Flowers and Bones

If the truth can be told, so as to be understood, it will be believed...

Last week, I read an article on a well-respected site, all about Scotland and a handful of the many places to visit. Overall, I agreed with much the writer had shared, but I then found myself frowning as they trotted out that old cliché—oh! how barren the north of Scotland is! All those bogs, all that flat land, just barren until you cross the Pentland Firth and hit Orkney.

This frustrates me, the choice of language is poor—not just because it is overused, but mostly because it is simply, outrageously, wrong. Over on Substack Notes, I shared my irritation, sharing some photos I have taken of the exact area discussed in that piece. This can be found here:

Anything but barren.

I began to think about this, about how often descriptions are made on sweeping ‘evidence’, perhaps from the window of a moving car, or train, or even from the air.

It is no different by the coast. Here, so many plants and animals exist, only they often do so in sheltered nooks and crannies, hollows in dunes, crevices in rock, clinging to cliffs and pulling their way along watercourses emptying into the ocean, staying low, keeping their head down, stealthy by necessity. On the whole, the coastline is not a gentle place to live. As such, life here adapts to stay sheltered and, by extension, often out of sight of those speeding by.

If we slow down and take a walk, then stand or sit still and look—truly look, closely—these margins are neither barren nor empty, windswept rock. There is just so much life here, and so much of it is beautiful.

Scotland possesses a rich bounty of wild plants and nowhere is this more evident than on the coast. Here, there are grasses, lichens, seaweeds, and flowers. Choosing just one of my photographs to illustrate this piece is difficult—do I select the rocks of a cliff, covered in lichens of so many hues and shades, or do I share a rockpool, wreathed in tendrils of all manner of seaweeds? Or, perhaps, one from my collection of flowers, especially those from the sheltered meadows behind the dune systems—the machair, or the links?¹

Machair is a special place, one which needs to be experienced to be truly appreciated. It is also very difficult to classify. The direct translation from Scottish Gaelic is ‘fertile plain’ and is generally applied to the coastal flatlands on the west of Scotland and Ireland. To the east of Scotland, the same area is known as ‘links’, a landform which will be familiar to anyone with an interest in golf, but links are richer in mineral content than machair².

The accompanying photograph is not from the west of Scotland, but from the north—that ‘barren’ land I mentioned. Here, there are various places along the coast where sandy bays give way to dunes, which in turn allow the formation of a plain, full of carpet flora, and the drone and hum of many different—and exceedingly rare—bee species. These places use the name links, yet the debate continues as to where, exactly, they fit. By some definitions these places are closer to machair than links. Links or machair? To most of us, this scientific definition doesn’t really matter, they are similar enough—and both at high risk of loss.

In summer, these plains are a riot of glorious and varied colour, resplendent in flowers and perfume, the air seemingly several degrees warmer than that down on the beach beyond. Quite simply, they are wonderful.

When I was an undergraduate Archaeology and Prehistory student at the University of Sheffield, I was lucky enough to dig the remarkable site of Cladh Hallan, on the west coast of South Uist. On one side, this locale is backed by some of the richest remaining machair in Scotland and, indeed, the world, and on the other, beyond the shore, the rolling valleys and white-capped peaks of the Atlantic Ocean, nothing to stop those waves as they travel for kilometre after kilometre, mile after mile, one continent unto another.

This coastline is one where you can walk and find whispers of a distant past, plough marks in the eroding dunes, or archaeology appearing from beneath the sand. The excellent preservation of bone in these sandy environments means erosion often exposes the dead of hundreds—and thousands—of years ago, whether animals or human remains. As the oceans rise, more will appear, each successive winter chewing at these bays and strands, sometimes a nibble, sometimes a great gulp. The sand—those tiny shell fragments from which this entire ecosystem is built—will blow inland or be sucked out to sea.

It takes thousands of years for such meadows to form, creeping landward, slowly moving across the peatlands beyond, aided by early farming methods now almost entirely unused. Yet these edgelands no longer have thousands of years. They are low, too low, and it is entirely possible they shall be swept away in our lifetimes, or altered by inundation into something other, something less.

