UNINTENTIONAL MONUMENTS: Ruins in a Landscape
It is clear that the Duke of Sutherland statue is both an intentional and an unintentional monument insofar as its makers’ objectives are not forgotten (they are preserved, for instance, in Loch’s Mémoir), but coexist in the memorial text with subsequent ‘interpretations’. Indeed it is doubtful whether any monument is purely intentional since alternative ‘readings’ are invariably present, even at the time of its construction; “how and what we remember in the company of a monument,” writes Young, “depends very much on who we are, why we care to remember, and how we see” (1993: xii).
The columnist of The Scots Magazine quoted earlier describes “the broken walls and piles of stones” of the deserted Clearance townships as monuments to the communities that were driven from them. Such places have typically lost their ‘use value’, thus a ruined crofthouse becomes more than the crumbling remains of an old habitation, it becomes a symbol. But just as the Duke of Sutherland statue defies neat classification, so too do those places to which Riegl gives the appellation ‘unintentional monuments’. I argue that, in practice, a tendency exists in which such places are given a ‘fixed’ commemorative meaning in a manner analogous to the makers of intentional monuments. Because they do not appear to exist in their ‘pure’ forms, we might thus treat Riegl’s categories of intentional and unintentional monuments as ‘ideal types’ (after Weber).
Riegl writes that an unintentional monument must retain “at least a recognisable trace of its original form” and that “a shapeless pile of rubble” therefore conveys nothing (1982: 33). I believe such a statement requires qualification for one person’s “pile of rubble” is, of course, another’s settlement cluster! This is an essential point when asking what role the ruins play in keeping the ‘memory’ of the Clearances alive and for whom. If ruins are not recognised as such then they can play no mnemonic role. Issues that must be addressed therefore concern ‘expert’ knowledges as well as oral traditions, the ‘signposting’ of ruins (on maps, for example) and interpretation offered either at the site or in heritage centres, museums, libraries, etc. Such issues affect the character of a memorial text and therefore the character of the memory such texts recall.
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Ironically the most prominent ruins of the Clearance story are not of the homes from which the “ancient respectable tenants” were cleared, but of the houses they subsequently built in the reception areas. The ruins of such dwellings are most commonly found along the coasts of Sutherland—around Helmsdale and Bettyhill, for instance—where they form an integral part of the planned crofting landscape established after the Clearances. Macleod describes how, in 1832, tenants were forced to build, at their own expense, new houses “with stone and mortar, according to prescribed plan and specification” or else face “removal” (1996: 62). The thatched roofs of these ‘improved’ houses may have long since rotted, but the walls and chimney stacks often stand to a considerable height.
In Gartymore, for example, a few are still occupied—or have been reoccupied—but the vast majority are derelict, their occupants forced to leave through economic necessity. Gartymore was home to a number of activists of the land agitations of the 1880’s. A commemorative cairn was erected in 1981 to mark the centenary of the formation of the Sutherland Association, a fore-runner of the Highland Land League who successfully campaigned for security of tenure for crofters, in effect putting to an end the absolute power of landowners over their tenants’ fates. A poignancy arises out of the juxtaposition of this intentional monument and the unintentional monuments among which it is situated. The biblical text on the memorial’s plaque reads, “They laid the foundations that we might build thereupon.” One of the people involved in erecting the cairn told me that the text had been chosen for its irony: today the crofts of Gartymore are again reduced to little more than those foundations.
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The construction and unveiling of ‘alternative’ intentional monuments to the Clearances such as that at Gartymore, or the Donald Macleod memorial already mentioned, provide examples of what Connerton calls “performative remembering” (1989). Undaunted by a torrential downpour, Gibson recalls how, at the unveiling of the Gartymore cairn, Ewen Robertson’s nineteenth century ballad, Mo Mhollachd aig na caoraich mhor (“My Curses on the Big Sheep”) was revived and sung in Gaelic with its bitter condemnation of the Duke of Sutherland (1996b: 11):
Gu’m b’fhearr leam Iudas lamh rium.
Were I with you in Hell to meet,
I’d sooner stand wi’ Judas.
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