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Landscape, Materiality
and Heritage
An Object Biography

Tim Edensor
Landscape, Materiality and Heritage
 Tim Edensor

Landscape, Materiality
and Heritage
An Object Biography
Tim Edensor
Institute of Place Management
Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester, UK

ISBN 978-981-19-7029-0    ISBN 978-981-19-7030-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7030-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
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189721, Singapore
 Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a labour of love, involving a deep reacquain-
tance with an artefact I knew well in my childhood. As with all research
projects, family, friends, advice and wise counsel from many people have
been critical.
Several fellow academics have offered invaluable advice in helping me
compile this book. Most especially, I want to acknowledge the enormous
help offered by Sally Foster, whose wise critical advice has been most wel-
come. I also thank the supportive comments of David C Harvey. Big
thanks to Kenny Brophy for sending me the little-known volume by
Ludovic Mann, War Memorials and the Barochan Cross, that has proved so
useful. Also thanks to Tim Clarkson, John Moreland and Adam Drazin for
their knowledge and wisdom and to Gordon Masterton for his insight
into the Bridge of Weir War Memorial. I am also grateful for a number of
local people who have provided me with stories and opinions, including
Duncan Beaton, Robert Colquhoun, Ian Jackson, Jim McBeath, Bill
Robb, Richard Strachan and Craig Morris.
I also want to thank Marion Duval at Palgrave for her enthusiasm and
support for this project, and my excellent colleagues at the Institute for
Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Finally, I want to thank my mum, Rosemary Williams, for her company
on a great visit to several sites connected with the cross and above all, to
the amazing Uma Kothari, who is invariably supportive besides being such
a fantastic companion.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Making Sense of Landscape  9

3 Scholarly
 Interpretations of the Barochan Cross:
Religious and Military Landscapes 29

4 Imagining the Early Medieval Landscape 39

5 Moving the Cross Uphill: Creating a Romantic Landscape 51

6 The
 Cross and the First World War: Landscapes of
Commemoration 61

7 Revaluing
 the Cross: Its Incorporation into the Heritage
Landscape 73

8 Mending the Cross: Landscapes of Repair and Maintenance 87

9 Relocating
 the Cross: Re-enrolment into a Christian
Landscape101

vii
viii Contents

10 The
 Future of the Cross: Continued Absence, Replicas
or Something Else?109

11 Conclusion: Things, Landscapes, Heritage121

References133

Index145
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 The Barochan Cross, 1941, courtesy of Historic Environment

Scotland2
Fig. 1.2 Location of the Barochan Cross 3
Fig. 3.1 The Barochan Cross details. John Stuart, Sculptured Stones of
Scotland, 1856 30
Fig. 4.1 Map of the original and secondary location of the Barochan Cross 41
Fig. 4.2 St Peter’s Well 43
Fig. 4.3 Barochan Glen. Possible original site of the Barochan Cross 46
Fig. 5.1 Engraving of Barochan Cross, Theodore Brotchie, Some Sylvan
Scenes Near Glasgow (1921) 54
Fig. 5.2 Socket stone of the Barochan Cross, summit of the hill, viewed
from the bottom of the hill 55
Fig. 5.3 The socket stone of the Barochan Cross on top of the hill 56
Fig. 5.4 View towards Kilpatrick Hills from the socket stone of the
Barochan Cross 57
Fig. 6.1 Frontispiece, Ludovic Mann, War Memorials and the Barochan
Cross65
Fig. 6.2 Bridge of Weir, First World War memorial 67
Fig. 6.3 Detail of soldiers, Bridge of Weir, First World War memorial 68
Fig. 6.4 Memorial, Govan. Head modelled on that of the Barochan Cross 70
Fig. 7.1 Ruined interior of Castle Semple Collegiate Church,
Lochwinnoch79
Fig. 8.1 The Barochan Cross. Under repair at Stenhouse Conservation
Centre, Edinburgh, Courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland 96
Fig. 9.1 The Barochan Cross, Paisley Abbey 104
Fig. 10.1 Socket stone of the Barochan Cross 117

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter introduces readers to the Barochan Cross, identi-

fies the key themes, and approaches and lays out the book’s structure.

Keywords Interdisciplinarity • Multiple stories • Composite biography

• Object • Landscape • Heritage

From 1965 to 1975, I spent most of my school holidays at my grand-

mother’s small cottage in Renfrewshire, situated between Bishopton and
Houston. Days were spent exploring the local area by car and on foot,
trips fuelled by my nan’s insatiable curiosity for local history, geography
and culture. One of our favourite excursions was to the old Barochan
Cross, sited on the summit of a nearby hill. We would first picnic in the
nearby Barochan Burn, interspersing our meal with paddling and fishing
for minnows and bullheads, and resting on the green, grassy banks of the
stream. Afterwards, we would leave the glen and walk to the summit of
the steep grassy mound to see the cross and take in the views in all direc-
tions (see Fig. 1.1). Three and a half metres high, the cross was sculpted
out of local sandstone in the ninth or tenth century CE. In January 2021,
driving past the hill for the first time in several decades, I was disconcerted
to see that the cross was no longer there. I urgently tried to find out the
fate of the cross, and I was relieved to find that it still existed. My

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
T. Edensor, Landscape, Materiality and Heritage,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7030-6_1
2 T. EDENSOR

Fig. 1.1 The Barochan Cross, 1941, courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland

explorations disclosed that the cross had been subject to an abundance of

interpretations, practices and relocations over its long life, and these con-
tinue to surround the ancient artefact. Indeed, the site on the top of the
hill on which I had encountered the cross was not its original location
(Fig. 1.2).
Like many other ancient sculpted stones, it has experienced widely
varying fortunes. Like most of these artefacts, it has not remained in situ
at the site at which it was first installed some eleven hundred years ago
(Fraser, 2005). Some crosses have been recycled as building materials
while others have been subject to iconoclastic destruction and
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Fig. 1.2 Location of the Barochan Cross

defacement, regarded as idolatrous monuments before and during the

17th Reformation. Some have eroded to become undistinguished stony
lumps, with others removed to museums for exhibition, classification,
inspection or storage.
The stories I uncovered about this particular early medieval sculpture
shape the organisation of this book. In tracking the biography and itiner-
ary of the Barochan Cross, I explore how this venerable object has been
sited and resited in diverse spaces, enmeshed in different historical pro-
cesses, interpreted by various fields of interest and subject to the activities
4 T. EDENSOR

of distinctive communities of practice. The stories I relate both reveal

larger social, political, historical and cultural processes and adopt what
Emilie Cameron (2012: 578) refers to as ‘a politics of valuing the local,
the situated, and the specific’. The chapters into which the account is
organised follow distinct themes that emerged as research proceeded.
Each of these discussions emerged from an inductive process involving an
extensive literature and archive search, site visits and interviews with schol-
ars and locals, and each draws on diverse theoretical sources to explore
distinctive elements of the cross and its history. Of necessity, the approach
is interdisciplinary. As well as employing theories from my own discipline
of human geography, I also incorporate arguments and ideas from archae-
ology, history, anthropology and heritage studies so as to honour the
highly variegated story of this single object and investigate it from multi-
ple perspectives. Stories are included that veer from the scholarly to the
amateur, the vernacular and the mythic. These different conceptual and
theoretical resources are augmented by descriptive passages that seek to
depict the embodied sensory experiences and affective impacts of the
object. There are also conjectural sections that explore overlooked aspects
and seek to fill in missing and sometimes unknowable details. This is an
invariably messy story.
In this book, the cross is presented as a multi-storied object. The adop-
tion of a broader temporal frame refutes a sole focus on a specific period
of origin and usage. The cultural biographies of artefacts extend from the
period of their creation to the present day, revealing how people reimagine
things in accordance with changing social and spatial contexts. For as
Mark Hall (2015: 183) insists, a focus on the changing meanings, loca-
tions, uses and feelings of early medieval stone sculptures such as the cross
‘breaks down the straitjacket of traditional periodization’ and ‘disrupts
cohesive, generalized definitions of the function and meaning of sculp-
ture’. This broad temporal perspective also discloses that rather than con-
sidering clean breaks from prior habits of thought and practice, people
incorporate, amend and augment understandings from the past, and con-
tinue to do so (see Williams et al., 2015). In addition, the notion of a
‘composite biography’ also underlines the relational quality of an object
(Foster & Jones, 2020). No object is an island. It shares characteristics and
origins with other artefacts of a similar vintage, is grouped together with
other things through institutional procedures, may be augmented or lose
parts as part of a larger assemblage, may inspire replicas and is emplaced
within distinctive, sometimes shifting spatial contexts. This spatial
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

relationality also foregrounds how the histories of many things involve

their moving or being moved; in this sense, their biographies can also
productively focus on the ‘object itineraries’ that identify such travels
(Joyce & Gillespie, 2015). The stories of all objects are also shaped by
their own properties and how these influence their longevity, but critically,
also by the non-human agents that swirl around, colonise and penetrate
them. Nothing lasts forever, but the enduring presence of an entity in the
landscape depends upon how these agencies ravage and alter its constitu-
ency over time. Heritage objects in particular are typically managed to
limit such deleterious effects, and a host of maintenance and repair tech-
niques are mobilised by humans to secure their persistence, as I will
describe.
My primary focus in exploring the shifting ways in which the Barochan
Cross has been moved, utilised, cared for, interpreted, encountered,
sensed, copied and appropriated is to think about its changing relation-
ships with the physical and conceptual landscapes in which it has been situ-
ated. These different spatial settings have endowed the cross with
fluctuating expressions of power and a changing range of meanings and
feelings, and have shaped the stories that might be told about it.
Furthermore, the cross provides an excellent example of how artefacts can
serve as portals to wider theoretical explorations about landscape.
Accordingly, I have sought to expand the divergent perspectives from
which landscape might be considered, moving beyond what can be some-
what reductive debates and conceptions. In the following chapter, I first
focus upon traditional scientific and classificatory approaches to landscape
and follow this with an examination of the notion that a landscape is a text
that can be read for the meanings imposed upon it, often by the powerful.
I subsequently explore how objects are conscripted into broader land-
scapes of meanings, focusing particularly on heritage, military, memorial
and religious landscapes. I move away from these representational and
meaning-ful landscapes to consider how landscapes are also part of ordi-
nary, everyday worlds within which routines, habits and tasks are under-
taken, often unreflexively, shaping memory and modes of inhabitation.
This is extended to take account of sensory and affective engagements
with landscape, influenced by the rise of non-representational ideas that
insist that much of social life is unconcerned with making sense of mean-
ings and cognitive knowing. Finally, I examine how landscape, although it
is a human concept, is certainly not solely a human product; it is continu-
ously co-produced by infinite material, chemical, vegetal and creaturely
6 T. EDENSOR

