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What is ruined?

a meditation.

By Lisa Bickmore

March 17^th, 2015

(Slains Castle, Aberdeenshire, Scotland)

In Aberdeenshire, a place I’ve visited a number of times, since my daughter and grandchildren live there, there’s a surprising solidity to what we call, categorically, a ruin. The word ruin—etymology being an archaeological act—seems to have come from the Old French (late 14th century), and before that from Latin, meaning “a collapse.” But many ruins are not collapsed, not entirely. In Scotland, many ruined castles and fortresses perch on the edge of the sea. Scotland has a lot of coast. One imagines the original builders, the original architects, seeing the sheer cliffs as, in effect, a part of the plan, the very tallest wall.

At New Slains Castle—Old Castle Slains having been destroyed by James the VI in 1594—there are parts of the ruins with structural elements that indicate three and even four storeys in the original structure. The idea being that, from the sea to the top floor, marauders would have a more daunting task to get at the people barricaded therein.

Slains was occupied until the late 19th or early 20th century. It was sold to a shipping magnate who later took the roof off, in order to avoid paying taxes. It thus became a ruin, officially, only in 1925 and thereafter.

The Slains Partnership, who own the property and its structures, had plans just a few years ago to convert the structures into holiday homes, although it‘s hard to imagine how that would be done with any sort of care for the ruins as they are.

There‘s a chain link fence that signals an intended, restricted access, but since it’s sited in the open, on the coast, there are contemporary signatures on the medieval walls.

(Dunnottar Castle, Aberdeenshire, Scotland)

Many of the castles in Aberdeenshire have been built and rebuilt upon the site of earlier castles, chapels, and fortresses. At Dunnottar, for instance, there are buildings standing, in various stages of ruination or repair, dating from the 13th to the 17th centuries. But there’s also textual evidence that suggests the site was a Pictish fortress dating back to the 7th century. Various of the buildings, after this or that conquest, were harvested for building materials elsewhere. This is a theme of grand structures—the people of Northern England, after the exit of the Roman occupation of England, took materials from the wall to build their houses and dry stone dikes.

Every ruin is also an original site of dispersal, of wood and stone. When you visit a site, whether it’s curated or essentially abandoned, you temporarily occupy spaces that have been lived in before. You climb stairs (warned or not warned about their uneven treads, their potentially slippery surfaces); you look down from landings, or from curves in the staircase that are no longer walled in. You imagine what rooms might have been on the upper stories. Sleeping chambers? Towers from which to watch for marauders? The same places that were ancient fortresses often also had churches founded there. It’s said that St. Ninian founded a church at Dunottar, and converted the Picts.

(The Wine Tower)

At Fraserburgh on the Firth of Moray, next to an old castle keep, there‘s a small building, three stories, called The Wine Tower. One story says the building was a chapel, or contained one: the Frasers came from the Catholic French at Anjou. The keep was an imposing, looming defensive presence, with religion intertwining with its purpose.

(Dunnotar Castle, Aberdeenshire)(Slains Castle, Aberdeenshire)

Among the ruins, some buildings maintain their function—have walls and a roof—or are restored to function; they stand among other buildings in the slow, invisible process of collapse. This gives us. we imagine, further detail of what it might have been like to live there. At Dunnottar, it must have been cold, wet, and dark. But in the Quadrangle, a group of buildings set around a square garden, there are roofs, and working fireplaces. Perhaps the royals who visited here, and their hosts, had some degree of comfort.

A person who is looking carefully can see differences in building materials, as well as differences in structural styles. But such observations can be misleading. Most complicated structures from the past were built over a long period of time. The effect of pastiche or collage at Slains belies what was apparently a continuous period of building over about a century, which nonetheless involved disparate materials and styles.

Maybe it depended upon what was available, or who had traveled where and observed a style of building. What we know about these structures is partial, and we, looking now, were neither the building’s intended residents nor its intended admirers or detractors. That moment cascades away from us, inevitably.

(near Joshua Tree, California)

Ruins don’t have to be as far removed from us in time as these fortresses and castles. For instance, the Small Tract Act of 1938 essentially allowed any U.S. citizen to lease five acres of public land, deemed otherwise useless, with the proviso that if the leaser improved the lot with a dwelling, he or she would be elegible purchase the land three years later at something like ten to twenty dollars an acre.

In the Morongo Valley of California, east of the San Bernardino Mountains and east of Palm Springs, near Joshua Tree and Twenty-Nine Palms, the desert is dotted with these dwellings, most of which have been abandoned.

Some of the same fascination applies to these dwellings too. They are not magisterial. They were not once visited by Mary Queen of Scots (Dunnottar) or Bram Stoker (Slains). But one wonders about the lives lived there. What would it be like to live in so small a space, built in the style we called “shack architecture” when we stayed in Joshua Tree a few years ago? in so unforgiving a climate? What enemies, even natural ones, would the dwellers within these small houses have to face?

One morning, we came upon an abandoned shack, the back slope of its roof partially caved in on an old single bed. In the kitchen lay what seemed to be the carcass of a dead duck and an open bottle of Jack Daniels. Had the house been abandoned in the wake of some domestic catastrophe? Maybe. But the area around Joshua Tree is home to a small, rugged arts community. The scene could just as easily have been an artist’s tableau. I didn’t want to touch a possibly dead duck to know for sure.

There is a scholarship and a science around the understanding of ruins. We learn more and more every day in the careful excavation of sites like the garrison villages around Hadrian’s Wall or the various castles all around Scotland. We know less of the lives closer to us, the ruins of more disposable dwellings, their poignant anonymity. It’s possible, though, that despite the knowledge we add as we find out more details of the lives people lived at such sites, both far in the past and near to our present, they nonetheless recede from us, still unknowable.

They leave lacunae to be filled in with our own investigations.

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