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“This project is much more expansive than a line on a map. It is more like branching tributaries of thought (and diverse philosophies and practices) conjoining upon ‘Lorn’ whose estuarine ‘beyond’ is – for myself at least – the symbolic Well at the World’s End.” Alexander Maris, October 2017.
Like archaeologists, artists and culture producers are motivated to uncover, rediscover and re-present the things which are overlooked, just out of view, or need time to be fully considered. These things include identity, language and a sense of place, to which programmes of cultural events and artworks can give context and definition.
In the past, territory was a constant physical challenge, and loomed large in the imagination through mythologies and folklore, but in today’s increasingly globalised world, territory is more readily associated with abstracted concepts of nationalities, entitlement and capacity to generate profit. Digital media has collapsed geographical distance, and the safety and comfort of our transport insulates us from physical experience of the terrain that connects us with each other. However, in its silent glens, rocky coastlines and restless expanses of sea and sky, the geology of Argyll is omnipresent. To its residents, its global diaspora and its millions of visitors, it is home, heartland and a place of refuge from urban life.
Locating Lorne was devised to engage with evolving ideas about environment, language, territory, place, the rural, the urban, the centre and the periphery. Locating Lorne doesn’t aim to produce a definition which encloses the idea of Lorne, rather it seeks to activate narratives and explore what concepts of organised, geographical areas mean in today’s multi-channelled society. Locating Lorne commissioned Alexander and Susan Maris to undertake a major project exploring Lorne as a territory of pilgrimage for well over one thousand years, and in May 2018, Alexander and Susan Maris walked from Schiehallion, the centre of Scotland, to Iona, the final destination of the ancient Road of the Kings, as both a research action and performance in the first in this new series of events, exhibitions and publications.
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Alexander and Susan Maris commenced ‘The Journey to I’ (pronounced ee) as a research action informing ‘The Well, at the World’s End’. The route has been indicated by narratives which thread through the Maris’s practice, including journals of Findo Gask (pen name of Alexander’s father) written between 1982 and 1987, Scottish mythology, story-telling, and insights into Scotland’s terrain learned through their 20 years’ research into the cultural memory embedded in specific locations in Scotland’s terrain.
On the Full Moon of 30 April 2018 Alexander Maris collected one ounce of water from The Well of Schiehallion (The Well at the Centre of the World) and poured it into a protective silver flask. On 1 May, he removed the white, quartz Cailleach Stone from where it had been concealed for a year and a day in the font of the Well. He then started ‘The Journey to I’ to carrying the quartz stone and the silver flask of water to Tobar na H- Aois (the Well of Age and Eternal Youth) on Dun I, the highest point on Iona. On the following New Moon, at the end of his Journey, he combined the two sacred waters into Tobar na H- Aois, and the silver flask.
The Marises collected 100 seeds ‘begotten of the Fortingall Yew’ for ‘The Journey to I’, planting these in response to their encounters. Water and lichen had already been collected and processed by Susan Maris for the Schiehallion half of their proposed tapestry. Water and a small amount of Lichen, just enough to fill a silver teaspoon, were gathered from Dun I on the New Moon of 15th May 2018 for the Iona half of the tapestry.
From the knowledge they have gained during The Journey to I, Alexander and Susan Maris will develop a new series of artworks, including photographs, texts, audio recordings, a tapestry, GPS drawings and a notebook with bibliography. The artefacts used during the Journey; the Silver Water Flask, the Capsule of Yew Seeds, the Cailleach Stone, and the Silver Lichen Spoon will also be curated into the displays.
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The Well at the Centre of the World:
Some call it the ‘Fairy Well’, others the ‘White Well’ on account of the quartz stones around its font. It is, without question, the most sacred spring upon the Cailleach’s Mountain, and for centuries it has been famed for its curative powers. Its icy waters spring from the deepest source and are infused with potent mineral compounds.
