Tapes of stones

I had many questions and I got some answers. About cinematic standing stones. Tropes of horror, folk horror, rural horror, the uncanny. The entanglement of film and megalith: tapes of stones, and stone tapes. Urban prehistory in the big screen in the city – London, Edinburgh.

Q&A. Call out and response. Panels and chairs, chairs and panels. Tapes of stones and stone tapes.

During January 2023 I had the good fortune to attend two cinematic events that presented films that all combined elements of rurality, unsettlement, and standing stones. In both cases, films were followed by Q&A and panel sessions with film makers and artists.

First up was a showing of Enys Men, directed by Mark Jenkin. This Cornwall-set movie has been branded in marketing as being folk horror and includes many of the key elements – a remote rural setting (in this case an island), a lonely protagonist, local legends turned to song, a hint of menace, and a standing stone.

The director was happy enough during the Q&A at the end to suggest that the marketing for this film perhaps over-egged the horror element, but there is no doubt that despite there being little blood shed or physical violence shown on screen, nonetheless a horror-scape was evident through a fragmented temporality and the wonderful use of sound. The recurring roar of a generator reminded me of some of the more visceral sounds one finds on Italian horror movie soundtracks.

The film was wonderful and the Q&A fascinating, with Mark Jenkin being generous both with his time and his insights into the creative process. For more of the same, here is an extended discussion about Enys Men with Mark Kermode and central actor Mary Woodvine.

But we’re here for the standing stone! Sadly my raised hand did not get my question asked on the night, and a tweet the following day remains unanswered at least by Mr Jenkin.

Still from Enys Men

In fact, it is both a real – and a fake – standing stone. The actual Boswens menhir was used for some scenes.

Modern Antiquarian (source)

But in an article about the film by Tanya Gold in The Spectator, she suggests that a fake standing stone was used in some scenes, and this makes sense, as it comes and goes, and is to an extent altered during the film.

Landscape has agency in Enys Men. I walk to Boswens Menhir after watching it: it’s the stone in Enys Men, though they made a replica, which I found in the rafters at the reclamation yard Shiver Me Timbers a few days later because the owner is also the prop master. It’s middle Bronze Age, about 4,000 years old, a haunted object.

The two incarnations of the standing stone – real and fake, mirror images of one another – nonetheless have a powerful agency in this film, and probably deserve second billing in the cast list. It / they fulfil(s) the role that megaliths often do in folk and rural horror, in that the standing stone acts as a focal point for our fears and anxieties, a mute and timeless observer that just might become a participant in the right set of circumstances. “Presiding over this time-slipping strangeness is a giant standing stone” (Mark Kermode) and Jenkin himself has noted that of standing stones in the Cornish landscape:

I was really haunted by the Pipers. I’d look through the gateway and I’d think they’d moved slightly. I like the idea of a sentient stone.

And this is a sentient stone with anthropomorphised traits: reviewers use phrases like ‘keeping her company’, and note that the stone seems to have the ‘power to move’, and even that it ‘moves around the island …. changing position and size’. I’ve also read phrases like ‘stands sentinel’, and ‘presiding over’ (reference perhaps also to the fact that it seems to be located in the highest point in the internal island landscape of the film).

Writing about the film, Adam Scovell (sort of the godfather of critical Folk Horror writing) is also drawn to the recurring standing stone imagery, an evocation of what might be called ‘Cornish eerieness’. This is also suggested by the other heritage landmark shown in the film, an abandoned tin mine, which reminded me of earlier Cornish horrors – Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) and Crucible of Terror (1971). These heritage horrors play on time depth and mystery, a vein mined with much success by MR James. Mark Kermode has suggested that Enys Men could be viewed as “the cult 70s TV frightener The Stone Tape reconfigured” – if only past lives, rites, and voices played out beside standing stones could be recovered now, but what if we were to find that blood had been spilled or the living petrified?

Enys Men is a thought-provoking megalith movie that happens to have people in it, orbiting around a standing stone, an eternal entanglement.

A couple of weeks later I was back for more, this time an event organised by The Stone Club, part of London Short Film Festival, and called Figures in the landscape – see this page. Over a couple of hours, five short films were shown followed by a panel discussion.

Stone Club traverse Britain and Ireland’s ancient landscapes via the medium of shorts. From mysterious apparitions in Cymru, sculptural monoliths on the misty moors of Kernow, and a bouncy Stonehenge travelling across the UK, Stone Club offer visions that attempt to thin the veil, inviting us to re-enchant the landscapes we inhabit on a daily basis.

The five films shown were:

Figures in the landscape is a short documentary about the artist Barbara Hepworth at work in and around St Ives, with an evocative narration and soundtrack, and featuring standing stones (of course) and artworks that perfectly align with the Cornish landscape. This included the juxtaposition of standing stones and sculpture as this selection of stills demonstrates, such as the 1938 piece Forms in Echelon.

Filming ongoing (source: BFI and here)

Forms in Echelon (Tulipwood on elm base): Tate

The narration intones: Stones for dancing and stones for dying…death and rebirth, in and out

You can watch this free on the BFI player here.

This was followed by Tresor, a film directed, written and produced by the Cornish singer, composer and artist Gwenno, to accompany her recent album of the same name. Claire Marie Bailey, a Cornish-based film-maker and photographer, collaborated closely with Gwenno on videos for this album and the short film I saw in London. (Mark Jenkin worked with her on a video from a previous album, and one song by Gwenno appears on the Enys Men soundtrack.) This film is joyous and playful, and features Bryn Celli Ddu Neolithic barrow, upon which Gwenno did a DJ set in 2022. (The hat worn below by Gwenno was designed by the Stone Club’s Lally MacBeth.)

Gwenno at BCD solstic 2022 (Pic: Megalithic Portal by dodomad)

Also obligatory draping over and hugging the ubiquitous Mên-an-Tol!

Like Enys Men, Tresor includes the use of Cornish, and was made during a Covid lockdown.

Third up was Jeremy Deller’s film English Magic, made and first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The centrepiece of this work was scenes of children playing on Deller’s bouncy castle Stonehenge, Sacrilege (2012). Again, this was joyous and fascinating, and it was fantastic to hear at the end during the Q&A how much Deller admires the creative thinking and creativity of archaeologists.

The exhibition for the British Pavilion at Venice included this film and other pieces. Deller’s website notes,

The exhibition reflects the roots of much of Deller’s work, focusing on British society – its people, icons, myths, folklore and its cultural and political history. He weaves together high and low, popular and rarefied to create unique and thought provoking work. English Magic addresses events from the past, present and an imagined future.

Source: Deller website (link above)

Sacrilege is a famous artwork, megalithic in form, but green and plastic in execution, a playful inflatable that toured the UK during Olympic year of 2012 including a stint in Glasgow Green park.

Sacrilege (Deller website)

In Deller’s film, we see bouncy Stonehenge blown up (not Transformers 5 style!), enjoyed via the process of uncontrollable bouncing, and then deflated like a giant air bed (but more dignified than National Lampoon’s European Vacation style!). I’ve been to Stonehenge a few times and I’ve never seen anyone have much fun there, so this was always a refreshing installation, and it was nice to see its use documented.