forces that emphasise the agencies of the non-human. While all these con-
ceptions of landscape have their strengths and limitations, and none are
able to provide more than a very partial perspective, each is useful in
exploring the different dimensions of landscape. The utility of these diver-
gent conceptual understandings is exemplified throughout this account by
contextualising the relationship of the Barochan Cross to the landscapes in
which it has been sited.
A secondary focus is to consider the cross as a particular object within
the larger realm of heritage. The institutionalisation of heritage as concept
and practice underpins how it has become a highly influential, specifically
modern field of knowledge through which the past is understood and
imagined. As such, heritage interpretation testifies to the concerns of the
present. Though there are multiple ways in which heritage objects might
be interpreted, all too often, the authoritative narratives offered by heri-
tage institutions have been reductive and minimal. And yet imperatives
and ideas amongst heritage professionals change, are contested and super-
seded, and their practices are supplemented by those of other human
actors. The story of the Barochan Cross identifies reified interpretations
and official procedures but also recognises the host of participants and
practices that make heritage a process in which objects are enrolled in
contesting, changing ways and with different ideals and aims in mind.
The book is organised as follows. The first chapter, the review of the
divergent ways in which landscape can be conceptualised, provides a theo-
retical context for the organisation of the book into eight themed chap-
ters, each focusing on the different ways in which the cross has been
enlisted into different relationships with landscape. Subsequently, the sec-
ond chapter investigates the scholarly interpretations of the Barochan
Cross, while Chap. 4 seeks to imagine the encounter with the cross in the
early medieval landscape in which it was sited. Chapter 5 explores the
effects of moving the cross to the summit of a nearby hill to contribute to
the creation of a romantic landscape. Chapter 6 discusses how the cross
was recruited into a First World War memorial landscape. Chapter 7 exam-
ines the implications of enlisting the cross into a heritage landscape, with
Chap. 8 enquiring into how it has been cared for through procedures of
maintenance and repair. Chapter 9 considers how the cross has been relo-
cated and recruited into a Christian realm, while Chap. 10 speculates
about the future of the Barochan Cross, especially in terms of how a rep-
lica might be fashioned to restore its absence in the landscape. The book
concludes with an overview of how my account has contributed to
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

theories about material culture and landscape and assesses how it might
inform future critical thinking about heritage.

References
Cameron, E. (2012). New geographies of story and storytelling. Progress in
Human Geography, 36(5), 572–591.
Foster, S., & Jones, S. (2020). My life as replica: St John’s Cross, Iona. Oxbow Books.
Fraser, I. (2005). “Just an ald steen”: Reverence, reuse, revulsion and rediscovery’.
In S. Foster & M. Cross (Eds.), Able minds and Practised hands: Scotland’s early
medieval sculpture in the 21st century (pp. 55–68). Routledge.
Hall, M. (2015). Lifeways in stone: Memories and matter-reality in early medieval
sculpture from Scotland. In H. Williams, J. Kirton, & M. Gondek (Eds.), Early
medieval stone monuments: Materiality, biography, landscape (pp. 182–215).
Boydell Press.
Joyce, R., & Gillespie, S. (2015). Making things out of objects that move. In
R. Joyce & S. Gillespie (Eds.), Things in motion: Object itineraries in anthropo-
logical practice (pp. 101–122). School for Advanced Research Press.
Williams, H., Kirton, J., & Gondek, M. (2015). Introduction: Stones in sub-
stance, space and time. In H. Williams, J. Kirton, & M. Gondek (Eds.), Early
medieval stone monuments: Materiality, biography, landscape (pp. 1–34).
Boydell Press.
 CHAPTER 2

Making Sense of Landscape

Abstract This chapter contends that contemporary theories of landscape

are partial, singular and inadequate, and that only multiple and broader-­
ranging approaches to landscape can advance understanding about land-
scape per se and about its relationship with people and things. The
argument thus provides a discussion about the comprehensive ways in
which landscape might be conceived, identifying a range of theoretical
approaches, all of which are useful for considering the relationship between
the Barochan Cross and the physical and conceptual landscapes in which
it has been situated. None is pre-eminent. The summary identifies the
virtues and deficiencies of conceptions of landscape that focus on classifi-
cation, power and textual inscription, reiterative categorisation, taskscapes
and habitual engagements, sensory and phenomenological encounters,
material vitality and the role of non-humans.

Keywords Landscape • Classification • Text • Meaning • Power •

Reiterative landscapes • Taskscape • Sensation • Vitality • Non-human

Landscape is an extremely complex, contested and multiple term (Atha

et al., 2019). Barbara Bender (2006: 303) asserts that ‘the permutations
on how people interact with place and landscape are almost unending, and
the possibilities for disagreement about, and contest over, landscape are

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 9

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
T. Edensor, Landscape, Materiality and Heritage,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7030-6_2
10 T. EDENSOR

equally so’. Accordingly, to situate my account of the many contexts

within which the Barochan Cross has been situated, I investigate the
diverse ways in which landscape can be conceptualised. I discuss classifica-
tory approaches, understandings of the landscape as a text, recurrent land-
scapes, landscapes as habitually inhabited and practised, phenomenological
and affective notions of landscape, and ideas about landscape’s vitality.
This review cannot claim to be exhaustive, but critically, these conceptual
approaches to landscape all have salience in accordance with the different
angles of approach I adopt towards the Barochan Cross, and in relation to
the diverse histories, encounters, practices and interpretations that are
explored.
The first issue I address is the scale at which landscape might be con-
ceived and perceived. A rather small area might be considered to consti-
tute a landscape, whether this is constituted by a curated garden, a physical
or environmental feature, or a local setting. Conversely, landscape can be
understood as that which unfolds from the perspective of the viewer—and
as the onlooker moves, so does the scope of the landscape. I do not wish
to delimit the scale of landscape in this analysis; indeed, I consider that a
recognition of the unfixed, shifting scales of landscape is productive in
grasping the multiple spatial contexts into which the cross is sited. It is also
salient to consider whether landscape is a discrete entity or extends beyond
any identifiable area of analysis, beyond human-made and seemingly natu-
ral boundaries. As I discuss below, certain landscapes seem to stand apart,
characterised by distinctive mountain, marsh or moorland or arboreal
landscapes, or enclosing an array of distinctive cultural biological or geo-
logical features. Boundaries may be formed from natural features such as a
river or escarpment, or by walls and fences, and yet as Tim Ingold (1993:
156) points out, such indicators may only constitute a boundary ‘in rela-
tion to the activities of the people (or animals) for whom it is recognized
or experienced as such’. Accordingly, while the demarcation of a particular
landscape may appeal to common sense experience, landscape always
resists such confinement.
A further limiting perspective has been an exclusive focus on the surface
of the land, and yet what lies below and above also belongs to landscape.
As Ingold (2011: 119) insists, the land is not ‘an interface’ separating
earth and sky but is a ‘vaguely defined zone of admixture and intermin-
gling’. Variegated patterns of sunlight and shade tone landscape with shift-
ing colours, shadows and textures, gases and particles escape from earth
into the atmosphere, and water and air penetrate the earth. Similarly, the
 2 MAKING SENSE OF LANDSCAPE 11

sea also remains part of a landscape even though it extends to the horizon
and its watery qualities seems to constitute the opposite of land. Tidal pat-
terns lengthen and decrease the reach of the land at particular times, but
the sea cannot be detached from the landscape when it is incorporated
within a view from any position on the land. This underpins how land-
scape unfolds according to movement and changes according to the angle
of perception. A journey that includes a walk to the top of an escarpment
offers a view backwards to the landscape that has been traversed and a look
forward to that which lies ahead. Such expansive views may be accompa-
nied by a gaze into the middle distance or visual scrutiny of that which lies
within touching distance.
In assessing these divergent conceptions that postulate landscape as dis-
crete, or unfolding and expansive, I argue that both must be incorporated
into any account for they highlight how landscape is always beheld from
both embodied and conceptual perspectives. This is exemplified by my
focus on one particular artefact, the Barochan Cross. I demonstrate
throughout this book that like all objects in landscapes, it is encountered
through multiple perspectives. It is apprehended as a silhouette on the
horizon, viewed from several hundred metres or encountered close at
hand. It also offers a series of vantage points from which to experience
both nearby and distant views of landscape. The object can also be inter-
preted in multiple ways that are informed by and imply different concep-
tual perspectives towards landscape, and more specifically, this can disclose
its particular relationships with the landscapes in which it has been located.
Conceptually, notions about landscape emerge from diverse fields of
study, historical circumstances, cultural contexts and different linguistic
and conceptual traditions. I largely focus on influential Anglo-American
traditions of writing about landscape. However, it is critical to recognise
the particular cultural and historical contexts out of which these scholarly
accounts have arisen, and also to acknowledge that key ideas may not
extend to non-western theoretical and popular conceptions. This is espe-
cially so since modern western preoccupations with landscape emerged
during the colonial occupation of territories, as accounts were fashioned
to make other realms seem knowable to colonisers. Such authoritative
depictions, masquerading as comprehensive, identified specific features,
including geology, fauna and flora, settlement patterns and racial groups.
These understandings construed the world as a mosaic comprised of a
patchwork of landscapes with their own distinctive characteristics. The
descriptive accounts disseminated by this emerging ‘spatial science’ were
12 T. EDENSOR

