Call for Papers: Troubling Exposures and Hopeful Geopolitics for the Anthropocene: The Telling Times of Earthly Archives

RGS-IBG 2019  Geographies of Trouble/ Geographies of Hope

Sponsored by the RGS Political Geography Research Group

Conveners: Daisy Sutcliffe and Deborah Dixon, University of Glasgow

The Anthropocene – broadly outlined as a fossil-fuelled, planetary condition that has a continually updated geosynchronous signal of anthropogenic radionuclides and plastics, and a raft of rapidly intensifying exposures, vulnerabilities and securitizations – has afforded troubling times for Geologists and other exponents of an Earthly deep time. To tell time is a telling act (Swanson 2016), as accounting for the anthropocentric forcing of physical processes transforms Geology into a science of attribution with profound political consequence, identifying not only where, when and whom will be exposed, but also from where, when, and by whom (Rudiak-Gould 2015). What is more, and despite its theological controversies, Geology has traditionally provided a measure of surety about the world, and the place of humanity within it (O’Connor 2017). Geosynchronicity places materials within a stratigraphic record, and as such is a key product of a 19^th century Geologic imperialism that effectively projected an evental history on to the planet itself. Where Geologists once looked to the subterranean for evidence as to a planetary history, the Anthropocene has inverted this gaze. Carbon-fuelled economies have poured materials upwards and outwards, warming oceans and atmospheres in the process. Deep time is no longer to be told from vertiginous field sites alone, but from vast, proliferating drifts of matter that permeate alongside, beyond and within bodies. It is this geologic subtending of life on Earth that has helped prompt a critical return to the ‘geo-‘ of geopolitics (Bobette & Donovan 2018), and a questioning of what kind of ‘geopolitics’ emerges when melting, fracturing, dissolution, calcification, crystallisation, subducting and so on are envisioned not as external threats or triggers, nor even as standing reserves for an evolutionary-based life, but as an Earthly vitalism that can and does proceed otherwise.

This session seeks to explore the politics and geopolitics of an Earthly vitalism.  We welcome papers or other formats that consider any of the following suggestions, or that contribute to this discussion in other ways: 

• How has Geology as a discipline been enabled by, and promulgated, an imperial world order? And, what understandings of the lithic stand outside of/challenge such an imperialism?
• How does Geology as a science of attribution trouble politics? And how do politics trouble Geology?
• In what ways does the geology that we conserve as ‘heritage’ reveal and influence politics?
• How does a stratigraphic geologic imaginary allow for and enable the congealing of other imaginaries of life on Earth? And how might non-stratigraphic accounts trouble these?
• What are the ramifications of a geological subtending for debates on order and chaos, violence and security, creativity and destruction?

Please send abstracts or proposals of up to 250 words and a short biography including name(s) and affiliation(s) to Daisy Sutcliffe: daisyksutcliffe@gmail.com by 6pm on February 11^th.

References

Bobbette, Adam & Donovan, Amy (eds.). 2018. Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life. Palgrave.

O’Connor, Ralph. 2017.  Earth on Show. University of Chicago Press: Chicago ILL.

Rudiak-Gould, Peter. 2015. The social life of blame in the Anthropocene. Environment and Society 6.1: 48-65.

Swanson, Heather Anne. 2016. Anthropocene as political geology: Current debates over how to tell time. Science as Culture 25.1: 157-163.

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Officially a Doctor of Philosophy

This week I received my formal letter notifying me that I have been awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geo-Social Science.

My thesis ‘Reworlding World Heritage: Emergent Properties of ‘Kinservation” is now available on the University of Glasgow Library website

It has been a long time coming, and quite a journey to say the least – more the life part than the academic part, but both are entwined.  This turbulent journey has lead me to write about emotions and especially loss and grief in the age of the anthropocene both in my thesis and now, in further work that I am doing.

In short, my thesis suggests that there are many worlds; an infinite number.  They are constantly changing.  Each of our worlds emerge from moment to moment as we move through them, interact with them and respond to them.  Our legislative culture struggles to cope with this, and I call for a deeper engagement with our worlds and those of others, human and not.  This engagement is our heritage, which is also constantly in motion, emerging, as is its meaning.