The penultimate film was HforSpirit and Nick Hadfield’s 2021 short ‘pagan rave film’ UnTyMe, “… a short fly on the wall film about a group of friends that flee the city on a rave escape to the hills”. I must confess this was less engaging and joyful than the other films. I can’t like everything! But there was some cool dancing around Castlerigg stone circle with a typical foreboding big sky. You can watch an extract here.

Finally, there was a rather depressing Irish documentary from 1974, called Stones will Speak, directed by Terrence McDonald. This was an evocative and poetic exploration of, I suppose, elements of misplaced nostalgia, for a rural way of life that was neither sustainable nor equitable. “…voices of residents of the west coast tell the stories of their lives – dispelling romantic notions of rural life with tales of immigration, loneliness and hard work….[the film] has an air of truth, bearing witness to the changeless beauty of the Irish countryside but equally the harsh reality that a man cannot live on beauty or support his family on folklore”.

You can watch the film here. I suppose it speaks of a universal human melancholy related to landscape change. “I doubt there is anything in the city to match the sunshine on the mountains”.

The evening was concluded with the panel discussion featuring artist Jeremy Deller, the Stone Club’s Lally MacBeth & Matthew Shaw, artist and archivist Victoria Jenkins, and musician and producer Richard Norris. This was a free-flowing discussion on the films that covered a lot of ground although didn’t quite bottom out the enduring fascination for stone, and standing stones, suggested across the films. There was much discussion about ‘re-enchantment’ which I confess is a concept that I am not sure how to respond to as a prehistorian. It was all, with one exception, very English.

The chance to watch these films on the big screen was too good to miss, coupled with the opportunity to hear film-makers, artists and musicians discuss them. It was also an opportunity for me to explore the increasing interest there is today in Britain with standing stones and megalithic rites, a trend that transcends Folk Horror, despite what this recent Guardian article suggests.

There is something in the wind – perhaps this was even said by a panel member in London – that has so far largely escaped archaeologists. Looking back at my notes from that evening event, perhaps a better way of putting it is that there is a ‘yearning for something’ – and this seems dripping with nostalgia which is entangled with childhood TV memories, some kind of slower paced past, and played out through a rather retro and analogue sensibility. There are dangers of course with such nostalgia, especially were recollection falls to a sort of pagan past that never was. But I get the sense that all of those who were involved in making and curating the films discussed in this blog post are well aware of these dangers, and indeed would actively work against them.

Panels and chairs, chairs and panels. Tapes of stones and stone tapes. Standing stones in the cinema.

PS I still have many questions. One of them was answered via twitter by Mark Jenkin, a belated but welcome answer to my question as set out above about the Enys Men standing stone.

Sources and acknowledgements: I’m very grateful to all of those who organised and participated in the events that are discussed in this blog post, and I’m appreciative of the creative talent involved. I paid to attend both events, this was no junket! My companions on these evenings – Bam and Jan – both helped me think through some of the issues discussed above.

Special thanks to Gwenno for correcting information on the first version of this post in terms of collaborations for Tresor videos and film, and for the kind words!

I hope I have cited all sources for images and so on correctly and clearly above, let me know if you see any problems.

My visit to London was supported by a grant from the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow.

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Tauroctony

Slaying the bull, a cult in the city.

Capital beneath the capital.

The London Mithraeum, and the corruption of prehistory.

Excavation in 1954 © The Times / News Syndication

The Mithraeum in London was found and excavated in the early 1950s as part of a campaign of work by archaeologist WF Grimes to explore ruins and bombsites created by the Second World War. Hints of this structure were found in 1952 when the Walbrook waterway was identified, and full exposure and excavation happened in 1954. As well as the remarkable architecture of this riverside Temple, carved stone fragments were also found including parts of the god Mithras himself.

Rex / BBC

Some 400,000 flooded to visit these excavations, in advance of commercial redevelopment. The initial discovery was memorable and powerful, as documented by an oral history project (instigated by the Museum of London Archaeology Service (MOLAS) and Bloomberg). In some cases a visit to the site stimulated a lifelong interest in archaeology. This kind of public interest, and pressure, as noted by Mike Pitts (Digging up Britain), forced the developer to “rebuild the temple foundations within the new office block” some 100m from where it was found. This replication only came after a period of storage in a nearby builders yard, and seems to have been something of a hasty and mishandled compromise. Thus began what might be termed the ‘peripatetic’ (source) life of this monument, and an entanglement with City of London money.

The first rebuilding of the Temple in a yard ( The Sphere, 23 October 1954, Image © Illustrated London News Group), source: Flickering Lamps blog)

For many decades the Temple lay hidden in plain sight beside Queen Victoria Street, about 100m from its original location. Orientated north-south rather than east-west it looked every inch a shallow ruin, “embedded in concrete outside Bucklersbury House” (Great Wen blog). The general consensus as far as I can tell from blogs and memories of this incarnation of the Temple was rather sad and lost. Mike Pitts has described this location as, “a weed-grown pavement ornament collecting food wrappers wafted by passing buses” (Digging up Britain (2019), pg. 64). Not the kind of deposition that the acolytes of this mystery cult had in mind, but certainly an ordeal – a trial – for this building.

Original source: unknown

But thanks to unfettered capitalism, the Mithraeum moved again! In 2010, the development merry-go-round began once again, the churn of new-for-old office blocks meaning the end was finally nigh for Bucklersbury House. Unlike the Temple of Mithras, this structure was not dismantled brick by brick and put into storage, having little value other than as a testament to really really boring post-war architecture, of which there are and remain many better examples.

Excavations in the 1990s and 2000s in advance of massive shiny (but still boring) new office blocks at Poultry and then Bucklersbury revealed loads more evidence for Roman occupation of this area documented nicely by Mike Pitts in Digging up Britain (page 64 onwards) and this book produced by MOLA. This development also posed a fundamental threat to the the Temple itself, but the developer, Bloomberg, committed to give a permanent new home to the Temple more or less where it was found in the 1950s.

There is no doubt that the construction of the European headquarters of this massive information and media company allowed a lot of archaeology to be found. There is also no doubt that Bloomberg were keen to celebrate, embrace and (let’s be honest) exploit these discoveries, probably due to a mixture of a genuine sense of duty and some of that reputational boosting feelgood magic dust that only deep time can sprinkle. Don’t take my word for it, this is Michael R Bloomberg in the 2017 book (link above) called Archaeology at Bloomberg:

As steward of this ancient site and artefacts,
Bloomberg has embraced the City of
London’s rich heritage. And as a company
that is centred on communication – of data,
information, news, and analysis – we are
thrilled that Bloomberg has been at the core
of a project that has provided so much,
hugely important, new information about the
character and development of Roman
London during its first century of existence.

Before reaching its current original – final – resting place, the Mithraeum moved again, being constructed and deconstructed more times that one would normally expect even for a Roman site. Sadie Watson who ran many of the excavations around this bit of London told me that before reaching its current location, the Temple was moved and rebuilt temporarily to Battersea. The remarkable resilience of this structure is testament both to the original builders and the skills of archaeologists.

