Today is a momentous one. After two years and countless trips – since if I’m honest it took far more than the 33 listed here – finally I’m launching The Devil’s Plantation website. For anyone reading, especially those who subscribe to this blog, I want you to be the first to see it. Naturally I’m quite nervous from several angles – whether the site actually works, or if anyone will look at it and if they do, will they get it? Looking at the webstats for this blog, I’m delighted by the number of people who’ve visited, even if some of the search terms used tell me some visitors are more interested in say, dogging at Gleniffer Braes or Murder in Carmyle than in the Secret Geometry of Glasgow.
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In 2006 the city of Glasgow was named by Conde Nast Traveller magazine as the UK’s favourite tourist destination, beating London and Edinburgh to the punch. Another promotional stunt disguised as fact? As a native I find these accolades dubious perhaps because I’m conditioned to the negative reckoning of my home city: violence, substance abuse, impenetrable argot. I’m writing this on the week Glasgow played host to the MOBO Awards, the first outside of London, several of whose nominees are known to actively promote violence, substance abuse and… insert punchline here.

I found this quote –

Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger, because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Gray’s condescending proposition is obvious and troubling. Obvious because the city uppermost in his mind – Glasgow – is not Florence, Paris, London or New York. Neither is it Rome, Marseilles, Bath or Chicago. It’s Glasgow. It doesn’t need to be anywhere else.  [read more]

What other people get up to in their garden sheds is nobody’s business, but subscribers to this blog may be interested to learn that mine is currently being deployed as a multi-media factory, if a MacPro, a MIDI keyboard and a bunch of software qualify as the means of production. Since my final trip in May I’ve spent too much time within these walls, piecing together 66 short films for The Devil’s Plantation website due to launch in October. This is no small task, with over 30 hours of footage to edit and with every piece of sound recreated from scratch.
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“If a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular…”

Spinoza

On my crowded desk sits a diagram of Harry Bell’s network, described by him as a pattern of possible prehistoric communication lines, or PCLs. It seems even at the end of his quest he was still hedging his bets. At first glance the pattern is incoherent, its lines forming a vague exploded star containing a set of triangles within triangles. At its centre, marked in capitals, the main sites – Crookston Castle, Camphill and Carmyle Fords form the base of a triangle linking to the Necropolis at its apex. At its outer edges, the end points: Duncolm, Dumgoyne, Bar Hill, Woodend Loch, Hamilton Motte, Tinto Hill, Torrance House, Harelaw Cairn, Dumdruff Hill, Dunwan Hillfort, Walls Hill, Seedhill Craigs and Dumbarton Rock. I’m intrigued to find that they total 13, an auspicious number.
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I’m nearing the end of my 33 trips, the magic number I set myself in 2007. In that number, I decided, I would bag as many of Harry Bell’s sites as possible in an attempt to prove that the aligned sites of Glasgow and its environs hold the key to a secret geometry. My trusty OS maps – the Landranger 64 and the Explorer 342 – are a bit frayed at the edges. For the last ten days it seemed I might not get the chance to use them. In a re-run of last summer, skies in forty shades of grey and torrential rain are the norm. Only it’s not. Glasgow gets its fair share of rainfall but I’ve never known rain like it; rain cast from liquid lead. Bullet rain.
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With three trips remaining on this project, I’m anxious to hit the road. The weather, however, is playing up – one minute the sun’s out, the next the clouds conspire to steal the light. My destination today – Tinto Hill – involves a day trip, but one I’m almost tempted to invent rather than venture 50 miles south east of the city. Does my physical presence matter, I ask myself, or could I simply make a virtual journey, pieced together from maps, Google Earth and other people’s accounts? Not really. Not if I want to feel the ground under my feet, breathe unpolluted air and leave with photographic evidence. That, and any excuse for a picnic.
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I’m not sure exactly when the question enters my mind, possibly at Junction 10 of the M8 motorway or maybe opposite the Shandwick Centre in Easterhouse while watching people queuing at the bus stops. It’s this - when Harry Bell set out to discover the old, now-invisible tracks criss-crossing Glasgow, did he ever envisage the extent to which roads would dominate the city? Or how in Easterhouse, an area of low car ownership, the city becomes ever more inaccessible to its people? Passing the site of the Stirlingfauld Flats recently I was surprised to see the huge mounds of rubble gone, used in the making of new roads. It’s like the old saw – the best thing to come out of Glasgow is the M8.
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It’s not every day you wake to the sound of unfamiliar voices in your house. This morning I discovered two police officers in mine, come to investigate – well, nothing as it turned out because as the officers later conceded, no crime had been committed. This episode serves to show how we citizens going about our lawful business are under constant surveillance, our identities, movements and whereabouts held on myriad files and databases increasingly managed by private - i.e. unelected and unaccountable - outfits. It’s one thing to be accused of criminality, but in a corner of Glasgow where several murders and countless sexual assaults on women have been committed in recent times, it’s hard to grasp why police resources are being squandered on non-crimes. Dressed in my pyjamas in my own kitchen, under interrogation by two Glasgow cops, this question could use an answer.
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