Unlike UNESCO, and much of the conservation world at the moment, I prefer meaning to value as this moves away from a reductive tendency in neoliberal capitalist cultures to attempt to value everything by monetizing it.  I play on the word ‘properties’, meaning both the way in which World Heritage Sites are formally referred to by their managers and UNESCO, implying definition, boundaries and ownership, and, also, the dynamic, emergent ‘properties’ of the plural worlds I argue that we inhabit, and which cannot be owned.  The attempt to own, define and boundary (or bind) our worlds leads to a congealment of them, which does not serve them or conserve them.

I suggest that rather than conserving the world, we reimagine our place in it through notions of kinship with all life, human and more-than-human.  I call this ‘kinservation’.

Have a read and let me know what you think.

I am currently working with b-side to provide Creative Producer support to 6 new art commissions for a public art trail in Weymouth town centre. The commissions are for Weymouth & Portland Borough Council. They include the potential to create work in association with water refill units – to our knowledge the first time public […]

via new commission opportunities for artists — Flow Contemporary Arts

Earth Echoes: Resonances between arts, geology and wellbeing.

Last year I was fortunate enough to be asked to evaluate Earth Echoes: A Song of Stone for the English Riviera Global Geopark.  Earth Echoes was a large scale community opera, devised and written by the people of Torbay under the expert leadership of a team of artists and arts organisations from the region, that formed the opening ceremony of the seventh International Conference on UNESCO Global Geoparks.  It told the story of the earth and how we have reached the anthropocene.

The project started in February 2016 and culminated last September.  My report and the other materials from the project including a film can be found

here

having just been published in time for the 10th Geopark Festival on the English Riviera, which is taking place now. My background is in producing participatory projects, and like many others I have had the privilege to work on, it was an extraordinary journey to travel with a diverse group of talented people, and the trust and generosity that developed throughout the process made my work much easier.

The theme of the conference was ‘health and wellbeing through creative and active engagement’, and I was asked to evaluate the impact of the project on the wellbeing of the people involved. In keeping with my PhD research, the philosophies of Deleuze, and also the group’s response to the story that they were telling, I explored ideas of emergence, in Global Geoparks, in health and wellbeing, and in the artistic process.  None are static entities.

They constantly come into existence as they are experienced differently from moment to moment, person to person, making them very difficult to ‘pin down’ and for causality to be categorically proven. A key desired outcome of the evaluation was the ability of the findings to speak to many audiences across arts, health, wellbeing, earth sciences, tourism, community engagement and marketing and I chose a selection of methodologies that I hoped would build a picture through statistics and stories.  All suggested that taking part in the project had beneficial impacts on participants’ wellbeing.

The conference was attended by 700 delegates from 63 countries, and I presented my findings with Mark Laville in the key note session of the conference after an address by Dr Mat White, ‘The relationship between natural environments and health and wellbeing (and what has been missed)’ that explored how Geoparks can engage with ideas around health and wellbeing.  This was followed by a panel discussion involving:

Mark Laville – Artistic Director, Barbican Theatre Plymouth and Earth Echoes Artistic Producer
Patrick McKeever – Secretary of the International Geoscience and Geoparks Programme Chief of Section, UNESCO
Marko Pogacnik – UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and Artist for Peace
Artur Sa – Associate Professor and UNESCO Chair on Geoparks, Sustainable Regional Development and Healthy Lifestyles, Univ.Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro
Iain Stewart – Prof Geoscience Communication, Plymouth University, Patron of English Riviera UNESCO Global Geopark
Sue Waite – Associate Professor (Reader) in Outdoor Learning
Mathew White – European Centre for Human Health

…and me.

It was a privilege to be entrusted with some very personal stories by some of the participants and to be made to feel such an integral part of the delivery team.  Thank you to all involved in an extraordinary project.

#TheRockConnectsUs

 

 

Visualising the Conserved Anthropocene

 

This is an area that I have been rummaging around in for several years now, so my colleague Phil Nicholson and I have decided to convene a session at this year’s Royal Geographical Society with International British Geographers conference to explore it further.