Source: Pitts 2019

And so eventually, in November 2017, the Temple of Mithras had been moved back to more or less where it had been found by Grimes, and was opened to the public within and beneath the huge shiny gold Bloomberg HQ building. Located 7m beneath street level, it offered the opportunity for a free archaeology experience in the heart of the city of London, and I have been lucky enough to visit twice since then (in November 2019 and October 2022). One thing that was noticeable on both visits was that there were primary school groups there, so this is clearly a popular educational visit.

Discourse around discoveries made at the Mithraeum are rooted in the world of commerce and finance as befitting a site that sits near the heart of the City of London, a gold bar’s throw away from the Bank of England. Or as Peter Ackroyd would have it, “…where the clerks of the Empire tossed their pens into the water” (London the Biography (2000), pg 27). Perhaps this is inevitable, with the survival of the Temple and its current fancy latest incarnation down to the largesse and riches of Bloomberg.

The materials on display reinforce this connection between ancient London and finance, with an obsessional focus on one type of object found during the MOLA excavations – wooden tablets with legible words impressed into them. One dates back to between AD43 and 53. Ghostly Latin words captured some sentiment about a debt and a poultry-keeper. Pitts notes that this tablet is concerned with ‘finance’ and notes also another tablet dated to 8 January AD57 is also concerned with finance, this one being an IOU. In the wall of artefacts on the ground floor of the Mithraeum experience, the caption for this latter tablet reads: “the oldest record of a financial transaction in the city of London”. This stuff isn’t subtle.

The mystery religion of Mithras was, therefore, replaced simply by the mystery of the markets. Occult practices that shape our lives today with their origins millennia ago. Merlin Coverley included the Temple of Mithras in his occult gazetteer of London (Occult London (2008), pg. 136), suggesting that this riverside cult centre set in motion an almost unbroken sequence of the performance of all-male dark arts in this place.

Visiting the Mithraeum is less of an archaeological deep dive and more an exploration of the murky world of secret, unattainable knowledge. In many ways this is a shame, as the nakedly capitalist agenda and the overwhelming miasma of big money almost overcomes what should be a simple exploration of a place of worship. When I was there all I could think about was that this was the corruption of prehistory. As Pitts has noted, “There was no London at all before Rome invaded in AD43”, but there was a whole lot of prehistory out there to inculcate into pseudo-capitalistic practices and tensions.

This is mediated through a multi-media immersive experience of the Temple. Booked timeslots manage the flow of punters, offering a sense of control and selectivity of those allowed in which again reflects the original purpose of this structure. (Although to the great credit of Bloomberg this is a free attraction, unusual in London.)

There is a gallery – the Space – with temporary art exhibits, and a large wall display of objects from various excavations in this block, displayed in a clinical and stylised fashion, with additional information mostly held on tablets that visitors can consult. Thus we have tablets about tablets and all the other Roman rubbish on display Tetris style.

From here one descends, of course a literal realisation of the subterranean nature of the Mithras experience, to 7m below current pavement level. A schematic section drawing of London lines the side of the stairs, allowing one to descend as if on an elevator through an excavation, unpeeling layers, identifying key moments in the time – the great fire of London! The blitz! Once at the bottom, one enters a dark room with black walls, some touchscreen installations, and ghostly figures projected onto the wall. Music and words float in the air, some from archaeologists, and with a narration by Joanna Lumley. A sense of tremendous anticipation is set up by this gloomy space, with tightly wound tourists pacing beside the closed door that will – when opened – allow access to all that matters, the much-moved Mithraeum.

Down another set of stairs, a performative space is entered, with the ruinous Mithraeum spreadeagled in the centre of a large room, surrounded by a glass walkway and fence, in essence a viewing platform.

The lights gets dimmer and mist starts to form, creating a weird barrier of light around the ruins. Sounds become apparent too, footsteps, chattering voices, a ghoulish horn that reminds one of the opening Germanic battle scenes in Gladiator. Latin chanting begins and there are some groans and animated discussion just beyond the scope of our understanding. A neon tauroctony scene lights up the business end of the Temple, a high-tech version of the hole-and-candle altar to be found at Carraburgh Mithraeum on Hadrian’s Wall. Suddenly it stops and after a photo op, visitors can return back above ground, back to the future and the bustle of London. What passed between these visitors alone with their own thoughts in the darkness, deep in the sweat and pain of pathetic elitism, must remain a mystery.

This is a powerful location, on the banks of the buried and largely lost Walbrook, close to the magical London Stone (which I blogged about in 2018). It feels like a location that has depth enough to enflame solitary male rage, echoes of the bull being slaughtered. Because this bloody act – the Tauroctony – lies at the heart of Mithraism, an eternal chase across the University to kill the bull. This is about men getting their hands dirty, doing what has to be done, whatever the cost. In the streets above this monument to self-serving brutality, pubs in the area heave in the early evening with men in suits holding long thin pint glasses of lager. They smell of booze, of money, of mundane masculinity.

During my most recent visit, a stripped to the waste lone guy climbed onto a Starbucks on Walbrook and started throwing rocks at the windows of a mirrored office block. As we watched from Cannon Street, he restlessly prowled back and forth, ranting. The motivations of this topless shouting man hurling rocks at capitalist totems was never made clear: was he slaying the bull or had the bull slayed him?

The London Mithraeum has at its heart the violent act of slaying the bull, the obsessional and bloody outcome of this mystery religion. On my first visit in 2019 I was disturbed by the violence – the capitalist cult – of this place. and what its location represents today. For London, the coming of money, and this mystery religion, meant nothing would ever be the same again.

London cromlech

Looking for Welbeck Street. Hunting for Henrietta House. At times walking and looking upwards. At other times with my nose buried in a map.

Following another tweet, sniffing out a lead, searching for prehistory where by rights there should be none and yet….

… this is London after all.

This tireless, relentless, obsessional quest for #urbanprehistory is driving me on beyond what is reasonable of a person with my other commitments.

And then I see it: the London cromlech. Suddenly it is all worthwhile.

On the corner of Welbeck Street and Henrietta Place, perched high above pavement level, surveying the steady flow of commuters, shoppers, doctors in this medical quarter of Marylebone. A place of bones. On Henrietta Place stands Henrietta House. On Henrietta House stands the cromlech.

Megalithic art on the corner quoins

Occult architecture across a from department store, a place of coins

The Debenhams dolmen

A structure of dark passages and concealed knowledge

rendered in four dimensions, all angles and shadows

having the feeling of being an optical illusion.

A stone joke not shared by those who pass beneath unaware

the view from below being as if from the underworld

and we are the dead.

The cromlech is perched, an iron on coffin legs

placed on a junction, a liminal place of decision-making

looming from its dizzy cliff, inaccessible, skeletal, timeless

representative of an impossible topography.

Field notes 1: the cromlech

The cromlech is not alone. A remarkable series of buildings and structures are carved around the façade of Henrietta House in Portland limestone, the work of sculptor Keir Smith. They are from a commissioned series of sculptures he called From the Dark Cave which was completed in 1992. I traced the edge of this office block with my eyes, moving forward in time, sometimes recognising the well-spaced miniature stone architectural renderings of iconic buildings of Britain both real and stylised.

Smith during work on the project (source: catalogue)

Fifteen buildings, from the dark cave, to Canary Wharf, hundreds of thousands of years of human occupation and endeavor.