bolstered with new measuring techniques that scientifically bolstered

knowledge about landscapes with quantifiable information. Such classifi-
catory practices were undertaken by physical and human geographers, the
former delineating the geological, climatic and geomorphological shaping
of particular landscapes, the latter definitively identifying historical, social
and cultural attributes that were evident in landscape forms and vestiges of
the past. Until recent times, other disciplines followed this classificatory,
typological approach to landscape. For instance, archaeology was also
thoroughly inflected with a specular gaze (Thomas, 1995) and a primary
focus on demography, social interaction, technology, territorial claims,
resources and land use (Knapp & Ashmore, 1999). Here, landscape was
conceived as a deterministic force, a backdrop to human action.
However, landscapes cannot be objectively classified according to fixed
systems of categorisation; conceptions of landscape are invariably informed
by situated, culturally specific modes of scholarly enquiry. This becomes
evident when we consider the objects of scrutiny. Surveyors may measure
landscape features while cartographers denote particular, already priori-
tised elements on the maps they devise. Archaeologists might inspect aer-
ial photographs to look for inconsistencies in the topography, botanists
investigate plant and arboreal distribution, and ornithologists survey bird
numbers. Tourists, in contrast, scan the landscape for signs of beauty, curi-
osity and sites of architectural and historical interest.
In recent decades, quantitative approaches have been supplemented by
investigations into how power is manifest across landscape. It is not diffi-
cult to consider how landscapes express and have been shaped by diverse
forms of power. Decisions to commence mineral extraction; undertake
specific kinds of farming or forestry; demarcate national parks and heritage
districts; sequester land for military, carceral or religious purposes; create
large transport infrastructures; sequester areas for private housing devel-
opment and extend normative forms of retail, service and architectural
provision: all testify to the power of some to decide how landscape is pro-
duced (Lefebvre, 1991), a power denied to others. Power is thus distrib-
uted unequally across the landscape, often massively unequally, and in
order to secure such control, persistent surveillance, maintenance and
repair are required to counter subversive practices such as trespassing,
occupation and destruction.
The inscribing of power has been further explored by considering land-
scapes as texts upon which symbolic meanings are written. Contesting earlier
scholarly accounts that were devoid of social, economic and cultural
 2 MAKING SENSE OF LANDSCAPE 13

perspectives, such approaches were most prominently initiated during the

cultural geographical turn in the 1980s and 1990s. The focus is on how
landscapes can be read according to architectural and monumental styles,
and the distribution and aesthetics of property, religious institutions and
commercial structures. Especially important is the ground-breaking work
of Denis Cosgrove (Cosgrove, 1998; Cosgrove & Daniels, 1988) who
explore how aestheticized landscapes conceal power relations that can be
unpicked through assiduous reading. Exemplary expressions of power are
evident in the designs of the estates of wealthy landowners in which signi-
fiers of status, taste and ownership are embedded in landscape features.
In considering textual qualities, it is crucial to consider how landscape
is appraised according to particular aesthetic conventions. For instance,
the tenacious notion of the romantic landscape continues to inform domi-
nant understandings of selective rural landscapes. As Claude Lorrain’s
seventeenth-century paintings of Italian landscapes became valued for
their mooted picturesque qualities that were transmuted into the land-
scape designs of British country estates. Landowners installed a series of
ruins, grottoes, fake and actual historical relics into their landscapes to
create picturesque effects, direct visual attention and suggest antiquity. As
I will subsequently discuss, this resonates in the eighteenth-century relo-
cation of the Barochan Cross. The illusory manufacture of balance and
harmony included the removal of signs of rural labour, an emphasis on
aesthetic rather than productive qualities that was further consolidated in
artistic representations.
Importantly, the cultivation of a romantic sensibility promoted the rar-
efied appreciation of the landscape as a separate object from which the
spectator stands apart, thereby producing a particular kind of viewing sub-
ject (Cosgrove, 1998). Landscape thus ‘became a locus of identity forma-
tion by virtue of how it was read about, toured through, experienced,
viewed physically or in print, spoken about, and painted’ (Darby, 2020:
72), expressing the cultural capital of the viewer through the performance
of sophisticated aesthetic evaluation. While this was formerly an elite,
somewhat rarefied practice, it rapidly became democratised with the rise of
mass tourism as large numbers of people travelled into rural landscapes in
search of esteemed views. We remain heirs to this mode of encountering
landscape, and this is underpinned by a plethora of contemporary paint-
ings, photographs, film locations and mass-produced tourist images, as
well as tourist practices.
14 T. EDENSOR

As symbolic carriers of identity, freighted with meaning, the reading of

particular realms has also served to underpin national landscape ideologies
(Edensor, 2002) wherein selective qualities and features are interpreted as
symbolising particular national virtues. For instance, the generic represen-
tation of rural English landscapes replete with old churches, village greens,
thatched cottages, cricket pitches and a patchwork of fields and hedgerows
are commonly inferred to embody mythic virtues of insularity, stability
and order that inhere in the ‘traditional’, ‘authentic’ pre-urban roots of
Englishness (Lowenthal, 1994). The repetitive representation of such
landscapes by artists, photographers, novelists and filmmakers contributes
to the ongoing production of an idealised imaginary England (Taylor,
1994). This English national vision contrasts with the symbolic landscape
of the Scottish Highlands, conversely construed as wild and rugged, an
imaginary Scottish geography that incorporates ‘bens and glens, the lone
sheiling on the misty island, purple heather, kilted clansmen, battles long
ago, an ancient and beautiful language, claymores and bagpipes and Bonny
Prince Charlie’ (Womack, 1987: 1). Rather than epitomising the attri-
butes of the picturesque, these apparently wilder Highland landscapes
reverberated with that other central concept of Romantic landscape appre-
ciation, the sublime.
In addition to the national virtues inscribed into selective picturesque
and sublime landscapes are an array of recurrent features including heri-
tage sites, monuments, castles and palaces, objects and places that more
specifically signify the uniqueness of what Anthony Smith (1991: 16) calls
the nation’s ‘moral geography’. Such landscapes offer reassuring, stabilis-
ing symbols of continuity; they are etched with the past so that ‘history
runs through geography’ (Cubitt, 1998: 13). A more mundane sense of
national belonging can thus be construed by identifying a host of reitera-
tive elements within national landscapes that do not extend beyond
national boundaries. Such architectural, infrastructural, commercial, rec-
reational, institutional, domestic and environmental commonalities per-
vade local settings: post offices, police stations, train stations, town halls
and libraries, pubs, supermarkets, branded shops, vernacular architecture,
post boxes and road signs. Scotland’s mundane landscape is distinctive
from that south of the border. Scotmid and RS McColl retail outlets recur,
along with Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches, ‘tardis’ police boxes,
lofty tenements, crow-stepped gables and Scottish baronial buildings,
police officers with peaked caps, advertising hoardings for Irn Bru and the
Daily Record, brown heritage signs adorned with thistle icons, and saltires,
 2 MAKING SENSE OF LANDSCAPE 15

as well as Celtic and Pictish crosses, both ancient and modern. Such mul-
tiple recurrent elements make national space knowable, contributing to
the ongoing production of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983).
Anxieties about change may be triggered when these mundane national
signs are threatened or augmented by features perceived to be from ‘else-
where’, as will become evident in my discussion about the twentieth-­
century relocation of the Barochan Cross.
Besides the proliferating national signifiers that constitute an encounter
with landscape, there are other kinds of reiterative and serial elements that
are repeatedly encountered as we traverse landscapes, and that inscribe
normative forms of power, organisation and identity across space. These
landscapes of reiteration conjoin common elements that offer material evi-
dence of particular qualities; indeed, they are composed of multiple smaller
landscapes. They organise objects into like categories that extend across
space, ignoring that which lies between, beneath or around them, flatten-
ing landscape in drawing out particular consistencies and resonances. In
adopting a particular selective lens through which other elements are fil-
tered out, a sequential array of thematic objects is interlinked to comprise
cultural landscapes produced and consumed by the particular perspectives
and preoccupations of specific professionals, ideologues, power-holders,
enthusiasts and strategists. These recurrent features also offer an analytical
focus that helps to explore why and how they recur, changing in accor-
dance with historical processes and accumulating to constitute compendi-
ous thematic gatherings. Across certain stretches, such features converge
and proliferate, but in others they occur more sporadically. In this account,
I identify heritage, religious, memorial and military landscapes as examples
in which a host of linked signifiers recur, institutionalising power and nor-
malising historical and ideological processes. I discuss how one object, the
Barochan Cross, has been variously enrolled into these four landscapes of
recurrence in ways that shape and contextualise its meanings and generate
diverse affectual experiences, according to historical context, predisposi-
tion and analytical perspective.
Certain religious landscapes incorporate a proliferation of material
forms that naturalise claims about the predominant faith. In Scotland, for
example, the collective existence of shrines, crosses, memorials and
churches of diverse style, sect and vintage seem to constitute irrefutable,
common-sense evidence of the centrality of Christian faith. Williams et al.
(2015: 7) identify how what they call ‘commemorative topographies’ are
exemplified by the early medieval landscapes ‘monumentalized by crosses’
16 T. EDENSOR

that belonged to a larger network of sacred sites around which rituals and
processions took place. The epistemological efficacy of such spatial accu-
mulations can be considerable. For instance, a majority vote in a 2009
Swiss referendum decided against the inclusion of minarets in the design
of mosques; while the religious buildings themselves were allowed, the
inclusion of signifiers of the faith were believed to intrude on Switzerland’s
Christian landscape. Religious landscapes change over time, with numer-
ous churches now becoming disused and other sacred centres such as
mosques, temples, gurdwaras appearing. Nonetheless, the Christian land-
scape of Scotland, saturated with symbols and structures, remains utterly
identifiable.
Heritage landscapes conjoin an increasingly diverse array of places and
objects within a spreading network, both as a result of institutional state
procedures but progressively through local and subaltern assignations of
heritage value. The effect of the saturation of heritage is to purvey an
impression that landscape itself is ancient, suffused with signifiers of the
past, and this also feeds into the national landscape ideologies discussed
above. As David Harvey (2015: 911) notes, ‘a cultural memory of
“national past” is literally conjoined with specific iconic topographical ref-
erence points in a taken-for-granted, self-fulfilling and mutually support-
ing sense of heritage landscape’. The heritage landscape also promotes the
composition of selective tourist itineraries that link together symbolic sites
as general points of interest or according to particular themes. As it
expands, with different groups championing the significance of particular
sites, the heritage landscape increasingly incorporates elements of very dif-
ferent vintage and type.
Military landscapes offer a series of complexes, centres and outposts
that naturalise how war and conflict have been repeatedly inscribed into
landscape over time, making defensive and strategic installations appear an
inevitable part of the expression of elite or state power. Indeed, there are
few landscapes that do not include both ancient and modern fortifications,
defensive walls, battlefields, training facilities, sites of munitions and arma-
ments production, baleful signs that warfare has been recurrent through-
out human history.
Memorial landscapes incorporate a series of commemorative forms,
ranging from the presence of ubiquitous cemeteries with their thousands
of graves to specific memorials that recall political events and battles or
honour the accomplishments of particular historical figures. These include
the commemorative topographies referred to above, networks that have
 2 MAKING SENSE OF LANDSCAPE 17