Here is the call for papers.  We welcome provocations from all walks of life, although as ever, there’s no money to pay for your time, which might limit us.  We can arrange for a live link rather than having to attend in person though – just let us know if you’re interested.

 

CFP: RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2017: ‘Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world’. London, 29th August – 1st September 2017
Visualising the Conserved Anthropocene 

Convenors: Daisy Sutcliffe (The University of Glasgow), Philip Nicholson (The University of Glasgow)

Sponsored by: Postgraduate Forum (PGF)

‘Conserving’ our environments in the Anthropocene throws up new conceptual and practical challenges, not least that the organisations that are charged with supporting this conservation such as UNESCO, the IUCN and WWF were set up by Western cultures in the mid-twentieth century. Here, the environment was largely framed within a classical geopolitical, modernist thinking with humans at the pinnacle of a hierarchical structure with responsibility for an appropriate stewardship of a Nature conceived of as other. As numerous commentators have observed, the Anthropocene has challenged the ‘rootedness’ of philosophical debates on a life well lived, instead placing emphases on material ontologies of exposure and vulnerability, symbiosis and depredation. Furthermore, it has exhausted established modes of visualising Nature, from photos of doomed polar bears, maps showing the borders of inscribed sites of conservation, to the transects that reveal a geological archive. What are the implications of such material ontologies for ‘visualising’ the Anthropocene? How might new modes of visualisation be developed for the Anthropocene and how might these be applied to conservation policy and practice? This session will explore these fraught, yet productive, tensions between the Anthropocene, conservation and visualisation, with an emphasis on work in progress.

We invite provocations reflecting on some of the challenges of conservation and visualisation of environments in the Anthropocene. We ask, how might these new modes of visualisation be productive for the conservation of environments in the Anthropocene?

Such provocations might include, but are not limited to:

•       Insights from artist residencies
•       Curating the Anthropocene
•       New approaches in geographic information science
•       Creative Geo-visualisations
•       Field encounters across disciplinary and cultural boundaries
•       New or novel institutional structures
•       Experimental and interdisciplinary approaches to conservation

Contributors will have up to 10 minutes to outline their provocations. We welcome presentations in the form of traditional papers but also encourage alternative formats such as PechaKucha style, photo or video essays, short film screenings, performances etc. These will lead to a facilitated discussion.

Please submit title, name & affiliation and an abstract of no more than 250 words to p.nicholson.1@research.gla.ac.uk and Daisy Sutcliffe (daisyksutcliffe@gmail.com) by Monday 6th February 2017.

 

 

Entanglements with nature

My crazy world:

I got to thinking last night as I looked out of the dark window of the plane at the orange branded wing tip cutting through the latest storm to hit the west coast of Scotland, horizontal rain drops like static lit up by the flashing wing light.

How come I live in a world where it makes sense for me to live in Bristol, work in Devon, study at the University of Glasgow and miss all my far flung friends and family so much?

The irony of it being quicker, easier and cheaper to fly through the ‘climate chaos in action’ than to get the train is noted. Not to mention that I’m doing this in order to study natural heritage that is under threat from this. From us. Hopefully not from me and my fairly frugal life, but I’m certainly not doing only good.

My crazy world. Postmodernism in practice?

Perhaps I’m over thinking it, but I am doing a PhD.

Thoughts?

Beaches, birds and other beasties

There are a few beaches close to the house. The first one we saw runs along the front of the town under the malecón or what we might call the promenade. It is sandy, but has a slightly dirty feel, perhaps because it is in town, perhaps because it is usually covered in sea lions, and perhaps because the sand here is browner than other beaches. We walked along this beach on the way to the house on our first day, and have seen it almost every day since, both during the day and in the evening. It doesn’t seem to be a place where people hang out, but the town’s children commandeer the pier after school for children’s antics throwing each other into the water, running, screaming and generally playing and showing off to each other.

We watched this as the boat that we traveled on from Puerto Ayora pulled into the harbour last Sunday. The other thing that struck me then were the crabs; so many of them crawling around on the rocks at the shore. Ivan later told me that they are Sally Lightfoot crabs, the large ones seem to take on a beautiful red colour and pattern and the smaller ones are darker, also beautifully patterned with paler spots, and harder to see against the volcanic rock.