Field notes 2: the dark cave

The primitive hut twinned with the cromlech, wrapped around the corner

Temple, cave, pyramid, skyscraper, church

Watchtower and tolbooth

Castles and crenulations

Globes and domes

The phallic observatory

Machines of industry

Whimsy, fancy, folly

The Euston Arch

Hawksmoor (of course).

Plan showing the locations and names of the 15 sculptures, from the catalogue

This work was commissioned by Lynton plc and Nationale-Nederlanden, and in part funded by the Public Arts Development Fund. The influences, process, and rationale, is captured in a rather tough to find short booklet entitled A sculpture for Henrietta House London W1, From the Dark Cave. The second part of the title is written, white on white.

My copy came in the post in an extravagantly stamped envelope.

The creative process involved the creation of a series of wooden maquettes in a specially established woodworking workshop. These are smaller scale versions of the final sculptural pieces which were made by cutting stone blocks with a diamond steel saw, ‘essentially stone constructions rather than pure carvings’.

Maquettes of the Dark Cave, the Cromlech, and the Primitive Hut

As a whole, the buildings represent what Smith characterised as a ‘personalised history of architecture, or more properly of building’. Yet there was also a strong archaeological undercurrent in this work, acknowledged by Smith as a longterm preoccupation. In his obituary in The Guardian it was noted that ‘Art and architecture of the past, archaeology, mythology and landscape informed his early work’ and all of this and more is evident at Henrietta House. There is also a clear occult thread running through this work not least with the depiction of a pyramid that recalls the one in the cemetery of Hawksmoor’s church St Anne of Limehouse and his pyramid in the grounds of Castle Howard.

Of the cromlech itself, Smith notes the ongoing impact on his work of Paul Nash, of whom this carving is a ‘remembrance’ especially the 1937 lithograph Landscape of the megaliths, an Avebury masterpiece. The line of stones in this painting, a kinaesthetic avenue, has more curves and fewer angles compared with the Dark Cave series, but captures a similar processional, progressional, aesthetic in stone.

Nash’s Landscape of the megaliths (Victoria and Albert Museum)

The cromlech is a composite creation, based both on an un-named megalith that Smith saw on a trip to St David’s in Pembrokeshire (= dolmen country) and Kits Coty House, a caged dolmen in Kent. That it is a fictionalised dolmen, composed of multiple sources of information, an every-cromlech, is no surprise. But Smith’s rendition has no cage, only the adjacent cave.

Kits Coty House dolmen (c) English Heritage

Here the Nash influence is at its most strong, and Smith has fabricated a fascinating facsimile of this mysterious monument. Unlike most other buildings in this series, this is a place of the dead, not the living.

What of the future of this artwork? This is a place of transformation. Scaffolding and fencing conceals from view some of the carvings, while men with high-vis jackets, hard hats, and cigarettes loiter in the shadow of the cromlech, observing my own curious behaviour, taking photographs, keeping notes, avoiding traffic.

This is not a quiet location. Close to Oxford Street, it offers the back view of big shops, the rear entrances, the underbelly of capitalism and pre-Christmas consuming.

Henrietta House is currently occupied by CBRE who appear to be a big international real estate corporation.

CBRE have embarked on what they call Henrietta House Re-imagined. A ‘divisional director’ says:

This transformational project will create an inspiring and energising workplace which promotes wellbeing, sustainability and productivity. Incorporating the latest in tech and office design, it will allow innovation and collaboration to thrive and will empower our teams to better serve our clients and to attract and retain the best talent.

Whatever.

A glance at the impression of the new look for the exterior of this building shows that Smith’s series of carved buildings will survive this regeneration. This can do no harm to the wellbeing of staff and visitors alike.

And CBRE do appear to like prehistory. They are the ‘Official Real Estate partners’ of the Tutankhamun: treasure of the golden pharaohs exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery (November 2019 to May 2020). This is King Tut on tour. This golden sponsorship deal reminds me of the Bloomburg curation of London’s Temple of Mithras which will be the subject of a future blog post. It would be nice to think that this ethos would encourage information about Smith’s work to be included at Henrietta House, as I am not sure if this is currently the situation.

Smith’s obituary says this of the Dark Cave series: These frontal sculptures were carved in deep relief, much bolder and more three-dimensional than the shallow carving that bas-relief allows. He employed geometric form and references to elements of his favourite buildings, whether significant or utilitarian. Who is to say which category we might assign to the cromlech?

The depiction of the dark cave, of the cromlech, of the primitive hut, represent an urban prehistoric triptych of unparalleled depth and complexity, and are well worth a visit if you are ever in the vicinity.

You won’t regret it.

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to Magnus Copps for drawing my attention to this cromlech, which I visited during a trip to the TAG conference at UCL in December 2019. A suitable end to the millennium. Quotes in the text either come from ‘the obituary’ (The Guardian, 3rd April 2007, by Ann Elliot) or ‘the catalogue’, which is the 1994 pamphlet From The Dark Cave – A Sculpture For Henrietta House London W1 by Keir Smith. The image of the maquettes is sourced from the Royal British Institute of Architects (RIBA). Finally, the Henrietta House re-imagined visualisation comes from the web page with this name linked to in the text above.

King Lud

Drink to King Lud

whose knuckle bones were

carried north

by a favoured son –

carried north

from Lud’s Gate to

Wishaw

a place that was then called  Wygateshaw

home from home

one gate to another

the Best of Caledonia

a hand of friendship

in those darker ages –

From Lud’s fortress

Fleet of foot

to Mother-well

Moderwelt

the lady’s well

water to water

border crossing

bribing Tennents with tributes

making merry

smoking area

& beer garden

at rear –

 

Ludovic Mann wrote of Lud in Glasgow –

The moon was termed Ur, Ara, Er; and Cu, Cua, Kai, Clu, Glo, expanded to Llud, Lug, Lach, Cluth –

the richness of moon nomenclature –

the Temple of the Moon

to the north of the Clyde

drink to King Lud

whose knuckle bones were

carried north

and it is said his ribs

were

dragged

to

Hookland.

 

 

 

Notes:

This post has been written to mark the beginning of the Hookland Year of the Moon.

Mann’s quotation comes from his 1938 book Earliest Glasgow. Temple of the Moon.

The King Lud pub is located at 9 Craigneuk Street, Craigneuk, Wishaw.

How old is a piece of stone?

There can’t be much left to write about the London Stone, an urban megalithic curio that The Guardian newspaper called a ‘psychogeographer’s landmark’. This strange roughly cuboid limestone block, located at 111 Cannon Street in London for at least half a millennium, may well be a solid lump of stone but it consists more of myth than molecule.

There are so many legends associated with this roughed-up beige 76 kg stone block that it strikes me as weird that it has consistently been located in such an un-legendary location. Although in the past the the London Stone has by historical accounts been set into the wall of the former St Swithen’s Church, it has also in more recent times been contained by a rather crappy cage in the wall of a WH Smiths and before that a Sportec sports shop and even The Bank of China. This was after a near miss during the Blitz.

Wikipedia: creative commons, John O’London

Above two images both Rex / Shutterstock, sourced from The Daily Mail 12022016

There is little point in rehearsing the many stories associated with the origins, meaning and biography of the London Stone. There is such a depth of lore about this object that I am sure that it deserves more than the one or two paragraphs afforded in most books about London; certainly, a lack of time permitted me researching this as rigorously as I would have liked.

