Drystane lines of demarcation
February 2010
The ‘consumption dyke’, which can be seen to the left of the road when you head from Kingswells over to Bucksburn. This monument, over 20 feet wide, is really three dykes in one – a neatly-built outer wall on each side, backed by a jumble of large boulders, and in the centre a broad, flat-topped walkway wide enough and well-laid enough that a barrow could easily be wheeled along it. There are even steps at the eastern end, for easier access.
by Colin Stuart
When you leave the area where you grew up, as I did 35 years ago, to live and work elsewhere in Scotland, some differences will present themselves fairly promptly.
There are the constant shocks of discovering that, even a hundred miles down the same coast, people do not speak, act or think in the ways that you have spent quarter of a century getting used to. At the same time you learn not to rely on blanket maxims like ‘It taks a lang speen tae sup wi’ a Fifer’, which is no more or less true than the hallowed pairing of Aberdonians with meanness.
There are differences, however, which take longer to percolate; one in particular because it is, literally, just part of the landscape. It took a long time for this one to get my proper attention but, once I did notice, it really started me thinking.
I am talking about something as simple, and as universal in Aberdeen’s hinterland, as drystane dykes. Drive around this part of the world and you will see fences around fields. In East Fife and further south, in East Lothian, and in Dumfries and Galloway, it is hedges or shelter belts of trees that demarcate the fields, especially the arable; not the universal, austere dykes of Aberdeenshire and Buchan. Down this way, only wealthy farms or estates splash out on stone walls; and even then, apparently, they need to use mortar to make them stand up.
My first reason for noticing the drystane dykes was that some of them were not there any more – in particular, the ones marking the small fields on the fringe of Elrick, swept away and obliterated by new housing.
Over many tens of thousands of years, glaciers flowed across Scotland, and retreated, and came again from a different direction – sometimes more than one direction at a time, until the latest retreat about 10,000 years ago.
In some regions, like Strathmore, the Lothians and East Fife, they left a legacy of rich, deep soil to gladden the hearts of the farmers who would settle there. In Aberdeenshire and Buchan they were not nearly so generous – not generous at all, in fact. What the North-East got was mostly stones; from other parts of Scotland, from the western seaboard of the continent, even from the Norse countries.
When I was a laddie delivering papers around Ruthrieston, one of these ‘erratics’ – unearthed during the construction of South Anderson Drive – used to rest on the grass bank on the east side of the road, just around the corner from the log cabin which was then a bus shelter with a wee sweetie shop inside (having previously marked the Bridge of Dee tram terminus).
The stone, probably amounting to most of a cubic metre, was a very unfamiliar reddish beige, remarkably marbled, and rounded and abraded by its long, ice-borne journey from Norway, according to the plaque beside it.
I remember it so well not just because of its foreign hue, but because it was the first time I had seen the word ‘gneiss’, whose peculiarity seemed to go well with its appearance.
Awe-inspiring labour
Exotic or not (and it was mostly ‘not’), the stones scattered all over our countryside stayed where they were dropped, more or less unregarded, until the great improvements in Scottish agriculture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Until then, outwith the towns and cities, almost their only use was for fortification. The trouble it took to construct hard, fireproof walls was resorted to only where there was a real need to discourage unfriendly visitors. On farmland, houses of turf had sufficed for the labouring poor; to be pulled in on themselves and used as manure when they became dilapidated.
Then came the revolution based on the turnip and the six-year cycle – an epic in itself, and a tale for another time; and better told, I think, by someone with roots in the land rather than a toonser like me. It is enough for now to say that the great advance in more efficient farming meant more produce, and a system that could keep more beasts – and markets that could return a profit to the farmer – set off a great drive to bring more land into cultivation.
Most important for this tale, it made land clearance worthwhile. That meant much more than just tidying the stones out of the way; drainage, liming and manuring on a grand scale were all part of the process; but the truly heroic element, for me, is the clearance of the stones and the uses they were put to.
We can start with the awe-inspiring scale of the labour of getting the stones out of the ground. With nothing but muscle power (human, animal or both) every stone had to be prised loose and then shifted to the side of the new field. Every stone would have been a new challenge, since no two would be the same size, shape or even density. That in turn would make it impossible to settle into the kind of semi-automatic routine that can chew through a stretch of routine drudgery, make the time pass and whittle down the mountain of work by steady steps: the brain, as well as the muscles, would be engaged throughout.
What really stops me dead in my tracks in awe or bafflement is the puzzle of how anyone ever, before the traction engine, the tractor and the JCB, even budged the occasional monster rock, anything up to the size (and several times the weight) of a small car. Because they did; and the evidence is still to be seen here and there.
One site, now vanished, was on the fields to the east of Nigg Brae: long before it became a prime site for oil company headquarters, there was a field junction abutting the woods occupied by a monstrous triangular pile, yards wide and about three times my boyish height, with several of these massive boulders showing on top of the pile: how on earth was that ever accomplished, after the dyke had been built up to a man’s chest-height?
The Kingswells ‘consumption dyke’
Still very visible, though, is the ‘consumption dyke’, which can be seen to the left of the road when you head from Kingswells over to Bucksburn. This monument, stretching right away across the field and over 20 feet wide, is really three dykes in one – a neatly-built outer wall on each side, backed by a jumble of large boulders, and in the centre a broad, flat-topped walkway wide enough and well-laid enough that a barrow could easily be wheeled along it. There are even steps at the eastern end, for easier access.
Other broad dykes, less heroic only by comparison with this one, can be seen right by the road from Mason Lodge to Culter – and I am just citing a couple of local examples. How many thousand of miles of dyke, I wonder, are still demarcating field boundaries all over the North-East and as far up into the glens and hillsides as aspiration and self-sacrificing toil could take a man?
Every farmer, and labourer, and would-be farmer, must have played his part in clearing the land for crops or stock; but their achievement – collectively, enough to make cleaning the Augean stables seem insignificant – would not be there for us to marvel at if it were not for the smaller band of men whose names now have faded clean away; the dykers. Working, mostly, their own district (maybe even on their own farm and not much more) they constructed a monument that cast a net over the land, marking where men decided they could draw a living from the cleared ground and, maybe, claw themselves up from labourer to farmer; to earn the distinction of being referred to by the name of their holding.
On every kind of ground and terrain, their work stands, still straight and stable even climbing and crossing brae-faces so steep that sheep will not tackle them head on. They knew, or learned, how to take the jumble of shapes and sizes lying to hand and turn them into a strong, straight boundary that would stand up to weather and frost-heave, and time.
A lasting memorial
I wonder whether even the best of them knew how long their work would last. Even in bare, grim country where the higher slopes have long been abandoned as too poor, too hungry or just too damned difficult to yield a worthwhile return, you can still see the dykes, standing as a lasting memorial to the heroes who made the North-East farmlands out of rock-strewn wilderness.
Next time you are out and about, pick a dyke – any one will do – and give it a minute’s attention: every stone you see, and all the ones on the inside that you do not, was picked up, brought there, and matched to its neighbours. Which of us, I wonder, will leave such a mark of skill and endurance behind us when we go?
I am indebted, for some of the background information, to John R. Allan’s marvellously warm and human account of the development of Scottish farming in The North East Lowlands of Scotland, a rather dry title for a book which is anything but.
In a college somewey in Fife, Colin Stuart is hingin grimly on tae the notion that young fowk can learn tae scrieve an spik some kinna sense.
This is an article from the February 2010 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.