At night the beach is literally covered with sea lions which also spread onto the piers, the pavement, the benches along the front taking on the appearance of a huge group of vagrants, and roaring like worried sheep. There must be a significant proportion of the world’s population of around 50,000 (Jackson, M. 1993), living in the capital town.

During the day the sea lions are joined by blue footed boobies, pelicans and frigate birds. There is also a lonesome lava gull that has made the pool illustrating the geography of the Galapagos along the malecón (and designed and made by the father of the family with whom I am staying) its home.

The second beach that we visited was Playa Mann. This is a small beach, with course white sand. It is still quite close to the town, opposite the Institute for the Arts and Sciences, but has a totally different feel. This is where many people head in the late afternoon for a swim and mess around in the waves. There is a kiosk and often a BBQ stall at the back of the beach selling roast maize.

When we first went, there was a sea-lion allowing itself to be washed around in the waves directly in front of us, and as we wandered down the beach looking for somewhere to sit for a while we saw that there was a whole colony of sea-lions at the other end, holding court with the passing tourists and their cameras. We sat for a while, and watched pelicans take off from some rocks further down the shore and seemingly pounce on the water, scooping the surface water into their beaks. They have the look of pterosaurs. Swooping higher up in the skies above them are usually at least one, and usually more like ten, frigate birds, also looking rather reptilian in their posture and behaviour. It is sometimes hard to believe that this island wasn’t here for 60 million years after the dinosaurs became extinct.

Walking on from Playa Mann, about another ten minutes along a dirt road and then when that runs out along a little path through some scrub, is Playa Carolla, also known as love beach where couples go and hang out at sunset. The path is full of sand lizards and ground finches. The beach is bigger than Playa Mann and also steeply sloped coarse white sand and shells including the pencil sized spines of the pencil urchin which is common on the rocks off the coast. We went there looking for a cove that we had been told is good for snorkelling, Las Tijeretas (‘the Frigate Birds’ in Spanish, as there is a colony of them that nest in the trees on the cliffs above the cove). We had been told that this was at the very end of the path, so we walked all the way down the beach, past sea-lions and marine iguanas sunning themselves along the edge of the scrub at the back, past a few people, although there were not as many as on Playa Mann, and off the end past the lighthouse. There was a little path with a tough looking plant forming a thick carpet on either side which reminded me of the island in ‘The Life of Pi’ somehow, and frightened me as I walked across it with my bare feet.

The path ended in a few bushes, one with a yellow warbler in it, and it became clear that we were not going to get to Las Tijeretas this way, so we went back to Carolla, and settled in the sand for a while.

I had borrowed a snorkel and mask from one of the other residents of the Casita, and after a while lying on the beach and watching the sea-lions playing I braved the waves. I put my head under and a whole other world opened up. There were dozens of beautiful tropical fish of every shape and size. Given that the marine reserve here is 133,000 square kilometers, and the land mass is 45,000, it is by far the larger proportion of the World Heritage Site.

On our way back to the town, we saw a paved path heading back into the scrub about half way along the beach and thought we would explore.  It wound through some more native scrub, and back towards town with a few turns which were obviously the paths to Las Tijeretas, ending up at the Interpretation Centre.

We came back along this path the following day and approached the cove down a path, looking out along the back of the cove to our right we could see a pelican balanced on top of the cliff and a great blue heron feeding under it at the water’s edge.

The snorkelling was indeed amazing, swimming with sea lions, although trying to get past them and into the water without annoying them was a bit more challenging.

Again the fish were amazing, shoals of silver flashes, a haughty looking parrot fish which must have been nearly two feet long making its way past, joining a large group in the shallows, and huge shoals of yellow-tailed surgeonfish, and the occasional hieroglyphic hawkfish emerging from its camouflage to mention just a few. We had been told we might see turtles, but no such luck. I had expected there to be coral for some reason, but the amazing sea life here is supported by the volcanic boulders scattered along the sea floor.