For the time being, to cut to the urban prehistoric chase, let’s focus on how old the LS actually might be. Peter Ackroyd (London: the biography, 2001), suggests that it, ‘is of great antiquity’, but ‘as a perishable stone, cannot be assumed to survive from prehistoric times’. Two pages tell the story of the Stone in John Matthews and Caroline Wise’s The Secret Lore of London (2016); they describe is a ‘worn stump’ and a ‘geomantic mark-stone’ of, at oldest, Roman origin.

Reproduced in The secret lore of London (Matthews and Wise)

In The Stones of London (2012) Lee Hollis suggests that the London Stone may be little more than a Roman gatepost that has taken on all sorts of myths and legends depending on the political needs of those who told those stories. Ed Glinert (The London Compendium, 2004) calls the Stone a ‘totem for the city’s safety’ which has prehistoric overtones, but more broadly draws on myths about the Stone not being removed from the city. And so on. Each account draws on the same pool of lore, include lots of secondary referencing, and indicate the limitations of the historical text as a source as authors attempt to peer back into the murky mists of time.

There is much that could be done from an archaeological perspective to add to the already-colourful story of the London Stone. There have been various different reliquaries that have held the LS, and this would be an interesting line of investigation both in terms of the form but also materiality of these cages and boxes, as well as telling us something about how people engaged with and interacted with the Stone, and what levels of control were exercised over that engagement.

From John Thomas Smith’s Antiquities of London (1791-1800)

Or perhaps a mapping exercise could be undertaken, considering the various different locations that the London Stone has been placed, on both sides of the street and with slight variation, and other possible places of repose. The location of the Stone vertically might also be traced, with pavement level and higher in the church wall just two variations. Again, how people encountered the London Stone and spatially where it was located might shed light on its social role, and this includes the bodily inclination needed to view the monolith: looking down or peering up.

Helen Butler does some conservation work (c) Museum of London

The stone itself could (and I’m being fanciful here but what the heck) be the object of scientific study, with techniques such as XRF and Ramon Spectroscopy able to discover paint, blood, sweat, tears and semen stains (OK, maybe not the latter, that would need a CSI-style UV light source…). Use-wear analysis would be able to (theoretically) shed light on the exact metallurgical properties of the sword that was used to strike the London Stone by rebel leader Jack Cade in 1450 (but not what he had for breakfast that day).

Stock image of Jack Cade waving his sword about, various sources online.

It is interesting how many old drawings of the stone focus on the detail of the container and not the stone, which more often than not seems to be a shapeless lump. This is perhaps because geometrically this thing is a shapeless lump. The Mail Online described it as looking like, ‘a large piece of leftover masonry’. So a 3D model of the stone would be nice so capture its slightly strange shape and rough surface, and might shed light in the mechanism of the breakage of the stone (it may once have been larger), as well as highlight historic damage and carvings.

(c) Europac 3D

Indeed, after I had written these words, I found out that such a scan has indeed been undertaken by Europac 3D. This laser scan, undertaken to sub 1mm resolution, was done using Arctic Space Spider which sounds like something from a John Carpenter film but probably isn’t. Interestingly, this ‘revealed several man-made carvings, one of which is believed to have been made when Jack Cade entered London’ although I think that one was already visible with the naked eye. I think full results are yet to be published, but at last the Stone can be viewed as something other than a blurry block in a photo or as an etching of a blob in a box (see below).

Reproduced in Ackroyd’s London: the biography

The London Stone, as it happens, recently spent a couple of years in the capable hands of the Museum of London’s archaeologists, and they undertook some conservation work on the Stone as well as putting the thing on display with a lovely purple background in their museum (and getting the aforementioned scan done).

(c) Museum of London

One of the key areas of their presentation of the stone to the public was some myth-busting, and blimey there are lots of myths and stories attached to this object that they wanted to bust.

Myth number 1 that they ‘bust’ was: It has stood in London since prehistoric times and Myth number 2: It was an ancient altar used for Druidic sacrifices. Both of these centre on the suggestion that the LS is the remnant of a much larger prehistoric stone or even a broken standing stone. However, MOLA question the urban prehistory credentials of this rock, and thus by extension the legitimacy of this blog post. In fact neither myth is really busted, but rather some of the historical biography of the London Stone cited, with the underlying suggestion that there is simply no evidence that this was ever part of a prehistoric monument. They push is back possibly to Saxon or Viking times, maybe even Roman, but no earlier.

Assumed by some authors such as John Strype and William Blake to be a pagan stone, in fact this had no basis in fact and simply confirmed their own romantic proto-druid mythologizing, captured in this stansa from Blake’s Jerusalem:

Where Albion slept beneath the Fatal Tree,
And the Druids’ golden Knife
Rioted in human gore, In Offerings of Human Life…
They groan’d aloud on London Stone,
They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook…

Finally, MOLA get to the point and conclude: “There is no evidence for this, and London Stone, whatever its purpose, was certainly not erected before the Roman period.” Boo.

That’s fine, and also true. There is no evidence that the London Stone is prehistoric in origin. But does this matter? Some in the past have believed it to be the case, and some still do. The prehistoric credentials of this stone are nothing to do with reality, but perception, and this is often the way with odd megaliths and other urban prehistoric miscellany. We might as well ask: how old is a piece of stone? Because the fact that the London Stone is an oolitic limestone means that it is very old, dating to before 1,000,000 BC. It depends on how one frames the question.

Source: London TimeOut 05102018

Visiting the London Stone today seems to me a legitimate exercise in prehistoric speculation now that it has been re-instated in a new shrine on the former WH Smith site, still 111 Cannon Street.

The Stone has only been back in its old location for a few months, although now the weird cage has been replaced with a glossy shiny glass-fronted display box. This reliquary appears to be a throwback retro design referencing older versions of the container for the Stone, some of which are pictured earlier in this post.

Two black plaques sit on either side, one of which explains that we know bugger all about the London Stone, while the other says the same thing in braille (I assume).

The right-hand information panel begins with a malformed tripartite sentence.

Above the ceremonial repository, there is a simple bookplate inscription saying LONDON STONE and this appears to be part of a limestone facade of the fancy new building, thus mimicking the materiality of old Stoney itself. Has the architectural design for this glassy building been designed with the LS in mind?

This has replaced the crappy but endearing WH Smith context of yore, and the new mini-high rise building is rather more glassy and glamorous. The London Stone has clearly gone upmarket. This is certainly a gentrification from its earlier status, described by Ackroyd as, ‘blackened and disregarded, by the side of a busy thoroughfare‘. Nonetheless, the latter part of this statement remains true.

The glassy nature of the building within which the LS is now encased affords views behind the Stone, a glimpse that was not within the gift of the stationer WH Smith. Here, disappointingly, the oolitic lump appears to be concealed behind a wall of mdf, although there is the hint of a small panel that might be removable with a smuggled screwdriver once this establishment opens for business, whatever that business might be.

Observing those walking past the London Stone suggests that this is, at worst, of no interest, or at best, an over-familiar landmark, as few pedestrians paused to pay their respects. The noticeboard detained a few men with suits for a minute or two, while a woman with a pram did look at it as she perambulated past.

