Back in London, I started preparing for a trip to Scotland. My plan was to spend several weeks in Ayr, Scotland in August staying at my mum's and working on my MA Major Project.
There were number of things I needed to sort out before going. I was not sure how much progress I would make and planned on the basis that I might manage to complete all the filming required, including my site based intervention, or action, that is the centrepiece of the work. I therefore needed to take with me playback equipment - portable cassette player and PA speaker; filming and recording equipment - 2 cameras, 2 tripods and microphone / voice recorder; and laptop and additional storage for video and sound editing.
On the critical path of my plan was the recording of songs. The intervention I was planning involved the playback of songs sung and recorded by me, my sister and some of my cousins and in part III of this blog I'll explain the significance of this. I hoped to use the trip to Scotland to acquire the rest of the recordings I needed. These recordings once made would need to be transferred to cassette tape as that was my chosen media from which to play them back. The only issue was that I had no means of transferring from digital media to analogue. I made enquiries and found that the university had equipment, but the timing of getting it done became critical as it had to fit with the university technician's holiday plans.
Another line of technical enquiry at the university was how to go about aerial filming from a drone. I had looked into this briefly on the web and had found various companies that could do this, but they all appeared to be high-end and aimed at the film industry and business, i.e. not within the price range of a struggling artist. I was on the point of thinking it would be cheaper to buy a drone and do my own filming. Fortunately I spoke to another of the university's very helpful technicians who dissuaded me from what would have likely been an extremely frustrating and expensive endeavour (probably involving several broken drones). His primary guidance was to get someone else to do it, but to research locally where I was going to work.
I had established that Ayrshire Archives had just recently reopened and had started corresponding with them to find out what sort of record they may have that would support my research. It was not looking promising, but there were some county council minutes and committee reports that would be worth taking a look at so I made an appointment to visit on the first day that they would be open on my visit to Ayr.
I spent a long time consulting maps; using them, in the absence of other information to chart the development of the village, or housing scheme, of Bellsbank in Ayrshire.
I was attempting to establish dates for the construction and later demolition of some of the houses and one entire street. The National Library of Scotland's online map finder was invaluable for viewing maps up to 1961, but the most important periods for me were from 1963 onwards and no detailed maps are available online (other than current online maps such as Google Maps). The only way I was going to be able to see these was by visiting the Maps room at the British Library. I was very excited to get myself a British Library readers card and managed to visit the Maps Reading Room before setting off for Scotland. There, in addition to printed ordnance survey maps for each year in which they were published physically, it is possible to access an ordnance survey application that allows each year's map to be examined for every year since they have been available digitally (1998).
I had grand plans before arriving in Scotland, I would research intensively, I would take long rambling walks with my various cameras to film and photograph all the sites of my subject and gather my cousins around to sing and record the songs I wanted for my project. I would also engage someone to do some drone filming for me.
But then this was also the longest I'd be staying with my mum since my dad died 8 years ago, in fact the longest anyone had stayed with her since then, and coming after the awful periods of isolation of Covid. I was going to have to balance my desire to be a free agent acting on a whim, or a spark of inspiration with being a good son who mows lawns, cooks meals, reaches high-up things and generally just listens.
In the end the days in Ayr seemed to run into each other. They were, I suppose, punctuated by visits to Ayrshire Archives. So I can say where I was on the first two Tuesdays that I spent in Ayr as Tuesday is the only day the archive is open to the public. I can also say it was sunny on the first visit and it rained on the second. I had vastly underestimated the time it would take to examine the council records that I had ordered on both visits - thinking a morning session would suffice, I ended up having to book in for the afternoon at the last minute and spend a hour in town while the archive was closed for Lunch. This allowed me to examine the state of Ayr town centre for a bit - generally not great, but I did encounter Narture, a bakery and cafe established and run by an artists collective to provide funding for arts projects. I visited the cafe a couple of times between sessions at the archive and when my wife joined me in Ayr on the third week of my stay, we got to speak to the founder of the collective and bakery, Robert Singer, who invited us into the bakery for a look around. He explained how the collective came about and its objective to provide art spaces and opportunities for emerging artists in Ayr and through this help to regenerate the town centre. I was very excited about this - particularly the role that sourdough bread baking played in the enterprise. I'm looking forward to being back in Ayr in the coming year to see how one of the spaces they are working on has developed.
During the first week of my stay when we had a wonderful warm spell of weather - a beautiful 27 °C, compared to the truly stifling 40 °C that London was experiencing at the time - I persuaded my mum to make a trip with me to Loch Doon the largest freshwater loch in southern Scotland. I had never seen it so beautiful. While we had many picnics there when I was a wee boy, it was normally on days when it wasn't nice enough to go to the beach; so lots of times seeing it look dramatic, foreboding or sombre, but never sheer bright blue beauty. I was trying to film with one of the camcorders I'd borrowed from the university's kit hub, but I'd not worked out how to increase the viewfinder screen brightness, so in the unbroken sunlight, it was impossible to see what I was pointing the camera at. I draped a picnic blanket over my head and the camera, but that just made me hot and itchy and certainly did not improve the shooting.