Those who came before us are telling us this, each bone, each skeleton, a warning—sometimes, entire cemeteries emerge after a storm, ancient skulls and limbs and pelvis, sometimes the departed of more recent centuries, coffins tumbling, a cascade of the dead, their actions a silent, stern testimony of sorts.

Elsewhere on our planet, on other edges, the dead are also calling out, glaciers and ice releasing those trapped there, permafrost liquefying, mammoths, wolves, lions, viruses, all emerging from long slumber. We are in flux, we ourselves are no longer on firm ground; it will be the edges which first pay the high price we have through our actions—and, principally, inaction—accepted. Why aren’t we raging against those few who push us in this direction?

How long, before the living join those dead, eroded, swept out to sea, cities swallowed and storms breaching defences?

The answer, of course, is no time at all—it has already begun.

Have you ever experienced machair, or links? Do you know of similar landforms where you live? Have you ever walked a coastline and found bones eroding from the sand? Do you live on an at-risk area, perhaps a floodplain or low lying coast? And do you have any idea how we can alter the trajectory the greed of certain groups and, indeed, individuals, have placed us upon?

A Memory

When I was young, back in the early 1990s, I began to collect and develop my now ridiculously eclectic taste in music. I loved all manner of things, discovering tracks on the radio, taping them, swapping blank cassettes and receiving full ones in return, handwritten notes, names of songs, of bands a poetry to my eyes.

One band I liked were The Shamen, a Scottish band who morphed from psychedelia to early proponents of a rock/dance crossover sound, one which was influential, controversial and, on the whole, ground-breaking (they were one of the first acts to have their own website, releasing music online as early as 1995).

Colin Angus, founding member of The Shamen, once said this (NME 27th February, 1993):

“The apocalypse is going to start happening in the beginning of the next century, the next millennium. At least the start of it, anyway. And it’s basically going to be the collapse of the global capitalist economic system, competition for dwindling resources and basically the results of there being too many people on the planet.”

Which just shows how long I’ve been awaiting the collapse of the global capitalist economic system.

However, this little story is not really about any coming or already-started apocalypse, or The Shamen, apart from their role in bringing certain words—certain powerful and thought-provoking words—to my ears, those of another controversial figure, Terrence McKenna.

On their 1992 album, there is an eight minute track (later released as a single), called re:evolution. It is a spoken-word track, McKenna doing the honours, with a background of techno-tinged house music reflecting the ongoing talk.

I loved that track, then and, as it turns out, now. At the time, I was fourteen or fifteen and I had never really heard anyone talking about some of the things McKenna discussed. Here’s an excerpt, some topics which I’d simply never considered at that time, my world very different to that of today’s teenagers.

“Shamanism is not a religion: it's a set of techniques, and the principal technique is the use of psychedelic plants. What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries one cannot continue to close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female, and so forth and so on.”

Of course, I’m well aware there is much of McKenna’s work which is pseudoscience, and I knew that back then, too, but that doesn’t take anything away from the fact he introduced several interesting topics to my tender mind.

However, this little story is not really just about Terrence McKenna, apart from his role in bringing me certain words—certain powerful and thought-provoking words—to my young ears.

The plural of shaman is not shamen, it is shamans. It was some years before I learnt this, as I began to read papers and books on shamanism and, especially, examining the ethnographic record to shed light on the hunter-fisher-gatherer cultures of prehistoric Europe and their own possible systems of belief, of being in their world.

I began to read and talk about this subject in depth, about how those pre-farming communities of entirely modern people would have been influenced by the world they lived in, one of climactic vegetation—the woodlands moving all the way north following the retreat of the ice—one where water and waterways played a huge role in mobility, one where trees were everywhere, where the whole forest was an ever-changing patchwork, pulled apart and regenerated by aurochs and bison, trod by bear and wolf, every plant, animal, rock, spring, cave, shore and more having meaning and depth to those distant ancestors.