been supplemented by later memorial expressions, for instance, the marble

and bronze Victorian and Edwardian monuments sited on plinths that
commemorate selective political, military, entrepreneurial and scientific
figures (Edensor, 2020) and the ubiquitous late nineteenth-century and
twentieth-century war memorials. Once more, the traces of power are
profoundly evident in such memorial forms, testifying to the capacities of
the powerful to inscribe their ideological preoccupations on landscape.
While memorial styles change over time, and certain monuments may be
threatened with removal or destruction, the urge to commemorate is evi-
dent in the recurrence of monuments across space.
The concept that the landscape is a text to be read has proved influen-
tial, yet it remains partial. Firstly, as with all texts, landscape can be read in
numerous ways; it is polysemic. What is more, landscapes are saturated
with numerous potential objects of scrutiny that might thwart intentions
for attention to be primarily directed towards those elements installed by
the powerful. More saliently, a narrow focus on its textual qualities neglects
consideration of the lived habitual and unreflexive encounter with land-
scape, the prevalence of affectual and sensory experiences that sidestep
processes of meaning making, and the active role of non-human forces in
shaping landscape.
Rather than a disposition informed by an attentive, intentional reading
of landscape as text, most of the time we habitually practice and sense the
landscapes that we inhabit. Our feelings and understandings about land-
scape are entangled with mundane practices and continuously emerge out
of everyday sensations, encounters and competencies. We undertake
repetitive, habitual enactions around the familiar sites, routes and fixtures
of our landscapes, carrying out daily household tasks, leisure pursuits,
exercise, commutes, and trips to shops, cafes and pubs. David Seamon
(1979) terms these routine journeys ‘place ballets’, and contends that they
foster a mundane, unreflexive sense of being in the world through which
people come to know how to accomplish tasks. Such habitual competen-
cies include knowing where to buy particular commodities, drive a car and
catch a bus, an array of situated rhythmic, patterned social practices that
take place in what Tim Ingold (1993) terms the ‘taskscape’.
The taskscape confirms that landscapes are continuously in process as
habitués serially encounter familiar perceptual realms while undertaking
ordinary, everyday practices, consistent endeavours that can foster topo-
philia, stability and a sense of belonging. These modes of inhabiting land-
scapes are further sustained by how they are shared with others. A
18 T. EDENSOR

predictable range of diverse movements and habits link individuals to

groups so that a sense of ‘cultural community’ may be co-produced by
‘people together tackling the world around them with familiar manoeu-
vres’ (Frykman & Löfgren, 1996: 10–11), strengthening affective and
cognitive links. Collective choreographies around local shops, bars, cafes,
garages, parks and transport termini—what Doreen Massey (1995) terms
‘activity spaces’—constitute habitual realms of circulation and intersec-
tion. These ideas resonate in the more interactive focus of recent archaeo-
logical thinking in which landscape ‘is both a medium for and the outcome
of human activity’ (Knapp & Ashmore, 1999: 8). The identification of
field systems, forts, boundaries, paths, as well as ritual landscapes is aligned
with a broader conceptualisation of landscapes as embedded in ways of
thinking and living.
The inhabitation of taskscapes involves repeated but unreflexively expe-
rienced encounters with familiar fixtures. Yet when the sudden disappear-
ance, removal or replacement of these recurrently experienced elements
occur, there may be a surge of anxiety that familiar landscapes are under
threat. As I will discuss, the relocation of the Barochan Cross has fostered
disorientation and disquiet. Such worries resonate with wider concerns
about the threat to local distinctiveness posed by globalising processes of
time space compression, homogenisation and serial monotony. The ongo-
ing disembedding (Giddens, 1991) of local production, media, cultural
practices and social interactions since the advance of industrial capitalism
has undoubtedly made a great impact on the landscape. Global flows of
people, ideas, cultures, commodities and information (Appadurai, 1990)
increasingly extend into places and landscapes, supplementing or replacing
time-honoured features and promoting concerns about the scale and pace
of change. Local farming, food and drink production, retail provision,
architectural styles and rituals become difficult to distinguish from those
that extend across national or global space. As a consequence, the patch-
work of different landscapes that characterise the landscape (as celebrated
by the likes of lobbying group Common Ground who promote ‘local dis-
tinctiveness’) blends into a more uniform configuration as the landscape
aligns with more extensive resonance with the notion of ‘non-place’
(Augé, 1995). In the context of this unease, according to Christopher
Tilley (2004: 19), historical objects—including artefacts such as the
Barochan Cross—can ameliorate a mooted lost sense of local belonging
and rekindle a vision of the uniqueness of place ‘as a counterpoint to the
flux of modernity’.
 2 MAKING SENSE OF LANDSCAPE 19

One critical activity undertaken within taskscapes is the repetitive,

relentless performance of maintenance and repair, without which land-
scapes would become disordered. As Denis et al. (2015: 9) emphasise,
‘repair is at the heart of a continuous process that includes patching up,
reconfiguring, interpolating, and reassembling settings from previous
forms of existence’. Roads are ceaselessly repaired, hedges restored
(Harvey, 2017), sewage and electricity infrastructures periodically
inspected and maintained, woods diversely managed, soils nourished,
fields left fallow, invasive plants eliminated, verges trimmed, riverbanks
bolstered against flooding and stone walls reassembled. Intrinsic to this
study is the ongoing maintenance and repair of heritage artefacts, as will
be exemplified by the periodic measures mobilised to preserve the
Barochan Cross within the heritage landscape, an object ascribed as of
national importance. If maintenance and repair is not systematically and
regularly undertaken, objects and sites are threatened by ruination, some
at a more rapid rate than others (Edensor, 2016). Maintenance work aims
at ‘capture and containment, the organisation of forces with a degree of
consistency such that they are apprehensible as bodies, subjects and
objects’ (Latham & McCormack, 2004: 718). Yet the ultimate fate of a
building or artefact depends upon human decisions about whether it
ought to endure or not. As Denis and Pontille suggest (2018), mainte-
nance and repair are an indispensable part of living with uncertainty, vital-
ity and change, of living in a world in which multiple non-humans exert
their agencies. The continual, vigilant upkeep of landscapes continuously
seeks to exclude matter out of place and keep things in place through the
enlisting of a compendium of techniques, procedures and institutions.
The upkeep of familiar heritage features in the landscape, Christopher
Tilley (2004: 23) reminds us, may act as key material metaphors of iden-
tity whose efficacy ‘is inseparable from bodily, sensory engagement’, a key
dimension to which I now turn.
The visual mode of appraising landscapes through a romantic gaze dis-
cussed above not only marginalises other ways of viewing but also of expe-
riencing landscape through other senses. For the sensory and affective
experience of landscape is multiple. As Hayden Lorimer (2005: 84) insists,
this ‘takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday rou-
tines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers,
practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interac-
tions and sensuous dispositions’. This foregrounds how sensory attention
deployed in the apprehension of landscape depends upon inclination and
20 T. EDENSOR

preoccupation, which shapes when and how we touch surfaces, gaze close
at hand or towards the horizon, sniff out smells and listen for sounds.
Sensation and affective experience also shifts according to the activity
undertaken. A mountain biker negotiates the gradients and twists of the
route. A birdwatcher scrutinises trees, sky and wetlands for signs of avian
movement. A climber clambers up and across rocky surfaces with deft
touch and an enhanced sense of balance. A fungi hunter inhales the air to
detect fungal scents. An archaeologist gazes at the landscape through aer-
ial photography, looking for inconsistencies in surface textures. A tourist
scans the landscape for historic sites and picturesque scenes. These bodies
are differentially attuned to detect divergent elements in landscape
(Büscher, 2006) in ways that are also marked by the different capacities
and dispositions shaped by gender, class, age, ethnicity and many other
identifications.
A decisive move away from the romantic gaze is provided by John Wylie
(2005: 245) for whom our encounters with landscapes are always shaped
by ‘the entwined materialities and sensibilities with which we act and
sense’. We see with light and colour, we move with surfaces and waymark-
ers, we feel with stone and earth. Wylie’s shift in perspective appositely
critiques ideas that we can be dispassionate observers separate from the
landscape. It also foregrounds how landscapes possess certain affordances
(Gibson, 1979) that make potential actions easy, difficult or impossible.
Sustained immersion in a particular landscape discloses recognisable com-
monalities and consistencies in temperature, colour and sound, as well as
more evanescent sensory and atmospheric qualities. These latter elements
undergird the emotional and affective resonances of landscape but are
often difficult to articulate: the subtleties of weather, the cloudiness or
cloudlessness of the sky, the sense of expansiveness or confinement, the
vibrant hues of flowers and foliage, the distinctive play of light and shad-
ows, the scents that waft across space, the chorus of birdsong and the
textures of building materials. Such attributes might rarely be consciously
noticed but are unreflexively deepened by time and embedded in memory
(Lippard, 1997); the accumulation of repetitively sensed textures, smells,
sounds and sights become sedimented in bodies.
Thus, a lengthy period spent in landscape may engender greater attun-
ement to minor features, gatherings, textures, peculiarities and absences.
For instance, a prolonged spell of sustained walking through landscape
induces a sequence of diverse modes and objects of attention. The walker
may gaze at scenic elements near and far as they initially stride out, but the
 2 MAKING SENSE OF LANDSCAPE 21