I got the sense that this is a lonely Stone as I lurked in the area for far too long. This is perhaps why this geological curio literally engaged me in a short twitter conversation, expressing the surprising and hitherto un-expressed desire to be called Kevin. I duly obliged, walking past and affording LS this new moniker with a jolly shout of ‘hello Kevin’, although as yet this new persona has not been adopted widely.

Shall we ever get to the truth of it? No, of course not. And why should that matter? When we ask ‘how long is a piece of string’ we don’t expect a factual, empirical answer. The London Stone’s prehistoric credentials are not in doubt as far as I am concerned, elements of a story long told, whether that be the one about it being a broken standing stone or having served as a druid altar or some other sacred megalith of yore.

It doesn’t matter how old the London Stone is: we only need believe it to be so. This is rich narrative, a stone that does not roll but has gathered spiritual moss. As AD Cochrane has noted, ‘Down the centuries a parade of charlatans, poets, modern psychogeographic writers, alchemists, historians and eccentric clergymen have enriched the mythology of London Stone‘. If this isn’t prehistory, I don’t know what is.

There is one source that I was able to find that suggested that this misshapen hunk of rock was once part of a prehistoric monument. In a review of the former London Stone Pub (107 Cannon Street) a contributor to the website ‘Fancy a Pint.com‘ suggests that the Stone was, ‘possibly part of an ancient stone circle’. The same review also suggests that the pub contained, ‘gargoyles, cocktails in test tubes and other assorted horror ephemera’ so perhaps it is for the best that it closed a couple of years ago, to be replaced by The Cannick Taps.

Photo: Fancyapint.com

Rare views inside the London Stone pub, which appears to have been a gothic extravaganza of poor taste, suggest decor that mimicked the grey metal cage that enclosed the Stone until fairly recently. Bad art imitates poor cage.

Trip Advisor – interior of the London Stone pub (deceased)

How old is this piece of stone? Who cares.

The London Stone is as the London Stone does. LS if you are into the whole brevity thing.

The London Stone abides.

 

Sources and acknowledgements: if you want to find out more about the London Stone, ask it questions on twitter via @thelondonstone – it / Kevin might answer back.

 

 

 

 

Plaque attack!

Isn’t is about time we started to mark the locations of prehistoric sites and discoveries in ways that are visible, informative and accessible to local communities and visitors?

It is factually correct to state that the presence of prehistory in your village, town, suburb and city is not a secret. There are online platforms that can tell you this, such as Canmore in Scotland and Coflein in Wales. However, the information contained in these national (and equivalent regional) databases is encoded in archaeological terminology, while site entries often lack detail, depth and / or images to make the information more accessible to a curious member of the public. They are also portals that currently do not work well on smart phones and depend on decent wifi or 4G, not as available in suburbia as you might think.

One way that would be effective at easing the burden on people finding out this stuff for themselves would be an urban prehistory plaque scheme, my preferred colour being brown, not blue [although I have not tested this colour yet]. This simple device, mirroring schemes in other parts of the UK focusing on famous dead people, is familiar and easy to interact with. In my proposal, urban prehistory locales would be marked with a circular disk a foot in diameter containing just enough information to let curious passers-by know the headline information required. This would be high-level and simple but would contain enough information to (a) demand further investigation and (b) blow minds (at least for some). Digital add-ons may become necessary, but the analogue disks would be a good starting place as my recent guerrilla activity on this front suggests…..

The concept of plaques is a familiar one, but it is not a modern invention. The first scheme was proposed in London in 1866 believe it or not, and is the oldest of its kind in the whole wide world. (If you don’t believe in alien life, its the oldest such scheme in the Universe.) Run by the (Royal) Society of Arts,  then London County Council, then Greater London Council, and since 1986, English Heritage, these blue info-circles are London-only although many other local authorities and organisations have since adopted similar schemes. The plaques usually mark a building with a connection to a famous person who has been dead for at least 20 years: ‘the intrinsic aim of English Heritage blue plaques is to celebrate the relationship between people and place’. (There is an excellent online resource, Open Plaques, which curates images, locations and stories of plaques from all over the place, well worth checking out.)

There is something immediate and accessible about plaques. They are spatially situated in the correct location someone famous lived and / or died (and less often, where events of note took place or an earlier building once stood). They are reassuringly analogue and do not depend on wifi or a mobile signal although this does not preclude follow-up research later. In some cases, they can surprise and even delight, as when I completely accidentally stumbled upon this Wheeler blue plaque when I was heading for a Cochno Stone meeting in London a couple of years ago.

But can we do more with plaques than just celebrate the rich, famous, mostly men? Could plaques be used to tell stories of what happened in a place, rather than simply who resided where and when? And can we push this back deep into prehistory?

Mike Pitts made a strong case (in the July-August 2012 British Archaeology magazine) for a plaque scheme that does not simply focus on famous recent people such as archaeologists and antiquaries, but also the dead found on excavations. (‘Let’s celebrate the anonymous people who made Britain’ is the sentiment, although I’m not so convinced by this jingoistic tone.) Nonetheless, this is a well-argued polemic and was accompanied by the mocking up of ‘Ochre plaques’ as he called them, in each case located where a ‘famous’ prehistoric dead person had been found…

Ochre ‘urban prehistory’ plaques, all images reproduced courtesy of Mike Pitts and British Archaeology.

These are very effective, and got some good feedback at the time and also when Mike recently re-posted them on twitter in response to my own musings on the subject. The focus here on the famous dead fits in with the broader aspirations of plaque schemes although in truth even the ancient dead whom we give nicknames are still unknown, while in some other cases multiple burials and events might also be plaque-marked.

A good example of how this might work is this surprisingly detailed plaque that is situated in a car park in Christchurch, Dorset.

Christchurch. Image reproduced courtesy of Annie-Leigh Campbell

This is part of a local HLF-funded ‘unofficial blue plaque’ scheme, the Millennium Trail, of which are there are many across England and indeed beyond. This series of plaques is accompanied by a map and leaflet available locally.

In the spirit of experimentation I recently carried out a couple of field visits to urban prehistory sites – plaque attacks! – having prepared in advance a rather low tech and mocked up plaque for the occasion. I confess I used dark blue for these early experiments, to provoke a reaction by subverting the familiar format, but will, like a judo person, aim to step up to brown in the future.

My two case-studies are in a sense classic urban prehistory sites – Bronze Age burials that were found during urban expansion in the form of road building, and were subsequently destroyed (although in very different circumstances). Importantly, in neither case is the location of this discovery marked in any way, almost nothing is known about the sites, and in at least one instance the nearest resident was completely unaware of the story. These are unremarkable urban streets with a hidden, remarkable secret, that if known might change the way that (some) people view the place that they live, but hopefully not in an Amityville Horror type of way.

 

Succoth Place, Edinburgh

In May 1901, during the construction of a new road to the west of the city centre, Succoth Place, running off Garscube Terrace, workmen came across a stone cist that contained a fine prehistoric urn. This was taken into the care of the architect D Menzies and then collected a few days later by archaeologist Fred Coles who subsequently helped investigate the site and wrote up a brief excavation report. The urn was recovered from the cist by the foreman after the cap stones had been broken to make way for the pavement kerb. Further damage to the cist itself revealed, remarkably, that this was a rare double-compartment cist, with two burial cells separated by a single upright central slab. Coles assisted with clearing out the second chamber, within which was a second urn. Both are what we would term Food Vessels and belong to the early Bronze Age.