This lies at the heart of what I wish to share with my Ancestral, Wild Empowerment series.

But this is not really the point of this story, either.

Instead, I wanted to share a memory which resurfaced recently, one which made me smile and brought about this piece.

Rewind once more to 1993: teenage Alex, The Shamen, and Terrance McKenna. My friend, Simon—who had a CD player (it was some time before I had one of these new-fangled futuristic machines) and had bought the re:evolution single, a single which included a fold-out poster of the entire McKenna monologue—and I were at school, in a supervised computer room session. Our school, Stromness Academy, was rather highly advanced when it came to computing (and, indeed, other areas too. Extra funding was possible, thanks to the islands’ location on the periphery of Europe), with a modem, enabling us access to a then-fledgling, pre-WWW, internet, an internet where the code for the World Wide Web was released in 1993, royalty-free, by CERN. The modem was a brick, a huge, hot block of plastic and wires, running at a now-laughable speed of 14.4kbps.

We were waiting for our turn on the internet-enabled computer, filling time, and I had the idea to type up and print off the words to re:evolution. My typing in those days did not run to the same speed it does now, I was a two-finger typist, thunk, clunk, thunk. It took some time to finish, I hit print, and then got distracted.

Some minutes later, I looked up, to see Doc Rob, the supervising teacher, poring over a printout—my printout—with a puzzled and rather unsure expression.

I walked over and confessed the paper was mine.

There was a brief conversation, in which eschatology and Wittgenstein were mentioned but the use of psychedelic drugs neatly skipped over, then I shuffled back to the computer and tried to hide my embarrassment.

Yet, looking back at this recently resurfaced memory, I can’t help but wonder just how many doors in my own mind were opened at that point, doors which needed no psychedelics, just words and a sharing of them, whether deliberate or accidental.

Sometimes, the point of an event lies waiting in the subconscious—in this case, waiting for over thirty years—then it appears in the brain, linking ideas, sparking an investigation into exactly where that moment in my life—one little memory—led. I’d argue it at least partly led here, to me, writing this, and you reading. A long journey indeed, a re:evolution of a kind and, perhaps, the point of this piece.

Last week, I shared the first in a series of guest cross-posts, this one from Susie at A Hill and I, based on the idea I discuss in my piece Let’s Take a Walk. I loved reading this piece, and was thrilled to share it with you, and I am very much looking forward to reading the next post Susie will craft, scheduled for midsummer.

On Monday, Jan Elisabeth of Alchemical Wonderings will be sharing the second piece in this series, and I cannot wait to then share it with you, probably next Tuesday, as I’m unlikely to be at my computer until then.

I love this idea of cross-posting, but I think I will have to have to reconsider how this series is displayed on my own site going forward. Due to the technical backend, although Substack shows Susie’s post in my archive, I cannot add it to the section Ancestral, Wild Empowerment, which was something I’d intended, so readers can easily access this as a part of the whole experience, a demonstration of how the work I am sharing in that section can be applied in different ways and shared through different voices. I don’t want those pieces to disappear into the archive, that would be too sad. In short, I’m going to have to have a rethink and any ideas are welcome!

This is the penultimate post for this current coastal focal point for Edges and Entries. We will soon move to a different focus, although at the time of writing, I’ve yet to finally decide which. I still have many, many photographs of doors to share, which was my original plan, but there are temptations of caves, whispers of wells and springs, messages from marshes, receipts from rivers, murmurous mountains, and more. Hopefully, by the time I share the last piece about coastlines next week, I’ll have a better idea of where we head next.

One thing I do know, however, is that the next season will consist of ten letters, rather than the 15 of the past two (doors, and coastlines). It will also move from a weekly slot to fortnightly. I’ll talk about why in a future post (I had done, here in the draft, but the post then ballooned into an unwieldy beast!).

Until next time, thanks for reading, I really do appreciate each and every one of you.

1. I cheated, dear reader, I cheated.

2. Here’s a paper about the definitions of machair versus links. Short version: it’s complicated.