sudden advent of heavy rainfall may necessitate a focus on conditions

underfoot. An encounter with a peculiar feature may solicit a period of
intense, close-up scrutiny, while towards the end of a long walk, a desire
to assuage painful blisters or tired limbs may cause the walker to identify
the easiest, flattest route to facilitate a speedy end to the journey.
In developing archaeological thinking about the sensory and affective
experiences of things in a landscape, Christopher Tilley’s (2004) influen-
tial phenomenological investigations explore the use of stone in shaping
ritual practices rooted in the landscape’s affordances. Tilley examines the
ancient Breton menhirs that occur in five distinctive locations and vary in
height, size, rock type, location, orientation, texture, shape and number.
Despite their diversity, Tilley contends that all menhirs were designed to
be perceived from certain angles, and from near and far, determining dif-
ferent and shifting relationships with bodies. This phenomenological
understanding is extended by an object’s location within a landscape that
possesses particular dimensions, textures, colours and shapes; hence, the
sensation and perception of such objects are always relational. These rela-
tionalities change over time as artefacts and buildings are demolished,
maintained or allowed to degenerate. For instance, as they become tar-
nished or delaminated, worn or discoloured, their forms are transfigured
by how they reflect the changing light. These shifting conditions under-
score how ‘meaning is neither imposed on things nor pre-given in con-
sciousness but discovered in the course of practical activity’ (Tilley, 2004:
24) and embedded in time.
Like Tilley’s menhirs, other stony forms are intended to endure, their
potency residing ‘in a fusion of their physical form and location or place-
ment in the landscape, the sensual experience of these stones and the ideas
and memories, histories and mythologies that became associated with
them’ (ibid: 35). Here, a phenomenological approach is supplemented by
an acknowledgement that we also need to investigate the symbolic mean-
ings that become attached to things within wider fields of understanding.
This emphasises how sensory and symbolic power are entwined and rein-
force each other, and how representations may be enfolded into affective
and sensory experiences and be deployed in accounting for them. The
representational is thus frequently supplemented by or melded with the
non-representational, phenomenological, sensory and affective experience
of landscapes.
However, sensory and affective engagements are often momentary and
immanent, disclosing the fluidity of landscapes and our own fluid
22 T. EDENSOR

performances in response to landscapes (Waterton, 2019: 96). Such sen-

sory and affective moments might be difficult to account for, revealing the
inadequacy of language. In an academic context, John Law (2004: 2)
appositely questions the extent to which standard social science methods
and languages can effectively deal with the experience of a world in which
much is ‘vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elu-
sive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have a pat-
tern at all’. Yet despite the salience of Law’s question, we may still attempt
to depict such experiences as best we can despite their elusiveness.
The sensory experience of landscape is often primarily stimulated by
multiple non-human elements. In emphasising the vitality of the land-
scape, a focus on these dynamic non-human agents and energies further
extinguishes any lingering residues of the sedentarist, detached approaches
discussed above. However, until recently, the conspicuous neglect of the
co-production of landscape by non-humans has reinforced anthropocen-
tric conceptions that conceive it as a product of human activity. This non-­
human co-production is multi-temporal and extends back aeons to the
advent of geological and geomorphological forces and their continuing
emergence.
For instance, as Jeffrey Cohen declares (2015: 38),

Stone is never a lone element but a partner with water, fire, air, organic life.
In stone a sense of place joins a sense of planet, but even that scale is not
enough. Stone emphasizes the cosmos in cosmopolitan, the universe of
inhuman forces and materialities that stretches to the distant arms of
the galaxy.

These rather ineffable contemplations of the ancient origins of the world

and landscape conjure up the buckling of the crust caused by colliding
continental plates, the laying down of the particles that coagulated to form
sedimentary rocks, volcanic eruptions and the slow erosion of stony for-
mations; all have shaped the contours, rises and defiles of landscape
(Massey, 2006) and provided the material for stone sculptures such as the
Barochan Cross. Through a geological lens, the landscape is part of a con-
tinuously moving lithosphere that will persist into the future with no obvi-
ous end point. These geological topographies are still being moulded
according to timescales imperceptible to human apprehension, shaped by
vital forces exerted over millions of years that contrast with the momen-
tary duration of human life.
 2 MAKING SENSE OF LANDSCAPE 23

To illustrate the prominence of the non-human in shaping landscapes,

I now provide a description of the geological and geomorphological land-
scape in which the study takes place. This perhaps resonates with the clas-
sificatory mode of analysis cited above, but it foregrounds the massive
non-human forces that have shaped the landscape and also initiates a dis-
cussion of the specific setting in which much of this study takes place. The
larger landscape context for the site(s) of the Barochan Cross is the
Midland Valley of Scotland, bounded by the roughly parallel Highland
Boundary and Southern Upland Faults, about 50 miles apart. This rift val-
ley has been forged by downward pressure to create a swathe of land of
lower altitude to the land masses north and south. The Midland Valley
mainly comprises old sedimentary rocks, with numerous volcanic intru-
sions producing an uneven, rolling landscape. The study area is bounded
by the igneous scarps of the Kilpatrick Hills to the North and the
Renfrewshire Heights to the Southeast, and is largely underlain by mill-
stone grit and carboniferous limestone punctuated by sporadic igneous
incursions. It has been further carved by successive waves of glacial erosion
and deposition and continuous fluvial erosion. In a Landscape Consultancy
Review by Scottish Natural Heritage (1999: 112), this landscape has been
classified as an area of ‘rugged upland farming’ that lies adjacent to the flat
Houston alluvial plain formed from deposits laid down by the River Clyde.
It is further depicted as a ‘rugged, hummocky landscape of steep, craggy
bluffs interspersed with more gentle farmland’ (ibid). The hill upon which
the cross was sited is one such ‘hummock’. The landscape has afforded
advantageous conditions for the cultivation of pasture for sheep and cattle,
clumps of woodland, and the design of country estates, some extant, oth-
ers defunct.
More generally, these huge geological forces are supplemented by a
host of chemical, beastly and biotic agencies that ceaselessly co-produce
landscape at less than millennial time scales. The tone, light, darkness,
colour and cloud cover of the sky continuously shifts, often in distinctive
patterns in particular realms (Edensor, 2017). Streams carve through rock
and earth, rain saturates and erodes, wind bends plants and distributes
spores, and areas of arboreal shadow and sunlight patch the landscape,
fostering and limiting plant growth. The landscape is interlaced with crea-
turely tracks and animal territories, livestock plough up fields and crop
grass short, while avian nesting colonies are annually renewed. Thick
shrubbery, spreading tree roots, colonising biofilms and mosses add fur-
ther layers. Below ground, mycelia extend for great distances, insects and
24 T. EDENSOR

bacteria erode matter and contribute to soil composition. All adapt to

changing circumstances, some flourishing, others withering as climates
change, air quality worsens and floods swamp terrain. New invasive plants
arrive displacing others, some creatures disappear while other species find
newly favourable conditions, organic matter rots and sprouts. At seasonal
time scales, leaves fall and grow while birds migrate to and from their sum-
mer haunts. As Ingold (2008) emphasises, we are always already immersed
in the currents of a world in formation. Landscapes are unequivocally
emergent, and humans join the legions of non-human agents in their
ongoing production, often seeking to take advantage of the potentialities
on offer or overcome the limitations afforded by geological, biological
and chemical processes. Such attempts may be futile in the face of over-
whelming forces and entropy but may endure for a period of time.
Immersion in landscape can sensorially attune us to these myriad non-­
human agencies. In this context, I will explore how the stone cross
explored in this book and the landscapes to which it has belonged are vital,
ever-changing. The cross has been shaped by geological processes and its
own geological constituents, rain and ice and wind, biological colonisation
and chemical action, as well as by a host of human interventions, all agen-
cies situated in the specific landscapes to which the cross has belonged.
These forces have impacted upon the form of the cross according to diver-
gent temporalities, foregrounding the multi-temporality of landscape.
Indeed, an encounter with any landscape is to confront its temporal depth
and layering, through the affordances that trigger awareness of geological
and geomorphological pasts, the layers of soil that have taken centuries to
form, the presence of ancient trees, and the traces of former inhabitants,
animal and human. Ruins and ancient artefacts subside and decay, provok-
ing haunting intimations of prior life. And our own memories are trig-
gered by moving across landscapes we have visited before or that resonate
with previous experiences of other landscapes.
Many historical signs are obscure or partial, especially in the absence of
substantial written documentation. Consequently, our considerations
about a landscape’s past must be largely conjectural, but to ignore them is
to participate in a presentism that can characterise certain strands of non-­
representational thinking (Harvey, 2015). As Divya Tolia-Kelly (2006:
215) importantly asserts, ‘by acknowledging power geometries of our
present as linked to our pasts, we can make complex and assert the differ-
entiating forces that effect the parameters and flows of affectual capacities
and sensitivities which course and shape the rhythms of everyday living’.
 2 MAKING SENSE OF LANDSCAPE 25

The multi-temporal qualities of landscape are, she considers, intrinsic to

the ways in which we experience it, certainly in terms of recognising
power, but also in experiencing a haunting of those forces and agents that
are long gone, as well those that continue to exert their influence on the
shaping of the landscape.
These queer connections, suddenly arising from sensory and affective
experience of landscape, demand to be acknowledged. Accordingly, in this
account, I seek to register these eruptions from the past, honouring the
ways in which they snare us into imagining, speculating and narrating
what they might be disclosing. In acknowledging them, I follow Hayden
Lorimer’s (2003) advice that we need to make more room for ‘minor
figures’ and ‘small stories’ beyond overarching narratives. My approach is
to incorporate speculative perspectives, along with autobiographical and
autoethnographic passages.
In this introductory chapter, I have emphasised the multiplicity of land-
scape. The conceptions and theories identified here are all useful, if only
partially; there is no single overarching theory that will suffice in exploring
the distinctive relationship of one unique object with the landscapes in
which it has been situated over its long life. As will be apparent in the fol-
lowing account, all these conceptions and interpretations of landscape
recur at different points, offering explanatory perspectives and contextual
salience. They illuminate my discussions of the diverse ways in which we
might understand the Barochan Cross, its meaning, its affective and sen-
sory impact, its materiality, and above all, its shifting relationships with
actual and conceptual landscapes in which it has been conscripted. If they
prefer, readers might return to this chapter after reading the rest of the
book; this may help them to grasp the links between this theoretical review
and the ways in which particular discussions intersect with these broader
ideas about landscape.