The Fortingall Yew is an ancient European yew in the churchyard. Modern expert estimates have put its age at between 2,000 and 3,000 years. It may be the oldest tree in Britain. Ten miles west of the ancient Yew is the remains of the largest Ash Tree in Scotland. Here can be found St Adamnan’s Cross, and nearby another hollow stone in which, according to legend, the Saint banished the Plague in Glen Lyon. On the other side of the River Lyon stands The Praying Hands of Mary or Fionn’s Rock (said to be have been split by Fingal’s Arrow).
At the head of Glen Lyon the route turns up into Glen Cailleach, and passes Tigh nam Bodach, possibly the most ancient pagan site in Europe; each year, on the 1st of May a ‘family’ of curious shaped stones is taken out of a little bothy to stand in the glen until Halloween, whence they are return to their dwelling, for the winter.
The route descends to Bridge of Orchy, skirts the Doire Darach (a notable refugium of the primeval Caledonian Forest) and enters Glen Kinglas via Loch Dochard. Here, in a tree by the shores of the Loch, the artist Angus Fairhurst was discovered hanging from a silken rope which he had woven for his suicide. Glen Kinglas truncates at Loch Etive whose shores are followed south-west to Glen Noe with the option of ascending another mountain sacred to the Cailleach Bheur – Ben Cruachan.
From Taynuilt, Glen Lonan is followed to the deserted village of Barrglas on the slopes of Creag Ruisge, where it has been proposed that John Ruskin’s ancestors gained their family name as Rusgan or ‘bark-peelers’. Glen Lonan leads to Loch Feochan and Carraig nam Marbh (the Rock of the Dead). From here, a boat was taken to Loch Spelve on Mull. There is a fine stone circle at the west end of Loch Uisg. One of its stones has a notch suggesting a sunset alignment with some feature on the Carsaig coastline.
The coastal path was followed to Tobar Choluim-Chille (St Columba’s Well) and beyond Carsaig lies Uamh nan Cailleach (the Cailleach’s Cave) below the Nun’s Pass. The path turns inland at Carsaig to Pennyghael and the Kinloch Hotel displaying a William Daniel print of Fingal’s Cave (with pyramid), before resuming a westward course to Bunessan.
And on to Iona, whose highest point, Dun I (101m) is named after the Yew Tree, which cradles Tobar nah Aois, The Well of Eternal Youth, The Well at the World’s End.
The final letter in the Beth-Luis-Nion, or Ogham alphabet is I. The Ogham is an ancient British and Irish alphabet, consisting of twenty characters formed by parallel strokes on either side of, or across a continuous line. Each Ogham letter is named after a tree.
The final letter, I, is named for the Yew tree and consists of five parallel strokes at right angles through the central axis.
According to folklore, the ‘Road of the Kings’ is part of the route taken by the funeral processions of Scotland’s monarchs on their last journey to the island of Iona. From the ninth to the eleventh centuries it is said that all of Scotland’s kings were buried on St Columba’s sacred isle – Kenneth MacAlpin, Aed, Giric, Constantine I, Macbeth and their many successors.
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The following text was written by Alexander Maris in preparation for The Journey to I:
I am setting out on a journey which haunts me with a troubling sense of finality; a measured movement of sixteen days – walking – into the inscrutable shadows of a waning Beltane Moon.
I am carrying three consecrated artefacts:
• A Silver Flask containing One Ounce of Water from the Well of Schiehallion
• An Aluminium Capsule containing One Hundred Seeds begotten of the Fortingall Yew
• And The Cailleach Stone – a piece of quartzite delivered by the ice flows of Loch na Caillich.
Every evening, at sunset, a Yew seed is planted, and watered with three drops from the Well of Schiehallion. The Cailleach Stone is placed over the sowing place until sunrise. The Road of the Kings is to be lined with royal yew trees.
(The Journey, and the positions of the latent yews, will be recorded as GPS data)
The Yew tree is the tree of death, represented by the letter I (Idho) in the Gaelic alphabet of trees.
‘I am the tomb of every hope’ is how it is invoked in the ancient Celtic poem: The Song of Amergin.
But for the Celts, death was merely a doorway into a new life. The seed of a new beginning.
Around that sacred Door were cut the Ogham notches that measure out the Wheel of the Year.
