for 25 years so feel very much at home here. … However the wind is cold and I’ll be glad when the pub opens its doors. Imagine how a refugee would feel as a door is opened for them. As a home is shared.”
Abandoned tank . Devastation . Clearing up the rubble
The mother said, “Grandma gave her toys to me” and her little son replied, “Do you ever see her?” And then I am aware of the importance of familial relationships, of the personal artefacts passed down, of interrupted generations and houses and possessions all lost.
Impaled
On the pavement, I am treated with courtesy and kindness as a man, wordlessly, stands aside so I can pass, and smiles.
I heard that some Ukranian people who were only able to go to Russia, have been interned. It’s beyond my comprehension
I hear the father say “Oh you want to touch that” and he lifts the back wheels of the buggy up so that the little one can stroke the leaves of the hedge.
Emplacement 2
I am wedged between two upright logs, one on either side, and there is a solid one underneath me. I teeter – I am not as safe as I might be. I can’t see behind and would therefore only know if someone was coming if I heard them. There’s a lot of noise coming from all over the place, from different directions so I can’t distinguish if one of them is someone approaching me or not. I can reassure myself, though, because there’s not a war raging here in Scotland.
I hold on and stretch back, the sun is warm. I hear a foot meeting a ball and it clatters against the goal posts. Her heeled footsteps pace beyond the hedge. A dog barks. Distant voices, nearby cars. Smooth wood under my palms, a taste of…of…cucumber… and cedar. Is that a taste or a smell? There is a breeze. Cold at my nostrils, of air, perhaps exhaust fumes, a hint of the warm wood. I have been worried that I’m losing my sense of smell, but maybe it’s OK.
Emplacement 3
I receive a second message from Richard: “We’ve made our first stillness and are moving on. Your script has been well used.”
Warmer, wider and flatter under my bottom, I have lots of space on this tree stump. My lower back tilts which relieves the pain. I am facing north now, but I have the same awareness of people perhaps coming from behind. Cars wheel beyond the hedge which doesn’t seem dangerous because, to my knowledge, one has never driven through it into the park. Then I realise danger can come from above and see that the tree top obviously fell down, though presumably in the recent storm and not on a day like this…
Blasted tree
I can smell the sun on my skin and when I touch it, it is warm. I put my warm hand to my cold nose. The wind is coming towards me here bringing…. what? Ice from the Arctic? Again, my feet are off the ground and it strikes me that this is less safe as it would take me longer to put them down and run away. Footsteps behind me; I know they are male. They come up, go past, without stopping. The taste (yawn) is of old apple. Mhmm. And some metal.
Moving on, I thank the man who has painted the pavilion a gleaming privet-green. He’s busy clearing a thin layer of turf from around the perimeter. We chat about the public toilets they installed late in lockdown and then took away again because someone had to watch them all the time due to the vandalism. He said that there is already “a Ladies and Gentleman’s Cloakroom” in the building, so all they needed to do was to make it accessible for people with disabilities and then there would be a permanent facility. I said, no-one ever asks the people on the ground who know.
A spent shell?
Emplacement 4
I am amongst insistent birds, beside the ever-running Water of Leith, on a hard log. The brambles are intrusive. Or maybe I am. I smell humus and rotting plants, someone smoking weed. I taste coffee (a mid walk treat), and there’s the touch of cool, smooth, dry bark on this knarled trunk.
People walk right past but don’t see me – I’m by the Rocheid Path but off the beaten track. The car sound pollution is distant. The rambling couples always come back in the other direction after a few minutes because it’s a dead end.
I try to sketch the detail of the log
I wonder, will Putin withdraw, or are they just regrouping for a heavier bombardment? It sounds like he’s out of rubles but… . I am obviously carrying the story with me as I walk, snippets of it anyway.
Tickling leaves at my neck, ants (maybe) under my thigh.
I see drops of ‘blood’ everywhere
My scarf is getting ruined, snagging on the thorns – as if that’s a big deal, in the circumstances. When I try to wind it around my neck again later, I am scratched because portions of blackberry branches are still stuck in it. Invisibly.
I ask myself, how can I maintain awareness of these horrifying occurrences and still live comfortably here, and Richard suggests that we could focus on better understanding “this connectivity between us all”, and I know that this is what these walks are about. I’ll share the walk, invite a response, and celebrate others’.
At 15.35 I am tired and I wonder if the Gloucester lot are having tea. I try to imagine where they are and what they are doing, without the aid of a newsflash or twitter feed.
I start on my return home with the scent of wild garlic in my nostrils.
ShatteredDouble gravesTrappedImpaledClinging on
I pick off an individual leaf of lavender and squeeze it between thumb and finger tip. I inhale for the pleasure and calm.
Sending our best wishes to the people of Ukraine, that they might find safe and still places to become embedded once more
Finding Refuge, Looking for Shelter by Lucy Guenot
In Walking the Land, we connect with each other via computers and phones. You can imagine these ‘meetings’ as emplacements, still places in which we innovate, stabilise and share our ideas. Then, see how we move out into the landscape on our walks, dynamically. If we stay in touch with each other as we walk, using What’sApp maybe, or even tweeting with a hashtag #, we remain in contact via a collective still-point while we move at the same time. If we post on social media after the walk, representing the body movement in ‘stills’ and fixed words, there is a further version of this ‘dynamic stillness’.