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 CHAPTER 3

Scholarly Interpretations of the Barochan

Cross: Religious and Military Landscapes

Abstract This chapter discusses the key archaeological and historical ways
in which the Barochan Cross has been interpreted. Discussion of the early
medieval Strathclyde Kingdom and the Govan School follows the consen-
sus amongst scholars that these were the historical contexts within which
the cross was produced and erected. Within this agreement, however,
interpretations put different emphases on the extent to which the sculpted
designs of the cross represent religious and military meanings. These con-
jectures are advanced by a consideration about how these military and
religious factors may have shaped encounters with the landscape during
this early medieval period.

Keywords Archaeology • History • Interpretation • Strathclyde • The

Govan School • Military • Religious

The Barochan Cross is one of only a few complete Scottish stones from
the early medieval period that continue to stand upright. Though
extremely weathered, the carved figures on front, back and sides remain
just about visible, but earlier photographs and drawings reveal the designs
more precisely. An illustration in John Stuart’s, 1856 volume, Sculptured
Stones of Scotland, provides clear details of the key features (Fig. 3.1).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
T. Edensor, Landscape, Materiality and Heritage,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7030-6_3
30 T. EDENSOR

Fig. 3.1 The Barochan

Cross details. John
Stuart, Sculptured Stones
of Scotland, 1856

Intricate interlaced patterns cover the head of the cross and the upper part
of the shaft on both faces, and a lower area of the shaft on one face. On
one face is a figural panel in three descending sections. The topmost sec-
tion features a spear-carrying mounted warrior facing a figure who is offer-
ing the rider a drinking horn. Below, to the left, is a large figure with an
axe, a small person to his right, and further right, another large figure
holding an object above the small figure. Below these figures are two four-­
legged creatures facing each other and seemingly roaring. On the cross’s
opposite side is a panel with the head and shoulders of four hooded figures
looking ahead, and below these, a further four spear-carrying figures fac-
ing right and blowing horns. The sides of the cross are also adorned with
elaborate interlacing patterns.
Architectural, archaeological and historical interpretations of the loca-
tion, purpose and meanings of the Barochan Cross diverge, and these
scholarly readings are supplemented by diverse amateur and antiquarian
accounts and myths that have accumulated around the artefact. These nar-
ratives all contribute to a composite biography; irrespective of their verac-
ity, plausibility or academic weight, they have been retold, been discredited
or retain credibility. There is, however, a gathering consensus that the
cross should be stylistically classified as one of the Strathclyde stones. For
its form and style roughly equates to those of the existing 31 Strathclyde
memorials formerly located in the graveyard of Govan Old Parish Church,
Glasgow, but relocated inside this ecclesiastical building in 1926. While
their panels of decorative interlacing patterns, figures of humans and
 3 SCHOLARLY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BAROCHAN CROSS: RELIGIOUS… 31

animals, and religious symbols superficially resonate with contemporane-

ous Pictish sculptures, these less refined Strathclyde monuments are stylis-
tically unique. In the church, five hogback tombs, several recumbent
cross-slabs and crosses, and a sarcophagus constitute the material vestige
of a wealthy ninth- to eleventh-century Strathclyde burial ground patron-
ised by the Strathclyde royalty. Beyond the church, there are several high
crosses situated within a roughly 30-mile radius of Govan that are regarded
as belonging to the Govan School; indeed, recent research (Bain, 2022)
suggests that these crosses may be more numerous than previously consid-
ered, with over 20 potentially identified, and that substantially degraded,
and now absent, crosses should be added to their number. The Barochan
Cross belongs to these outliers.
Following the destruction wrought by Viking raiders at their former
Clydeside fortress on Dumbarton Rock, or Alt Clut, in 870, the occupants
were forced to relocate further west along the Clyde, coming to inhabit
the district now known as Govan, around the areas on both banks where
a ford crossed the river. Here, they established Strat Clut, a new ritual
landscape and centre of ecclesiastical and political power. Strat Clut was
dominated by the new church and churchyard and the massive earthwork
of the Doomster Hill, its name inferring that it was probably the site of a
court or parliament of sorts that marked out sovereignty over the sur-
rounding area. It was levelled and erased in the nineteenth century.
Archaeologist Stephen Driscoll (1998: 105) considers that Govan was
probably the pre-­eminent ‘ceremonial and administrative centre for the
kings of Strathclyde between the 9th and 11th centuries’, but at the end of
the eleventh century, it was absorbed, possibly annexed, (Dalglish &
Driscoll, 2009) by the larger political entity of Alba from which the mod-
ern nation of Scotland was to emerge. The historical record of the
Strathclyde kingdom is scanty, with chronicles, hagiographies or charters
providing few significant details (Clarkson, 2016). This archival dearth
provides wide scope for historical and archaeological interpretation, and
Driscoll et al. (2005) detail twentieth-­century scholarly attempts to grasp
the meanings of the sculptures within the context of the Govan School.
For rather than written sources, it is the Govan stones that constitute
the most compelling legacy of this obscure kingdom and suggest its inde-
pendence and power (see Driscoll, 1998, for more extensive discussion of
Strat Clut). As historian Tim Clarkson (2016: 170) emphasises, ‘these
magnificent relics, far from being mute sandstone blocks, speak forcefully
of the wealth and power that lay behind their making’. Clarkson (2016:
32 T. EDENSOR

129) suggests that the Strathclyde stone carvers ‘borrowed ideas from a
number of sculptural traditions: Pictish, Irish, Welsh, Scandinavian and
Anglo-Saxon’, a multi-cultural product of the ‘web of cultural interac-
tions’ and ‘complex political relationships of 10th century Britain’. Driscoll
et al. (2005: 144) foreground that like the Barochan Cross, the Govan
stones feature ornate interlacing designs, the similar organisation of orna-
mental panels, mounted warriors and standing figures, animals and hunt-
ing scenes, but that these display ‘a more technically limited ability’ than
in the finer Pictish sculpture of Argyll. Drawing on art-historical analysis,
Driscoll et al. (2005: 142) also agree that a common tradition can be
‘inferred by the identification of common technical attributes, themes,
materials and findspots’. This, they contend, indicates that there must
have been a single workshop from which sculptures were produced for the
whole region or alternatively, several related workshops across the region
that employed masons trained to follow a particular stylistic tradition
under Strathclyde patronage (156).
In analysing the motifs sculpted on the Strathclyde memorials, Clarkson
(2016: 48) argues that although they ‘include crosses and other Christian
imagery, some are undoubtedly secular rather than ecclesiastical: images of
spear-armed horsemen on several stones suggest that that the people they
commemorated were members of a warrior aristocracy rather than of a
religious community’. He extends this analysis to the Barochan Cross,
specifically considering that the carved mounted warriors and the infantry-
men may commemorate a battle in which Strathclyde warriors were victo-
rious, perhaps against Scandinavian raiders. He further conjectures that
the open-mouthed beasts confronting each other further symbolise this
conflict. Driscoll et al. (2005: 147) similarly contend that the ‘prominent
martial imagery on the cross … may lend credence to the notion that the
original context was primarily secular’, an opinion that also guides Alan
Steel’s (n.d.) account in an information pamphlet produced for Paisely
Abbey about the metaphorical significance of the design of the cross. He
suggests that ‘there appears to be no theological or scriptural content’,
and that the symbols perhaps relate to ‘a purely secular and probably
pagan ritual’, perhaps the acclamation of a king.
Houston-based history enthusiast, Duncan Beaton (2009), avers that
these martial motifs may instead relate to a local account, related in a
nineteenth-century poem by a daughter of the landholding family, the
Flemings, and reiterated in nineteenth-century and twentieth-century his-
torical tales. The mythical episode tells of Somerled, a Norse Gael rival
 3 SCHOLARLY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BAROCHAN CROSS: RELIGIOUS… 33

warlord, being killed as he drank from the Barochan Burn, near the site of
the cross, by one of the Flemings. However, the cross predates the date of
Somerled’s death by at least two hundred years and it seems possible that
the story is a local myth amplified by later antiquarian accounts. Another
alternative reading about the symbols of the cross alleges that they com-
memorate ‘the achievement of some member of the Knights templar’, but
such an episode would also have occurred at a date after the creation of the
cross (Mann, 1919: 18).
These largely secular interpretations are contested by the prolific and
eccentric amateur archaeologist, Ludovic MacLennan Mann, a figure
untethered to any institution or conventional practice (see Brophy &
Mearns, 2020, for an introduction to Mann’s unorthodox ideas and prac-
tices). Mann (1919: 9) regards the cross as ‘a symbolic monolith, silent yet
articulate, to remind us of some of the simple, fundamental old-time reli-
gious ideas which many of us have forgotten’. He emphatically states that
‘the Cross was undoubtedly not erected for commercial or market pur-
poses… (or) … some outstanding event in the life history of a local hero,
a saint or a monarch’ (23). Instead, he claims, that the ‘sculpturings’ rep-
resent ethical lessons drawn from ‘specific Biblical episodes’ (26). Mann
speculates that the head of a man, now eroded and absent, was positioned
between the two howling beasts, which he identifies as lions; this was
Daniel, who according to the Biblical parable was cruelly thrust into the
lions’ den but because of his faith was able to tame them. The two large
figures and one small figure in between them are interpreted by Mann as
representing a tale from Exodus in which Moses protects the Israelite from
the Egyptian, an incident that conveys an instructive lesson about
Atonement and Deliverance. Similarly, the hunting scene, Mann argues, is
an archetypal allegory of the Christian quest to convert the sinner or
unbeliever to the Church. On the cross’s other side, the two adjacent
depictions of four figures, Mann asserts, represent the authors of the gos-
pels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The meanings of the designs carved
into the Barochan Cross, he concludes, resonate with similar sculptural
motifs from other contemporaneous memorials and are therefore ‘easily
solved’ (40). This consolidates his overwhelming interpretation that the
cross was devised to promulgate ‘moral teachings relative to good con-
duct, faith and the victory of good over evil’ (43).
Mann’s outspoken conclusions that the messages encoded into the
cross are avowedly Christian resonate with more authoritative notions.
Most recently, Historic Environment Scotland’s (HES’s) Statement of
34 T. EDENSOR