I eventually felt cold for the first time since we got here, and climbed out, joining Matt and the sea lions on the rocks and watching the frigate birds soaring and swooping over the headland above us.

Some things are the same where ever you are

We have arrived in the Galápagos for my fieldwork. After a huge journey which took three days in the end, delays, bureaucracy, food poisoning, and the worst mosquito bites I have ever experienced (and that is saying something as I seem to be the tastiest and most allergic person I’ve ever met), it is hard to think of something positive and interesting to write about, but I was struck by the cat here.

We are staying in a hostel belonging to Sonia, the mother of the men who I have been working on my plans with: David who lives in the UK and has been my first point of contact, Adrian who I met while he was visiting the Gulbenkian Galapagos Artist Residence Exhibition in 2012, where all of this started and who came to stay with me on the Jurassic Coast, and Ivan who is now helping me identify the right people to talk to and with translation. The hostel is about two hundred metres away from the sea in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, the port town and administrative centre of the Galapagos at the western tip of San Cristóbal Island. It is home to about 7,500 people and many seemingly half built buildings, and suffers like the rest of the Galapagos from development getting ahead of planning and infrastructure, so there is a sunken water filled hole not far from the house, where I’m sure mosquitoes are multiplying faster than the speed of light.

We have a double room in the hostel from which we can just about see the sea, with frigate birds swooping around,  and in front of that is a lush green carpet with cacti protruding from it and Darwin’s finches and yellow warblers darting around.

The accommodation is in a separate building from the kitchen and communal area which is outside the house that Sonia and the boys live in.

On our first night I wandered over to the kitchen to top up our water supplies from the ozone filter, weak after my food poisoning and massive journey. The lights were being battered by the biggest moths I have ever seen, like small birds, locusts and giant cockroaches as long as my finger. On the floor something was wriggling. I couldn’t make it out to start with, and then I saw the cat in hunting pose, and something else clearly trying to hide from her. She batted it, and I realized that it was a lizard with the tail missing. That was what the other thing was. The tail. It tried to hide again, and she batted it again so it was next to its missing serpentine tail. Cruel animals I thought. She watched them both now; body and tail. Cats are cruel animals. At home we have a bad relationship with the cats in our neighbourhood who use our lovely garden as a latrine and fight rendezvouz. Some things don’t change the world over I thought. True to form, as I got our chicken out of the oven the following night, the cat mewled around my ankles, twisting its tail around my legs. The bare-faced cheek of it! Perfectly able to catch her own food, she thinks that she can charm me out of mine.

I wondered about the impact that cats have on the nature in this town. There don’t seem to be a shortage of insects, birds and small reptiles. Perhaps they are less cruel than humans; more selective about what they kill and in what numbers. They might play with their prey, but they don’t plunder and decimate whole ecosystems, and justify this by claiming it will raise people out of poverty. The scale of their cruelty is easier to comprehend and label, and maybe that’s why we don’t  judge our own species’ behaviour using the same criteria.

A couple of interesting opportunities…

UNESCO Survey on the Status of the Artist

UNESCO is undertaking a review of the implementation of the UNESCO 1980 Recommendation concerning the Status of the Artist in order to collect data regarding the regional, national and global status of artists. The results will feed a consolidated report to be presented to the UNESCO General Conference in 2015. A Survey is being sent to all UNESCO Member States as well as Non-Governmental Organizations and other civil society organizations.

You can find out more and respond here: http://ietm.org/en/news/unesco-survey-on-the-status-of-the-artist

Cross disciplinary PhD in art/geography at Glasgow

I am delighted to announce the opportunity for a suitable candidate to apply for one of the prestigious Kelvin/Smith PhD Studentships at the University of Glasgow. The studentship is fully funded and the criteria for eligibility can be found by visitinghttp://www.gla.ac.uk/services/postgraduateresearch/scholarships/kelvinsmith/shortlistedscholarshipprojects/

If successful the candidate will work with an interdisciplinary team of scholars on the project from 1 October 2015 onwards. The primary supervisors will be Professor Deborah Dixon (Geography) and Professor Carl Lavery (Theatre Studies).

