KLF and Galloway

This clip of the Dumfries to Stranraer railway before it was closed in 1965 has scenes from newton Stewart in it. It also has a KLF soundtrack. It is very appropriate sinceBill Drummond of the KLF was brought up in Newton Stewart in the sixties. The full 26 minute film is in the Scottish Screen Archives.

Kenneth Grant sings...

Hegel and political economy

The Situationists and the Occupation Movements

One of the most notable characteristics of the “Occupy” movement is that it is just what it claims to be: leaderless and antihierarchical. Certain people have of course played significant roles in laying the groundwork for Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations, and others may have ended up playing significant roles in dealing with various tasks in committees or in coming up with ideas that are good enough to be adopted by the assemblies. But as far as I can tell, none of these people have claimed that such slightly disproportionate contributions mean that they should have any greater say than anyone else. Certain famous people have rallied to the movement and some of them have been invited to speak to the assemblies, but they have generally been quite aware that the participants are in charge and that nobody is telling them what to do.

From an article by Ken Knabb...read the rest here.

The Rationalised Landscape

This photograph is of the Carlingwark Canal, now called the Carlingwark Lane (local word for slow flowing stream). It was constructed in 1765 and cuts an arrow straight course across the Carlingwark and Blackpark mosses. It is nearly two miles long.

It goes with the Charles Oppenheimer  paintings of concrete dams being built (see previous posts). The canal was built to carry marl (a lime rich clay used as fertiliser) from Carlingwark Loch to farms upstream along the Dee/ Ken river system.

Before the canal was cut this is what the landscape looked like.[Taken from National Library of Scotland online maps- Roy's 1755 military survey of Scotland]

Course of Carlingwark Burn.

Harnessing the power of the Dee.

This is one of three paintings by Charles Oppenheimer (1875-1961) of dams built on the Galloway Hydro-electric scheme.

Art in Concrete Charles Oppenheimer

 

This is one of three paintings by Charles Oppenheimer (1875-1961) of the construction of dams on the Galloway Hydro-electric scheme.

Galloway in Concrete

Harnessing the Power of the Dee - Charles Oppenheimer, 1933.

This is my letter in response to two letters in response to my original letter about wind-farms...

Dear Sir,
                 In reply to  Delya Wilkinson and Alan Keith’s letters [20 October 2011], it seems  there are two main objections to wind farms. One is essentially aesthetic and concerns the visual impact of wind farms. The other is economic and concerns the inefficiency of wind farms as generators of electricity.

Thinking about the aesthetic objection, I remember visiting the first ’Homecoming’ exhibition of  paintings by the Kirkcudbright artists in 2000.  Most of the paintings were of scenes which captured the tranquillity of the Galloway landscape. But one painting stopped me dead in my tracks. It was by Charles Oppenheimer and showed a brutal mass of stark white concrete, dominating and overpowering the rural landscape.

The painting was one of three (Art in Concrete, Harnessing the Dee and Galloway Dam, Nearing Completion)  by Oppenheimer which document in graphic detail the ‘industrial devastation of the landscape’(to use Alan Keith‘s phrase) caused by the construction of dams for the Galloway Hydro-Electric scheme in the 1930s. But outside of an art exhibition, is anyone still shocked by these brutal concrete structures?   Of course not. The dams and turbine halls have become unremarkable features of the landscape. Likewise, once the fear of the new gives way to familiarity, wind-turbines will lose their power to trouble and disturb.

Turning to the  economic argument against wind-power, the Cruachan Power Station  mentioned  favourably by Delya Wilkinson is part of a pumped storage hydro-electric system.  The same principle could be used here. When the wind blows, electricity generated by wind power could be used  to pump water into the higher dams on the Galloway hydro-electric system, storing it for later use. By combining wind and water power, the overall efficiency of the generating system would be improved.

Realistically, since converting  the existing hydro-electric scheme to a pumped storage system will require significant investment, it will need a strong local campaign to make the case for such an innovative proposal. However, while finding ways to improve the efficiency of wind-power may answer the economic critics, it will not satisfy those critics who oppose wind-power on aesthetic grounds. The problem here is how best to manage the visual impact of wind farms.

In 1999,  widespread concerns over the expansion of forestry in Galloway led to a series of detailed public consultations. Those attending were given maps and asked to indicate  where and where not to plant more trees. These maps were then used to create Dumfries and Galloway’s Indicative Forestry Strategy. A similar process of public consultation could be used to manage the location and hence visual impact of wind farms.

Alistair Livingston