If you have work to share in response to this walking prompt, please send it to tamsinlgrainger@gmail.com
Broken branches, fallen boughs, John Muir Country Park, Scotland
Location: The John Muir Country Park near Dunbar, Scotland
This event took place on : Keeper of the Soils walk, by North Lights Arts
The Keeper of the Soils cloak, walking the Pilgrimage for COP26 October 2021
Preparation: I asked everyone to pick up a cone and practise playing it like a thumb piano, and a dead branch (for snapping when the time comes).
Natalie Taylor (@artforalluk on twitter), Keeper of the Soils, had chosen one of the trees which fell down in the storm. Half the group stood at the head of the tree and half at its foot. This is following an old burial tradition in which half the mourners would stand at the deceased’s head and half at her feet while the lament was sung.
A collection of Scots Pine still standing, John Muir Country Park, Scotland
Spoken version of Lament for the Scots Pine c.TamsinGrainger March 2022
Lament for the Scots Pine
(all together) “We stand at your head”
“We stand at your feet”
“And I keep watch over your trunk”
Hail Scots Pine!
Straight your stem
Contained, your goblet of leaves,
Slate-grey your coat
Needles the green of the waves,
We see you
(the group repeats) We see you.
Scots Pine cones
Hail Scots Pine!
Silent you lie
When once the wind sounded you,
Woodpecker knocked
We play your cones with our thumbs,
We listen to you
(the group repeats) We listen to you.
Hail Scots Pine!
Rough your bark
Cold to my palm your branch
Dry your scales
Stroke the smooth lumber inside,
We touch you
(the group repeats) We touch you.
Lewis playing the fiddle, John Muir Country Park, Scotland
Hail Scots Pine!
To sniff your scent
We must-break one of your boughs
Clearing my nose.
Fragrant the resin which oozes.
We smell you
(the group repeats) We smell you.
Hail Scots Pine!
Bitter my tongue,
Salt in the air and through you.
Peppery mint,
Sweet honeydew loved by wasps.
We taste you
(the group repeats) We taste you.
Jane Lewis leading the community singing, John Muir Country Park, Scotland
Tasted ocean,
Listened to Hedderwick Burn
Smelled the river,
Watched gulls and deer.
We applaud you
(the group repeats) We applaud you.
Tickled by squirrels,
Rain wetted your canopy.
Shivered by snow,
The wind blew you right over.
We mourn you
(the group repeats) We mourn you.
Natalie Taylor collecting the soil sample for keeping in the cloak, John Muir Country Park, Scotland
Grown from seed,
Might have lived 7-hundred years.
Closely planted
Could have grown-more-than 1-hundred feet.
We keen for you
(the group repeats) We keen for you.
Pinus sylvestris
All identical ages
Shallowly rooted
All same species together
We respect you
(the group repeats) We respect you.
Lexi Douglas reading to launch the event, John Muir Country Park, Scotland
Heated by sun,
We rarely view from above.
Cooled by sand
We don’t usually see under.
We learn from you
(the group repeats) We learn from you.
‘Timor mortis conturbat me’?
No, fear of death does not trouble me,
Because
‘Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life’.
Fallen tree with sap oozing, John Muir Country Park, Scotland
Quotes
‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ from late Medieval Scottish Poetry. A phrase from the Catholic Office of the Dead, it was used notably by William Dunbar in his ‘Lament for the Makars’. See also ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ by Diana Hendry
‘Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life’ John Muir
The park is by the sea, the mouth of the Firth of Forth, East Lothian, Scotland
Publicity
A contemplative walk round the John Muir Country Park trees following the effects of storm Arwen. Including live fiddling from Lewis, a community song from Jane Lewis, new poems from Rita Bradd and Tamsin Grainger, and soil sample collection by the Keeper of the Soils, Natalie Taylor.
A broken Scots Pine during Storm Arwen, John Muir Country Park, Scotland
Blake Morris, in New York, works together with another psychogeographer to make a score for a walk and it is then made available to anyone else who would like to walk it in whatever way they like, wherever they are.
I walked Score #21 ‘with’ Blake and Jody Oberfelder. Here’s the link to the score.
Jody’s score #21
8th March 2022 Edinburgh, Scotland
Even before dawn I spend time practising to breathe, the springboard to living. I seem to have forgotten to exhale, or maybe I was never very good at it.
A casting of a half-dozen rainbow circles – red, blue, orange, yellow, purple, green – and a flag of blue and yellow. Found singly and made into creative collections.
Women in 3s who already existed before I saw them, mythical crones they will one day become, prepare for the wild swim of the year on International Women’s Day 2022. We had a minute’s silence in solidarity with the women of Ukraine and Russia whose countries are at war.
I and 700 other women of many nationalities, cultures and backgrounds are all celebrating together by running into the water beside a sublime sunrise.
The cold water took my breath away.
Ukranian flag on a lamp post, Portobello, Edinburgh
I want the flag to open up conversations about nationality and migration. I question nationality because of its association with borders. Borders divide; they are used as a tool for power and control, and can destroy freedom of movement which is a basic human right. Freedom of movement exists but only for some people. It depends on your passport—if you are European or British you can travel easily. If you decide to go somewhere for work, for the weather, for love, you just go. So many freedoms. For other people, it is not the same.
Iman Tajik
Afterwards we drank a shot of icy sea buckthorn juice, kindly donated. It was a satisfying deep orange colour and very sharp to taste.
Walking without a donkey 