Significance (2004: 3) argues that the ‘tall height of the Barochan sock-
eted base not only added to its impressive height but also emphasised the
Calvary symbolism’. A further parallel that foregrounds a Christian read-
ing is found in their Statement of Significance (2016) for the ninth-century
Pictish Dupplin Cross, in Perth and Kinross. Though it belongs to a dif-
ferent sculptural tradition, this sculpture is similarly adorned with mounted
warriors, hunting scenes and two beasts facing each. Drawing on a range
of archaeological studies, HES state that the stone ‘demonstrates evidence
of Christianity being used to legitimise kingship’ (2016: 3) and that those
who authorised the cross to be created ‘were clearly overt in their devo-
tion to Christianity’ (8).
In the absence of any written sources that infer symbolic connotations,
since any interpretation of the Barochan Cross relies on speculation, as
well as comparisons with other contemporaneous sculptures, it seems
unlikely that any conclusive consensual agreement about its meaning will
arise. Perhaps the cross contains motifs that celebrate kingly power and
triumph in battle as well as allegorical references to Christian teachings
and parables. Until yet unforeseen new historical evidence comes to light,
it seems likely that this interpretation seems most apposite. And yet a ten-
sion between Christian and secular understandings of the cross persists, as
will become clear.
Both interpretations of the cross conjure up two serial, recurrent aspects
of the early medieval Scottish landscape and beyond, the religious land-
scape and the military landscape. In each case, I depict the layered serial
features that consolidate these recurrent landscapes before conjecturing
about the specific religious and military engagements with the Barochan
Cross and the early medieval landscape to which it belonged. In both
cases, some scholarly knowledge about this misty historical period can fur-
nish a few basic details but much else must remain speculative, as is
explored in the remainder of this chapter.
First, the Christian symbolism testifies to the spread of Christianity that
was spurred by the sixth-century arrival of St Columba and other early
saints and had since stretched across social and spiritual life, with the
ongoing building of stone churches, crosses, and monuments that were
becoming fixtures across landscapes. Sacred or religious landscapes take
many forms and contain diverse symbolic material elements and practices,
including shifting pilgrimage routes and sites of circumambulation, mon-
asteries, places of assembly and worship, the installation of religious
 3 SCHOLARLY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BAROCHAN CROSS: RELIGIOUS… 35

symbols, and the religiously inspired naming of topographic features,

shrines, and holy wells. At present, in Renfrewshire, over 100 churches are
distributed amongst the country’s towns and villages, including the
Christian epicentre of Paisley, most founded in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries or earlier. In Scotland, there remain over 5000 Presbyterian
churches, and many others of diverse denominations. Mercat and memo-
rial crosses, numerous graveyards, denominational schools, monasteries,
and seminaries further inscribe the historical prominence of Christianity
on the landscape, though these are gradually being supplemented by
mosques, temples and synagogues amongst other religious markers.
According to Adrián Maldanado (2016: 227), the sacred topography of
early medieval Scotland is evident ‘through the abundant ecclesiastical
place-names, church dedications, early Christian sculpture … upstanding
architecture and the morphology of existing burial grounds’. The emer-
gence of small churches, burial grounds and crosses followed what
Maldanado calls the preceding ‘conversion period’ from the fifth to the
seventh century and predicated the later advent of parishes, larger monas-
teries and churches, and a more extensive spread of ecclesiastical territory
and building. The sacred plants, rocks, mountains and ponds of paganism
were replaced or co-opted. While many sacred settings might be some-
what ‘multivalent’, with the ‘simultaneous, fluctuating and conflicting
investment of sacred and secular meanings’ (Kong, 2001: 212), other
more intensively sacralised places might be set apart from profane spaces
as apotropaic sites that were believed to be connected to both earthly and
heavenly space, that which was seen and unseen (Della Dora, 2011), as I
will explore in more detail in the following chapter. Saturated with every-
day intimations of the sacred, and dotted with specific sacred paths and
sites, such landscapes are sites of expressive ritual performances and every-
day religious practices through which shared communal beliefs are solidi-
fied. However, we may imagine that inhabitants engaged with landscapes
and sites with divergent degrees of enthusiasm and belief. As we will see,
the Barochan Cross has recently been re-enrolled into a Christian land-
scape, albeit in an era in which faith is declining and in which religion lacks
the dominant influence of yesteryear.
Second, the symbolism that some argue commemorates the endeavours
and might of the short-lived Strathclyde regime belongs to a military land-
scape that has expanded and contracted over centuries. As elsewhere, this
evidences what Rachel Woodward (2014: 42) refers to as ‘the sheer range
of effects of military action and militarization more generally in the
36 T. EDENSOR

production of landscapes of human settlement’. A chain of Roman forts,

one sited on the nearby Barochan Hill, and the later medieval castles of
Ranfurly and Crookston, testify to ongoing military struggles and expres-
sions of political power before and after the erection of the Barochan
Cross. Indeed, Dumbarton Castle, a short distance away across the River
Clyde, has a military history that extends from the Iron Age to the seven-
teenth century (Hale et al., 2017). In the twentieth century, a slew of First
World War memorials erected in villages in towns followed those of the
Boer War, commemorating the scale of slaughter produced by a global
military conflict in local settings. These are supplemented by Second
World War memorials, anti-aircraft batteries, foxholes and a bomb crater
created during an air raid about two miles north of the hill upon which the
cross was situated. A bunker located in Barrhead is a material remnant of
the Cold War. The greatest imposition of military function on the land-
scape is found less than a mile away from the hill upon which the cross
stood: the former perimeter of the now decommissioned Bishopton Royal
Ordnance Factory, a 2000-acre site established during the Second World
War to supply explosives to the British military services. These abundant
interventions into this landscape across centuries are supplemented by
medieval traces of military presence.
More specifically, the cross’s sculpted designs of armed warriors attest
to the constant, dynamic fragmentation of a political landscape in which
forces from without and within competed to gain control over space in an
era before more overarching governmental structures emerged to super-
sede these volatile internecine conflicts. Here, territorial claims were
marked out by spatial boundaries and guarded points of passage. This was
a landscape in which issues of defence and safety were paramount, con-
tinuously interpreted and surveyed to assess external threats or possibili-
ties for planning aggressive tactics. High points could offer extensive views
where potential enemy incursion could be spotted and be utilised as sites
upon which to build defensive structures. Valleys were perhaps regarded as
anxious spaces in which the threat of ambush might lurk; conversely, they
may have been strategically examined to plot surprise attacks on rival
groups. Caves, deep woodland and hollow places might have provided
hiding places, and tree-covered passages could have served as escape
routes. This was a landscape that at times could have been regarded with
fear, fuelled by imperatives to defend territory and prepare for violence.
Yet it is also likely that there would have been periods of peace and
 3 SCHOLARLY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BAROCHAN CROSS: RELIGIOUS… 37

security, where ruling elites established stable relations with rival entities
and threats receded.
I now return to consider in more detail the early medieval landscape
within which the Barochan Cross was sited, drawing on scholarly interpre-
tations but also a good deal of conjecture.

References
Bain, D. (2022). The high crosses of the Govan school of early medieval sculpture. PhD
seminar presentation, Glasgow University, May 2022.
Beaton, D. (2009). The Barochan cross. West Highland Notes and Queries,
3(14), 3–6.
Brophy, K., & Mearns, J. (2020). The Mann the myth: An introduction. Scottish
Archaeological Journal, 42(Supplement), 1–6.
Clarkson, T. (2016). Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking age. Birlinn.
Dalglish, C., & Driscoll, S. (2009). Historic Govan: Archaeology and development.
Council for British Archaeology and Historic Scotland.
Della Dora, V. (2011). Engaging sacred space: Experiments in the field. Journal of
Geography in Higher Education, 35(2), 163–184.
Driscoll, S. (1998). Church archaeology in Glasgow and the kingdom of
Strathclyde. Innes Review, 49(2), 95–114.
Driscoll, S., O’Grady, O. & Forsyth, K. (2005). The Govan School revisited:
searching for meaning in the early medieval sculpture of Strathclyde. In S. Foster
& M. Cross (Eds.) Able Minds and Practised Hands (pp. 135–158), London:
Routledge.
Hale, A., Fisher, A., Hutchinson, J., Jeffrey, S., Jones, S., Maxwell, M., & Watson,
J. (2017). Disrupting the heritage of place: Practising counter-archaeologies at
Dumby, Scotland. World Archaeology, 49(3), 372–387.
Kong, L. (2001). Mapping ‘new’ geographies of religion: Politics and poetics in
modernity. Progress in Human Geography, 25(2), 211–233.
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 CHAPTER 4

Imagining the Early Medieval Landscape

Abstract Given the dearth of written and archival evidence about the
cross, and this historical period, the speculative approach initiated in the
previous chapter is developed here by a more extensive account that seeks
to imagine how the landscape and the cross were encountered, experi-
enced and understood by early medieval travellers. The account draws on
academic historical and archaeological sources as well as my own sensory
and affective engagement with the landscape in which the cross was once
situated. I suggest that while many elements of this experience must
remain obscure, some sensually powerful intimations and continuities in
the landscape that have persisted provide firmer scope for such
speculations.

