James Crawford (2023) Wild History

I like books like this. Hidden history doesn’t follow the kings and queens route. I’m biased in that way because those are not my people. Have little to do with what I know.

James Crawford suggests we look and see. ‘Just how much of the past still lives with in the present. An invitation to explore the unexplored and make pilgrimage to the lost and overlooked. An invitation to ‘use the country itself, as its own map’

Our mind doesn’t need to put on grim mourning clothes. He advocates simple curiosity. Lyrical and poetic whether describing abandoned machinery like derricks and quarry carts, or the machinery of life, waves, overgrown grass, dandelions and pink thistles.  

Human life leaves a mark. Some cultures walk more lightly on the landscape as John Muir suggested.  Crawford seeks out the places in Scotland where these human maps are fading, but still hold the resonance of stories and history of place.

He chooses 55 places to investigate the and where of what used to be. But admits to whimsical choice. It could easily have been 555. His subdivisions of place into four categories—worked, sacred, contested and sheltered—bleed into one another and can be taken as equally arbitrary based on hearsay.

A rich cultural landscape that takes in most of Scotland. Canna, Eigg, Staff, Jura, Oban, Fort William et al, but equally the lowlands and places like Alexandria, Glasgow and the outskirts of Edinburgh.  

Closest to home and within cycling distance, as James travelled to many of the sites he visited, The Sacred is often easier to mark off as being different. Yet, if we look here, we see Glasgow emptying and the schemes filled up with shoddy buildings that suited an idea that had already past.

St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross.

‘For decades, Gillespie, Kidd & Coia had been the firm of choice for Scotland’s Catholic Church, and in particular the archdiocese of Glasgow. The postwar period had seen radical changes to the social fabric of the city, with mass demolitions of the old, decaying tenements, and the relocation of large sections of the population to new homes or, indeed, entirely new towns. These communities – often built from scratch – needed purpose-built places for religious education and worship. And so, increasingly, modern architecture began to reimagine what spaces for faith and spiritualism could look like. Churches were being built to stark and striking geometric designs – all hard lines and unadorned exteriors, fashioned in greatslabs, or huge boxes. Everything from roofs and walls, even down to crosses and altars, was being cast in bare concrete

Viewed in crude terms, the whole thing had the appearance of a UFO crashlanded from outerspace, or at least from the West Coast of California, which, in the context of a hillside above the little town of Cardross on the Firth of Clyde in the 1960s, amounted to pretty much the same thing. The new seminary was finally opened in November 1966. And, almost instantly, itwas an anachronism. The previous year had seen a fundamental shift in Catholic Church policy – most specifically a desire that priests be trained not in isolated seclusion, but in the heart of the communities that they would come to serve.’

But who did they serve? Read on