I is the ancient name for Iona, and is appropriate for the resting place of Christian Kings and Pagan Priests. There is evidence that it was a sacred island long before Christianity, hence the reason it was chosen as an evangelical epicentre.
The highest hill on Iona is Dun I (101m / 333ft) Upon its summit there is an ancient sacred Well – Tobar nah Aois – variously translated as The Well of Eternal Youth or The Well of Age.
The Journey to I connects the centre and the edge.
It follows one possible route of the Road of the Kings.
There is a personal thread woven into the Journey to I – a legacy which predates my own preoccupations – a testament from a deceased companion whose words will direct the penultimate stage of the walk from Pennyghael to Fidden.
My father made a pilgrimage to I when he was a teenager (see text below) and thirty years later, his private notebooks begin with a filming expedition to Mull and Iona.
I still use the Primus Stove he was given by his Aunt.
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Monday 30 April 1951 :
Findo Gask is sixteen and has recently left school – for good. He is heading north with his friend Ronny on a camping trip to Iona. His Aunt Agnes has given him her 1936 Primus No.96 and three crisp ten shilling notes.
I do not know the reasons for his pilgrimage, but perhaps his journey is an act of exorcism, an escape from the childhood abuse he has suffered at the hands of his stepfather. But now he has reached the age where no one can keep him from sanctuary.
[ . . . ]
It is raining hard and the two friends are already soaked when they come to set up their little tent in a sodden field near the Abbey. An hour later, water has begun to percolate through the canvas onto their cheap kapok sleeping bags. The wind buffets and tugs, loosening the tent pegs as it threatens to turn their tent into a parachute. It whips rainwater under the sidewalls onto the rapidly receding island of groundsheet on which they crouch, with their backs to the interior weather. Findo has set up the stove but he cannot get any of the damp matches to light, and despondently, they share some Scotch Broth, cold from its tin, with slices of stale wet bread.
An early storm-cloud darkness falls. They are miserable. Though the wind has temporarily dropped, they don’t yet realise that they are camped in the eye of a strengthening cyclone.
Presently, they are stirred from their misery by the wan circle of a flashlight playing upon their tent.
They can hear the squishing of footsteps approaching across the boggy field.
‘Hello! Is there anyone at home?’ enquires the lilting island voice.
‘Y… Yes. H…Hello….’ the boys stammer together.
‘Ah, look at this now; two brave creatures in a sack, in the middle of a bog; and with a storm coming in from the Atlantic ready to blow them clean into the Sound. You’d better come with me to the Abbey – bring your worldly goods and chattels for all their wet worth against this devilish weather.
Here, you’d better take this.’ There in the gloom, bearing a flashlight held out in one hand whilst carrying a spluttering hurricane lamp in the other, is a monk, or perhaps even a bishop. With his long robes and ancient lamplit features, he might as well be Saint Columba himself.
They strike camp by rolling everything (except their paraffin stove and the borrowed flashlight) into a cumbersome bundle, and drag it across the field after the apparition with the lantern. An arched door opens in the brooding bulk of the abbey, spilling a bright and warm golden light onto their host. They pass through the portal and, with a heavy clang, the darkness is promptly shut out.
‘This way’, The monk leads them to a small sparsely furnished vestry, with a dully glowing peat fire in the grate. ‘You can bunk down in the Lord’s House tonight.’
Before long they have dry (if somewhat coarse) blankets draped around their shoulders, and are sitting before steaming hot bowls of real Scotch Broth, and a plate of dry (if somewhat stale) slices of bread.
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Rub all the Rough Clouds Smooth. Alexander Maris 2016
The message
(in a trembling hand)
Left by the Antarctic explorer
Reads as follows:
Kinloch Rannoch 25 miles
Rub all the rough clouds smooth
Turn forward ten chapters
Skip the rest.