On another day, I rehearsed in my mum's garden one of the on-site interventions that I was proposing to make. I've previously mention that I intended to play back songs recorded on cassette tape. I also planned to use the cassette tape to trace the perimeter of the house that had stood on the site. This would involve unspooling the tape around some marker pegs (tent pegs) and then rewinding the tape back into the cassette. I had already calculated that there should be enough tape in a C60 (60 minute) tape. I had chosen to use this length as it would be enough for the during of the singing I was planning to record, but also because the tape ought to be slightly stronger more likely to survive the rigours to which I was subjecting it than a C90 or C120 tape. A C60 cassette should have approximately 90 metres of tape. My perimeter was 6m x 6m and the tape was looped so I'd need double length, i.e. 48 metres,.The unspooling was working fine until I was was about two thirds of the way round. At this point the friction of the tape on the pegs meant the the tape would no longer unspool from the cassette just with me pulling from a distance and I needed a second pair of hands to help release the tape. My mum stepped in for this once I had worked out what was happening. Rewinding the tape was easier than I expected and the tape was still playable when complete. It was a worthwhile rehearsal; especially as I now knew that the unspooling was. a two person job. But that was on a lovely summers day in the shelter and privacy of a high-walled back garden and a freshly mown lawn, not an exposed hillside at least a month later when the weather was sure to have turned.
My search for a drone videographer continued and I filled in the contact forms for a few companies who provided services locally not really expecting anyone to be interested ion what I was trying to do. But DroneDog got back to me and after exchanging a few emails and having a phone conversation, I was happy that I could work with them. However, arranging a date still depended on getting the songs recorded.
I had hoped to arrange a gathering of some of my cousins in Ayr, but none of the dates worked for my farther-flung cousins. But I was able get a couple of my cousins who still live in Ayr to come over to my mums along with some Aunts and while we did not get any singing or recording done, one cousin left promising that he would record himself reading some poetry.
I was running out of time. I needed to get my cousins and sister to sing and I needed to shoot more film. The weather was now more traditionally Scottish which limited my filming excursions, but I desperately wanted to get among some hills where I could film the landscape that underpinned my planned work. After a bit of negotiation with my mum (I was borrowing her newly serviced car) I was able to set off for a day's walking and filming on my own. I intended to walk to the top of Craiglee a hill next to Loch Doon that is clearly visible from Bellsbank and from which the Bellsbank street Craiglea Crescent takes it name. From there I thought I would be able to see the lochs Macaterick, Reicawr, Brandan and Finlas, and the other hills of Corserine, Shalloch on Minnoch and the Merrick, all of which have given their names to Bellsbank streets.
Having consulted my map only briefly on leaving the car at Loch Doon Castle, I followed a path marked as the Craiglee trail thinking that this would provide me with an opportunity to branch off to the summit. At a point that seemed to me to make sense I branched off on a path that rose steeply and after an exhausting (I've not had much exercise recently) climb I reached the summit of what should have been the highest point for a kilometre or so on this side of Loch Doon. But what was that hill next to mine that seemed slight higher and could only be reached by making a long decent and then another ascent to higher point than I was already? A careful study of my map revealed that I was not on Craglee at all, but on the Wee Hill or Craigmulloch which I know for sure no streets on Bellbanks are named after, though maybe wee Craig Mulloch was at my school. I was not experiencing the hill as particularly wee; it had exhausted me getting to the top and the views from here were spectacular and I had neither the time or the energy to continue to the top of Craiglee; 100 metres higher than where I was. So I settled here to get on with my filming.
Later in the day I walked from another point on the Loch Doon road to Loch Finlas following a Scottish Water access road with the earlier elusive Craiglee rising from forest on one side and empty moorland on the other. This was a much easier walk, but I felt mocked by Craiglee which looked so obvious and accessible from this angle. Loch Finlas sits at a higher altitude than Loch Doon and for the duration of the walk was invisible from the access road. Only at the end when ascending a shallow bank does it become clear that there is a significant body of almost black water nestling among undulating hills. I had walked here because the loch could not be seen from the top of Craigmulloch, and it was clear that it would have been from the top of Craiglee which now dominated skyline on the southern bank of the loch.
I made one more stop before returning to Ayr at the top of Ness Glen where Loch Doon is dammed and there are three huge steel pipes, each over a metre in diameter, to release excess water from the loch to flood the glen and the river Doon at times of extreme high water. I spent a while here filming the river and the pipes from a variety of angles and at one point set up my tripod precariously on the concrete encasement to film through the pipes to the river below.
had some film, but I was still short of the promised songs and everything was now going to have to wait for a return trip to Ayr in September and, hopefully, a spell of dry weather.
I sent out a flurry of pleading WhatsApp messages and made arrangements to meet up with some cousins in London for the weekend after I returned home. That weekend we met drank, sang and recorded a few songs together. My other pleas were heard and my sister and other cousins made recordings and sent them to me that same weekend. This was enough to work with and I created a mix of the recordings just over 20 minutes long. But I'd missed my opportunity to transfer the recordings onto cassette tape at the university. I messaged round my pals in London and found one who still had a cassette deck in his hifi configuration. This was all I needed and I was able record my digital mix onto tape - three for safety.
It was time to go back to Scotland.