Nothing else was found in either cist compartment, other than ‘minute fragments of bone, which, on the gentlest handling, crumbled away’. An undignified and dusty end.

Both Food Vessels were later accessioned to the National Museum, and that was the end of the whole business, with presumably the remnants of the cist being wrecked to allow road-building to continue, the whole site having been excavated in a rather crude fashion which was the norm for that time.

In early May 2018, almost exactly 117 years after this discovery, I visited Succoth Place with Glasgow PhD student Denise Telford in the rain armed with my cardboard urban prehistory plaque.

As ever with such trips, careful planning was required, and the friend of the urban prehistorian, the ragged annotated folded A-Z, was employed to get us there safely and efficiently.

The leafy suburbs of this part of Edinburgh, near the Water of Leith, looked rather dreich in the downpour, and we sheltered under overhanging vegetation from time to time as we wound our way up to the top of a hill (via Garscube Terrace) crowned with massive lavish sandstone mansions and a private school. The friendly lollipop man helped us across Henderland Road, just in case we should be crushed by a massive 4×4.

We reached the Garscube and Succoth soon enough. Despite the distinguished and peaceful surrounds, subversion was evident: the street sign has a runic addition in tiny letters, creating the memorably Shakespearean phrase Succoth My Nob Pl(ease).

Coles recorded that the cist was found 60 feet from the junction and so we headed there, with the location where the Bronze Age dead had once lain being mercifully free of the indignity of parked cars.

There was nothing here to mark this burial place, and I am fairly sure that the inhabitants of the big houses here know nothing of this either. There was nothing left to do but mark the place with the plaque, which had been carried here in an old-school 5p Morrison’s carrier bag for protection from the incessant rain. In error, Denise snapped 118 photos of me holding the plaque of which the best one is reproduced below.

There was little sense that this was anything other than a posh suburb and certainly there was no room for the remembrance of the dead – the dead whose bodily remains crumbled to dust in order for sandstone mansions to be reachable by horse and cart in as much comfort as was possible at the time. Let’s not be emotive and say that this part of the city was built on the (tiny) bones of the dead, but it was, and perhaps this needs to be remembered, out of respect for the deceased, who did not even have the dignity of a ghostly presence or their own plaque. Until now.

As John Mahoney’s character in the movie Barton Fink so memorably implored drunkenly: ‘Honey, where’s my honey?’. 

 

Morar Road, Crossford, nr Dunfermline

Let’s travel to Fife, just across the River Forth from Succoth and all that, to the location of another Bronze Age urban cist that was knackered in order to facilitate urban expansion. In this case, the cist was destroyed before an archaeologist was even able to look at it – and this happened in 1973!!

During construction of roads for a new housing estate called Keavil on the south side of the town of Crossford on 13th November 1973, a stone coffin or cist was found. The workers on this construction project thought that the collection of flat slabs was ‘some sort of old land drain’ and destroyed the structure to make way for the road the next day. A Mr A Hall was able to recover one thing from this burial, a fine complete Food Vessel pot, which suggests that the destruction of the cist was perhaps not as cavalier as reported, and perhaps the workers could have stopped when this was found rather than when it was all too late. So much for rescue archaeology.

A sober note was made of this unfortunate event in that year’s Discovery and Excavation in Scotland, while a drawing of the vessel and a brief accompanying narrative was published as an addendum to the excavation report of a cist cemetery found at Aberdour Road, Dunfermline (a site I blogged about back in 2012).

The contractors on this build, Geo Wimpey and Co, ‘kindly’ handed the Food Vessel over to the local museum and got on with making roads and money.

Armed with this sorry story, preparations for my second plaque attack were formed a week after the Succoth escapade. Using my time-honoured cheapo approach I created a similar plaque to the previous effort but this time with amended and simplified my logo. I had to contend with a greasy stain on the cardboard transferred from a kitchen surface the work was carried out on.

I visited this location with Glasgow PhD student Andrew Watson, on the way back from another urban prehistory-related fieldtrip to Fife. Andrew map-read me into the estate via a series of colourful streets (none of them Cist Street which might have been the least Wimpey could have done): Hunt Place, Katrine Drive, Western Avenue and then Morar Road and Affric Way, together representing a confusing mixture of street types for no discernible reason. And then we were there, in a quiet suburban road lined with blue bins and puddles.

The kind of place where twenty is plenty.

Andrew and I quickly set up a sophisticated photo shoot, marking the location that the cist was found and destroyed, 1m below the current road level, in a memorable fashion.

As we struggled to get to grips with the placelessness of this place that had once been a sacred burial spot that must have had an abundance of place, the owner of the house outside which we were messing about came out to see what us ‘boys’ were up to. We explained out business and he was amazed that such a thing had been found outside his house, as it was being built, and he assured us he would tell every visitor this exciting revelation (although he also said he hardly got any visitors so this may not be a strong method of dissemination). He declined the chance to have the plaque (an original and unique piece of art one might argue) hung on the front of his house however.

Knowledge exchanged, he walked back inside, and by god I think he had a spring in his step.

This sobering encounter with an old man ended our photo session, and I must say I don’t think Andrew was taking this as seriously as he could have been.

 

Plaque attack!

The cardboard plaques that I have made and taken to places that hold rich prehistoric secrets is a device that has started conversations and created complex experiences for all involved. These places of death and burial remain unmarked although digitally their story has now been told again, perhaps for the first time in decades or more, and this is how such plaques could act as easy gateway drugs into the hard stuff of prehistory.

Truth be told, we cannot just expect people to find out about the prehistoric events that may or may not have taken place when their houses or schools or roads were being built or improved. We – archaeologists, heritage professionals – need to be evangelical about this, pro-active prehistory-pushers, talking to people and braving the rain to find ways that tell the lost stories of ancient bones and bits of pottery. Circular information panels may or may not be the best way to do this, but we have nothing to lose by trying to follow the advise of Mike Pitts.

Let’s celebrate the ancient dead as well as the modern rich and famous. Let’s tell stories of deep time, generate wonder and surprise, and change the way that people see the places that they live.

I wonder – where will the next plaque attack be?

 

Sources and acknowledgements: I would firstly like to thank Denise and Andrew for accompanying me on these fool’s errands that I do from time to time, and for the stimulating conversation both provided; there ideas have filtered into this post. Thanks also to Mike Pitts for allowing me to use images, and drawing on his own ideas; please join the Council for British Archaeology if you want to receive regular copies of British Archaeology magazine. Thanks also to the many positive comments I got about the UP plaques on twitter.

The report on the Succoth Place discovery can be found in a paper by Fred Coles, ‘Notice on the discovery of cists containing urns at Succoth Place, near Garscube Terrace, Edinburgh’. This was published in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland volume 36 (1901-02). The Food Vessel and cist image in the post above were both sourced from that paper. 