From Poem for Beuys on Rannoch Moor, Rory McEwen 1970
We used to refer to Rannoch Moor as ‘our studio’, but in truth The Moor has always been our Solaris: It is a primeval life-form of infinite complexity; an organism capable of conjuring ghosts from the past; and daemons from the future. Not long after our arrival in this wounded landscape, we became haunted by the image of a gaunt man, in a fishing vest and hat, who led us to the pool where Stygian salmonids had consumed his gelatine heart. Thereafter, Brown Trout and Heather Tea became the homeopathic Eucharist through which we communed with our mentor.
For several years, Beuys’ transubstantiation of Rannoch Moor provided us with an unfashionable distraction from the ‘urbanality’ of the 90s. When we finally took on the task of replanting a forest ‘for the wolves’, we were intimately familiar with the mysterious agency that moves beneath the surface of the Moor. Yet, even as our first grove of seedlings began to sink their roots into the ancient peat, we could sense that somewhere in this vast expanse of wilderness, an unnamed creature had been re-conceived.
Whether it came from the future or the past, I cannot say. It may be that it conjoined simultaneously from both time-scapes, like an Ouroboros, encircling our collaborative unconscious. It corralled us towards the centre of its domain, and into the Refugium where it had concealed a fragile treasure: a little stone fish, bearing, in the faintest inscription, a message from the Muse.
In 2011, we moved to Kinloch Rannoch and began to rub the rough clouds smooth…
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Background:
The commission which developed into The Well at the World’s End was framed by the Alexander and Susan Maris‘s work to date, the aims of Locating Lorne set by Deirdre MacKenna, a series of introductions she arranged with people who hold specialised knowledge of the area and a series of informal and public dialogues exploring cultural practices in the territory.
Please see the following pages to follow the process enabling The Well at the World’s End to com into focus:
+ for st bride, exhibition at Dunoon Burgh Hall – autumn 2020
+ for st bride, an online exhibition at Dunoon Burgh Hall – May 2020
Research action – walk from Schiehallion to Dunoon – April 2020
Audio recording of the text read by Alexander Maris on 17 August 2019
The Well at the World’s End Exhibition at An Tobar Gallery Isle of Mull 19 August to 25 October 2019
The Well at the World’s End Exhibition opening and reading 17 August 2019
Alexander Maris and The Ross of Mull Historical Centre 05 June 2019, followed the next morning by
a Walk led by Alexander Maris and The Ross of Mull Historical Centre along the west coast of the Ross of Mull to Uamh Nam Marbh – 06 June 2019
The Well at the World’s End: Exploring Lorne through Art-making Processes – Talk by Deirdre MacKenna at Kilmartin Museum – 13 December 2018
Alexander Maris presents The Well at the World’s End at the Rockfield Centre Oban 28 June 2018
The Journey to I – in May 2018, over a period of sixteen days, Alexander undertook a research action entitled The Journey to I and walked from Schiehallion to Iona, meeting people along the way, both by arrangement and by circumstance; these meetings initiated new conversations which activated the symbolic objects Alexander carried on the journey, and explored ideas of centre and periphery and evidence of routes of pilgrimage and the Gaelic language woven into the landscape by our forebears. 01 – 16 May 2018.
Day 1 public discussions – 25 November 2017 – Lorne Cultural Arena
Early research days and introductions in 2017: these were a number of semi-structured visits through the area which had the purpose of introducing people to Alexander Maris and Deirdre MacKenna and enabling them to explain their motivations, gather information and develop knowledge. These were significantly enabled by Ian and Anthea Cleaver, Brigadier Iain MacPhàrlain / John MacFarlane, Graeme Strachan at Glenburnie House, Iain Coates at Hazelbank Motors and Rab Black at Argyll Safaris.
Find more info about Alexander and Susan Maris here.
The Locating Lorne Research Studio – throughout 2017
Facebook page – please ‘like’ our page in order to keep up with announcements.
To find out more about Walking as Practice, please click on this link.
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The Well at the World’s End has been made possible with funding and sponsorship from Argyll Safaris, Glenburnie House, Hazelbank Motors and Cultural Documents, in partnership with The Rockfield Centre and An Tobar Gallery.
Cover image: Alexander Maris discussing the route of The Well at the World’s End with Brigadier Iain MacPhàrlain / John MacFarlane. 17 May 2018 © Cultural Documents