The Scholarship is intended to support candidates of the highest calibre and as such may be offered to residents of any country provided that the candidate has obtained leave to remain in the UK for the purposes of full-time study.

The deadline for applications is Friday 23 January 2015.

Project

Performing Geochronology: Deep Time and Sustainable Futures along Scotland’s Western Seaboard

This cross-disciplinary studentship emphasises how a creative research investigation into the climatic and tectonic processes operating along Scotland’s Western Seaboard can help to nurture and communicate a sense of the ‘deep time’ involved in these. This includes the ‘slow’ temporality associated with glaciations, and the ‘quick’ events of storms and flooding, but also organic temporalities, from evolution to settlement patterns. Such an expanded notion of time is crucial if we are to respond to what Dipesh Chakrabarty has termed the sense of ‘historical confusion’ that climate change presents us with. For Chakrabarty, the uncanny spectre of ‘a world without us’ produces a sense of melancholia and helplessness. One way in which this despair might be countered is by imagining ourselves as planetary creatures whose history has always been entangled with a larger natural history.
This studentship investigates:

1. How field-based geochronological dating methods can use cultural artefacts (written and image-based, and oral traditions), ranged alongside physical artefacts (e.g. morphologies and sedimentary archives), to outline the extent and impact of particular climatic/tectonic processes along Scotland’s Western Seaboard.
2. How this work can be theorised, contextualised and composed with respect to extant artistic practices and theories of aesthetics.
3. How an appreciation of the ‘deep time’ involved in Scotland’s changing Western Seaboard can produce 3 site-specific performances/exhibitions/films such that new narratives of place and alternative histories emerge. The student will draw on geomorphological/archaeological data and techniques as creative resources, and will prompt reflection on new ways of communicating science.

Candidate

The student for this project should possess a high quality undergraduate degree (2.1 or 1st), a Masters Degree and/or equivalent experience as an artist. The candidate should be able to work both theoretically and creatively. Evidence of prior work – both academic and artistic – in the proposed research areas (arts, geography) is crucial for this project. As well as strong academic achievement and excellent intellectual ability, the candidate should have a developed artistic practice and be able to provide a CV listing some evidence of the following: professional performances, screenings, exhibitions, commissions, recordings, and residencies and collaborations with both arts and non-arts organisations.

Deborah Dixon
Professor of Geography
School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow
East Quadrangle, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland

tel: 0141 3304785
email: Deborah.Dixon@Glasgow.ac.uk

Editor, Environment and Planning A
http://www.envplan.com/A.html

http://futureofruins.wordpress.com/
http://www.curatingthecosmos.com/
http://artscience.arizona.edu/

Journey to the edge of the world, part 2: Notes from my field trip to St Kilda

Once I had finished my chat with Kevin and my lunch, I set off for the radar station near the island’s highest point. I decided to follow the road having been told that “bonxies” or arctic skuas might attack people on their own especially walking near their nests. There were rumours about a famous birder who, after thirty years of looking at their nesting habits and eggs, had been attacked by one which had burst his ear-drum!

I started out across the back of the village behind The Street. I soon came to the graveyard, enclosed by a curved dry stone wall, and on to several cleitean. These are dry stone store rooms,  roofed with grass turfs, that were used by the inhabitants of the islands to dry meats, peats, fish and to store grain and eggs. There are more than 1400 on the islands in total, scattered around the village and up the hills on all sides, facing in different directions suggesting that they had different properties and uses. After a few minutes of walking across the bouncy damp peat, I left the village, and headed for the road which I could see further up the hill. I came to a stream, which I recorded (have a listen: https://soundcloud.com/daisy-sutcliffe/the-stream-edited) before stepping over it and walking on up the hill to the road.  The road was very steep, and every now and again a landrover drove past transporting things and people between the Village and the Radar Station. It was a bit surprising that there was any transportation or indeed a road on the island, which is famed for being ‘wild’ and uninhabited.