For information (limited) on the Morar Road cist site, see pages 130-1 of Close-Brooks, Norgate and Ritchie (1974) ‘A Bronze Age cemetery at Aberdour Road, Dunfermline, Fife’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland volume 104. This was also the source of the pot drawing for this site. This journal is open access.

The Christchurch blue plaque was first posted on twitter by Annie-Leigh Campbell, while the map / booklet image related to the Millennium Trail in this town came from a website called Dorset Visual Guide. The quote about the purpose of the London blue plaques near the start of the post comes from the official EH site about them, linked to in the same paragraph.

The only way is essence

Is it possible to make sense of archaeological traces when nothing remains? Can we extract meaning about the past from the places where the past played itself out? Or, do we have to acknowledge that when it is gone, it is gone? To examine these problematic issues, I want to draw on some rather diverse sources: an urban landscape associated with an infamous Victorian serial killer, a weird parapsychological theory on the fringes of geology, a science fiction TV show, and the application of science in contemporary archaeology.

The recently re-issued book, The London of Jack the Ripper Then and Now, by Robert Clack and Philip Hutchinson (DB Publishing, 2010) presents a detailed analysis of the so-called Whitechapel Murders in their spatial context. The book includes a series of photos of murder scenes then and now, juxtaposing the poorhouses, institutes, slums and public houses of the 1880s with the fast food outlets, car parks and modern housing of today. I wanted to explore this urban landscape in a little more detail, to spend some time in places where notable events once took place but have since been radically transformed. This is a common experience for the archaeologist, although usually relating to rather different kinds of past events.

These murders took place in or on the fringes of Whitechapel in London between 1888 and 1891; some, but by no means all, of these murders have been attributed to Jack the Ripper. The quantity, frequency and unsolved nature of these 20 or so murders speaks volumes for the attitude towards, and lifestyle of, many unfortunate women, many of them prostitutes, living in extreme poverty at that time. These murders, the foggy streets of London and the grime of the East End feed a flourishing tourist activity – Jack the Ripper walks and tours. Whether self-guided, or with a formal group, these tours evoke the spirit of the age, and depend on the power of visiting the very locations where horrible crimes took place well over a century ago. This seems to me an inverse form of topophobia, a landscape of dread and bad memories that has become persistently attractive. Massive urban re-generation and the Blitz have rendered this a very different Whitechapel from the 1880s, yet visitors (some of them ‘Ripperologists’) appear to be seeking out the essences of those crimes, surveying the murderous geography.

A few days ago I visited Whitechapel, with a knowledgeable friend guiding, and spent some time absorbing the vibrant atmosphere of contemporary Whitechapel and Spitalfields, while at the same time recognising ‘infamous’ Ripper-related place names such as Hanbury Street, Fournier Street and the Ten Bells public house (shown in the first photo). Despite the gentrification, these narrow streets and the pub still managed, for me, to evoke something of the atmosphere of how this place used to be, although it is difficult to tell whether this was my projection, or was being projected onto me (a theme I will return to). We looked at one murder location, that of Mary Jane Kelly, supposedly the final ‘Canonical Five’ Jack murder (although doubt has recently been cast on this by some scholars.) In 1888, this location was a hovel called Miller’s Court, where Kelly met a gruesome end. But now it is a multi-story car park, on Duval Street (shown above). The location of the murder, essentially crowded slum dwellings, was demolished in the 20^th century and eventually replaced by a new street and car park. This is not much different to the fate of many prehistoric sites and monuments swept away by urbanisation: cemeteries beneath housing estates, roads which were once ritual monuments, bridges built on top of Mesolithic houses. These are places that have changed in role and function through time, the same places and yet different places. But what remains?

In the foreword to The London of Jack the Ripper Then and Now Stewart P Evans writes about ‘Victorian terraced dwellings, whose mute walls had seen Jack the Ripper at work’. Here, we have the evocation of the stones of the walls themselves being witnesses to the crimes, perhaps the only witnesses, and that they hold these secrets even today, beyond our reach. This is redolent of an idea called the Stone Tape Theory, an idea made popular in 1972 by the BBC TV sci-fi show The Stone Tape, written by Nigel Kneale. (Kneale had previously created Quatermass, where in one storyline a more tangible horror lurked beneath London’s streets.) This theory is based on the premise that materials such as stone are able to record traumatic or highly emotional events that took place in their vicinity in the form of energy; in some cases this energy is released creating phenomena such as ghosts. In other words, ‘ghosts are not spirits but simply non-interactive recordings similar to a movie’. The TV show follows a group of researchers developing a new recording technique in a Victorian mansion, where they come across a ghost that is somehow projected from the stone walls of a reputedly haunted room. But the ‘recording’ need not be visual. Don Robins, part-geologist, was especially keen on the notion that sounds could be captured by crystals, which I suppose could include the screams of a murder victim, or the chanting of shaman in a stone circle. This idea was promoted in his 1988 book The Secret Language of Stone, another strand of the wider concept of ‘residual haunting’. This loose connection of sources and ideas have been influential in parapsychological research (with current explanations focused on things like magnetic energy) and capture the sense that physical, material places can retain essences, or residues, of the past. Such theories developed because hauntings tend to have a spatial association, although the same could be said about most human activities. The murders of Jack the Ripper were grounded in the locations that they occurred, ‘place memories’ that transcend place-change.

There is, of course, no scientific of rational basis for believing this theory. If this were true, then all of the efforts of archaeologists would be concentrated on trying to rewind standing stones, or plug megaliths into DVD players. Yet archaeologists do treat stone (and other materials) as if they have recorded, or encoded, information about the past. The measurement and characterisation of atoms and molecules through petrological analysis allows us to source standing stones and Neolithic polished stone axes. The analysis of quartz and feldspar crystals allows us to determine when buried rock was last exposed to the sunlight. Such scientific techniques extract pre-recorded information from places and objects that tell us something of their history, and the activities involving them in the prehistoric past. What’s more, our chemical processes examine traumatic events: the death of an organism, the extraction of stone from the living rock, the burial of things. Yet as archaeologists we are trained not to think like this: the scientific data we collect from materials (in the past, surgically removed for thin sections) may have inherent properties that we can record, but we still need to make sense of that data.

Walking around Whitechapel today is a bit like walking through a landscape where prehistoric monuments once stood. Prior knowledge, documentary and map research and survey work by others allow us to build up a mental map of how this space was once used. Dots have been placed on this map at locations where important sites once existed. These places have fundamentally changed, yet they retain memory and significance of what went before. These impact on modern land-use and activities in this urban location, from the tourist industry, to inspiring street art, graffiti and literature. The pastness of Whitechapel has a direct correlation with the identity of this place today as well, for good and ill. Yet it is unlikely the residues of the Ripper are really encoded or trapped in Whitechapel bricks. Rather, we generate these essences through our engagements and experiences; we keep them alive through our interest and our gaze. Without us, the past would cease to exist.

Sources: Thanks to Alan for guiding our walk around Whitechapel, and to Aphrodite, Chris and Gavin for accompanying us. I looked at various online sources for information on stone tape theories, and found a very useful summary in a paper by Pamela Rae Heath called A new theory on place memory, found in the Australian Journal of Parapsychology 5.1 (2005), 40–58. The Stone Tape screengrab is widely available online.