     

I heard a wagtail trying to get my attention away from its nest I think. I stopped and recorded it (have a listen: https://soundcloud.com/daisy-sutcliffe/wagtail-edited) as it hopped over the old cleitean; closer, further away, in sight and just out of it. A bonxie swooped down the hillside, but at quite a distance, so nothing for me to be scared of. The sun beat down and I listened to the wind in the grasses and the wagtails for a while longer before setting off around the bend and up the next stretch of the road. There were more cleitean on either side, and a woman was walking down the road. We greeted each other as we walked past. This struck me as a bit odd. Somehow, neither of us should have been in this wild uninhabited place, and yet there was this casual “hi” as if us being there was nothing out of the ordinary, like we were on a country walk in the Yorkshire Dales or something.

Eventually I came to the fork in the road, where if you turn left you can walk south towards Ruabhal along the ridge that defines the south side of Village Bay, and if you turn right you walk north towards the radar station at Mullach Mor perched on top of the island. I could now see over the island in all directions, with its steep grassy slopes sweeping majestically away on all sides towards the cliffs and the sea.

    

I walked off the road to see if I could see the famous view looking down over village bay from above, and pulled out my camera to take another picture. I then headed back to the road for the last stretch, and realising I was thirsty tried to get my rucksack off my back whilst still walking. CRACK! I’d dropped my camera on the road. I cursed, picked it up, and tested it. Broken. After nine years of travelling the world with me and helping me to remember my journeys the motor controlling the zoom lens was no longer working. Still, a good innings. I fished out my phone as a replacement camera, ploughed on up the final bit of the road, then switched on the sound recorder as I entered into the mathematical structures of the radar station, weirdly ‘in place’ I thought. Somehow they seemed to fit with the angles of the island and the image of it being at the edge of the world. I walked through them and out the other side. There was not much space before the grass came to an abrupt end, so I walked as far as I could before getting a warning swoop from a bonxie just a few feet away form my head, and retreated to my right. On one side I looked down at the now quite familiar view of Village Bay, and on the other out towards Boreray and Stac Lee, white from the gannet droppings on it.

    

I then caught sight of the time, and started my descent. Down, down down I went half walking half kind of skipping or jogging in an attempt to reduce the strain on my hips and knees. Just where I’d headed off the road to record the sound of the winds in the cleitean, was a whole skeleton of a Soay sheep including its skull and horns. I wondered how on earth I’d missed that on my way up, maybe I’d walked around it while I was recording. Down down down the hill, to the bend with the group of cleitean and the wagtails, and on down the final stretch. I wanted to get to the beach to record the sound of the sea. Down I went, and arriving at the beach found myself a nice looking stone to perch myself on. I recorded the sea for a few minutes, ensuring that I got a few wave cycles in, and then photographed a few waves – I couldn’t believe how blue and clear the water was – good diving I thought. So tempted for a swim, but no time.

I then turned and walked back up past the diesel containers which line the beach and power the generator, past some Soay sheep which were hiding from the sun in the lea of a rock, and across the green grassy field towards The Street and on past the Factor’s house to the shop. To my astonishment there was a queue! Even on this remote island. I looked through the postcards and chose a few to send. I had no time to write them, but the shop assistants stamped them for me anyway, and I bought a cuddly puffin for my nephew, before dashing out to the boat. I was the last one on, and we headed back to the big boat for a cup of tea and a slice of cake before taking a tour around Boreray, Stac Lee and Stac An Armin, north east of Hirta. Here we saw the largest nesting colony of gannets in north west Europe and loads of other sea birds; fulmars, kittiwakes, puffins and guillemots as we journeyed around the base of the three landmasses. On Boreray we also saw a few black faced sheep, left behind by the inhabitants.

    

Finally we sat back down, and the engines were switched on properly as we headed back towards Berneray. I was still determined that I would see dolphins, but after ninety minutes or so of leaning against the cabin and watching, I decided to go and sit inside. By this time I could see St Kilda in the distance in one direction, and Harris and North Uist in the other. I chatted to the skipper and Malcolm for a while about the charts, and they showed me where they had seen various wildlife over the summer. I then looked out of the window and promptly fell asleep, waking as we pulled into the harbour. I was last off the boat, and climbed up the stairs onto the harbour wall tired and happy, and there was Matt waiting for me.