Keywords Speculation • Affective and sensory experience • Religion •

The supernatural • Affordances • Old ways • Academic accounts

Sculptures and memorials are situated within particular landscapes, and

these distinct settings contribute to archaeological and historical under-
standing. As Driscoll et al. (2005: 135) observe, ‘landscape position
emerges as one of the key attributes for understanding the original signifi-
cance of the Strathclyde sculpture’. Yet he and colleagues (ibid: 143) also
acknowledge that while analysis can be sustained and thorough, it is

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 39

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
T. Edensor, Landscape, Materiality and Heritage,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7030-6_4
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 —Qu’est-ce qu’elle mange?
Il posa cette question parce qu’il avait dans l’idée, vaguement, à cause
des réclames qu’il lisait dans les journaux, que les enfants ne mangent que
des choses extraordinaires, vendues chez les pharmaciens. Louise dédaigna
de répondre et M. Fauche continua de regarder Marie-Blanche. Elle avait un
front bombé sous des cheveux châtains, de beaux yeux noirs, un nez trop
petit et la peau mate. Et il prononça tout à coup, d’un air scandalisé:
—Il lui manque deux dents de devant. En bas!
Quand on apporte un objet chez une personne, c’est bien le moins qu’il
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mit à pleurer.
—C’est de son âge, dit Louise, puisqu’elle a six ans: ça repoussera.
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Contre la loge du concierge, il aperçut la cage. L’oiseau était bien là,
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—C’est un petit merle tombé d’un arbre qu’on vient de m’apporter,
expliqua le concierge. Alors, je l’ai mis dans la cage de l’autre. Mais depuis
qu’on le lui a donné, ce petit, il a l’air tout drôle, le vieux!
—Ah! vraiment, il a l’air tout drôle? répéta M. Fauche.
Et il franchit précipitamment le pas de la porte.
 Le lendemain du jour où Marie-Blanche était entrée si brusquement dans
sa vie, M. Fauche l’interrogea sur l’étendue de ses connaissances. Il fut
stupéfait d’apprendre qu’elle ne savait pas lire.
—Mais, compléta Marie-Blanche fièrement, je sais le piano. Où est le
piano, ici?
—C’était une phrase toute naturelle. Pourtant, elle fit au cœur de M.
Fauche une petite morsure aiguë et affreusement douloureuse. Il n’osa pas
demander à cette petite fille pourquoi, alors qu’on lui avait appris ses notes,
on avait oublié de lui enseigner ses lettres. Il le savait bien: l’homme pour
lequel sa femme l’avait abandonné était musicien. Et c’était lui sûrement
qui avait pris le premier ces mains, ces frêles mains grasses, ces mains où se
voyaient encore les adorables fossettes de l’enfance, et qui les avait posées
sur les touches. M. Fauche crut le voir penché au-dessus de la tête de
Marie-Blanche, les doigts dans les anneaux de ses cheveux couleur de
marron mûr, et il fut jaloux, jaloux d’une façon horrible, bien plus qu’il ne
l’avait été après le départ de sa femme. Il y a des hommes qui sont pères
avec beaucoup plus d’exclusive âpreté qu’amants ou maris. M. Fauche en
était un.
Le lendemain, il conduisit Marie-Blanche au cours préparatoire du lycée
de filles Desbordes-Valmore.
—Belle enfant! dit mademoiselle Béchart, la directrice. Petite, comment
t’appelles-tu?
La petite fille, à qui elle avait donné un bonbon, répondit sans hésiter:
—Marie-Blanche.
—Marie-Blanche qui?
—Mais, dit-elle étonnée, Marie-Blanche Estrella!
C’était le nom de l’amant. Naturellement. On disait autour d’elle
monsieur et madame Estrella et, par conséquent, la petite Estrella.
Mademoiselle Béchart comprit, et pinça des lèvres. Le pauvre M. Fauche se
détourna, regardant quelque chose, sur la muraille. Il éprouvait cette sorte
de rancune amère qui sèche subitement la bouche, et empêche de parler.
Deux heures plus tard, ayant lui-même fait son cours au lycée Leverrier,
il revint chercher la petite, qui avait pris sa première leçon, et joué, surtout
joué. A travers le Luxembourg, elle eut de ces bonds qui font penser aux
moineaux quand ils sautent dans les allées. Et lorsqu’elle marchait
tranquillement, lorsqu’elle consentait une minute à marcher tranquillement,
elle portait en arrière tout le haut de son corps, qui reposait sur ses reins
étroits, ravalés, bien nerveux. M. Fauche, qui n’avait de sa vie auparavant
regardé comment c’est fait, une petite fille, en était tout émerveillé, comme
un sauvage qui voit pour la première fois une comète, une étoile à queue, un
astre insolite, inquiétant et très beau, éclaté on ne sait comment, au milieu
du ciel, et qui sûrement va s’en aller, comme il est venu, d’une manière
incompréhensible.
En traversant la cour de sa maison il aperçut la cage du merle, toujours
accrochée au mur. Les deux pattes agrippées à un barreau, au-dessus du nid
en molleton vert, l’oiseau faisait remonter, de son gésier jusqu’à son bec, la
pâtée qu’il avait broyée pour le compagnon qui venait de lui tomber des
nues. Des ondulations régulières faisaient frissonner les plumes de son cou;
il fermait les yeux, comme ravi; et le petit merle, perpétuellement affamé,
sortait du fond de son gosier grand ouvert une langue rose, pointue, cornée,
toute tremblante de gourmandise.
Le concierge, d’un air impatient, sifflait au vieux la Marseillaise. Mais
lui, ce merle jadis artificiel artiste, tout hagard maintenant, tout hébété et
enthousiaste aussi de son rôle nouveau, n’arrivait plus à se rappeler
l’ancienne chanson. Il s’y efforçait tout de même, on le voyait bien. Il
baissait la tête, clignait ses yeux noirs, polis, ardents, peut-être même
parfois retrouvait-il une ombre de souvenir. Mais à l’heure même il ne
pouvait pas siffler, puisque sa gorge était occupée à préparer, à broyer, à
faire descendre cette pâtée pour le petit. Non, décidément, il avait autre
chose à faire! Une puissante injonction, celle qu’entendent tous les oiseaux
nicheurs, mâles et femelles, quand la saison est venue, lui commandait
d’oublier tout ce que, dans une oisive captivité, il avait appris; et sa pauvre
cervelle était tout étourdie des conseils encore brouillés de l’instinct revenu.
M. Fauche fut assez troublé de cette correspondance singulière entre
l’aventure de cet oiseau et la sienne. En même temps, il pensa au père
Goriot, puis au Canard sauvage d’Ibsen, et s’en blâma, comme il faisait
toujours quand une réminiscence littéraire venait en lui s’incorporer à un
sentiment vrai, pour en gâter peut-être la force et la sincérité. C’est un des
plus tristes soucis des lettrés et surtout des professeurs: ils retrouvent dans
tous les coins de leur mémoire des images de leurs impressions, même les
plus ingénues, et s’exagèrent alors la stérilité de leur âme, de leur
sensibilité, de leur imagination. M. Fauche haussa les épaules, tout
mélancolique.
—Je savais déjà, songea-t-il, que je n’étais pas assez bon pour faire un
archéologue. Je comprends aujourd’hui que je ne suis qu’un vieux pédant.
Mais, allons, allons, je suis comme ce merle: je peux toujours donner la
pâtée!
Toutefois, il sentait bien que cette façon de rendre hommage aux lois de
la nature n’était encore qu’une illusion, une duperie où lui et l’oiseau
voulaient se plaire. Etait-il seulement le père de Marie-Blanche? Il
l’ignorait.
C’est ainsi que le vieil homme et le vieux merle s’évertuèrent, chacun de
son côté. Le merlot poussa vite. Son bec s’effila, jaune comme une fleur; il
eut de belles plumes noires, si lisses et fines que son père adoptif,
maintenant, prenait plaisir à se frotter contre elles; et il sifflait des phrases
étonnantes, très courtes, mais toutes neuves, que personne jamais ne lui
avait enseignées, et que lui dictait son instinct. L’autre, le vieux, écoutait
d’un air attentif, ébouriffé depuis les ailes jusqu’à la queue, et il essayait de
répéter. Mais il avait trop sifflé les airs des hommes, il n’était plus sûr de
lui, il hésitait, s’arrêtait, et recommençait d’écouter, plein de tristesse et tout
béant. Du reste, il avait bien d’autres soins. Il nettoyait le nid de son élève,
il lui montrait à se baigner, à manger les graines sans les éparpiller, à
s’épouiller le corps depuis les pattes jusqu’à la gorge. Le merlot se laissait
faire, et de temps en temps, tout innocemment, sans doute pour s’amuser, il
donnait un coup de bec sur la nuque du vieux, à un endroit où les plumes, se
faisant rares, s’élimaient comme un tapis sur lequel on a trop marché.
C’était un jeu qui intéressait beaucoup Marie-Blanche quand elle y assistait.
Et quand le vieux criait un peu, parce que ça lui faisait mal, elle riait de tout
son cœur. Le merlot avait l’air de rire aussi.
Elle se laissait aimer, Marie-Blanche, et voilà tout. Elle était à la fois
caressante, presque voluptueusement, et très sèche, avec insouciance. Mais
elle devenait belle, elle peuplait la volière, et c’était tout ce que le pauvre
M. Fauche demandait. Parfois, il songeait, avec un doute horrible:
«Comment est-ce que je l’aimerai plus tard? de quelle manière?» Il avait
peur, étant plein d’honnête respect des lois et de la morale, que quelque
chose d’ambigu et de pervers se mêlât jamais à son affection. Parfois il
croyait distinguer, dans les traits, dans les gestes, la voix de l’enfant, un
souvenir des traits, des gestes de la voix d’Estrella, et il se disait: «Cela vaut
mieux ainsi.» Puis il était repris d’une jalousie furieuse, à quoi il voyait bien
qu’il était père, vraiment père et rien que cela. D’ailleurs Marie-Blanche
ressemblait surtout à madame Fauche. Elle en avait l’intelligence un peu
fausse mais lucide, le manque d’imagination, la coquetterie, le désir
passionné du plaisir. Un jour le professeur l’entendit qui demandait à la
vieille Louise:
—Je ne resterai pas toujours ici, n’est-ce pas? On s’ennuie. Comment
c’est fait, ailleurs?
Oui, bien sûr, elle s’en irait un jour. Elle s’en irait avec le même dédain,
la même impatience que sa mère, et sans qu’il y eût rien à dire. Elle s’en
irait parce que c’était la loi fatale. M. Fauche pensait perpétuellement au
jour où elle s’en irait.

Or, un beau matin, il aperçut, en descendant son escalier, un groupe

nombreux qui s’agitait autour de la cage des deux merles. Quelqu’un disait:
—Je le savais bien. J’avais prévenu! C’est mauvais de laisser un trop
vieil oiseau avec un si jeune.
M. Fauche s’approcha. Alors il vit, au fond de la cage, le vieux merle
roidi, les pattes renversées, les deux ailes déchiquetées. Il avait un grand
trou sanglant à la nuque et ne remuait plus. Il était mort, et tout froid déjà,
tout froid!
Quelqu’un dit encore:
—Oui, c’est à force de lui frapper dans le cou avec son bec, comme pour
rire, qu’il a fait ça, le jeune. Une fois que le sang est venu, il s’est acharné.
C’est leur habitude, à ces petits, quand le printemps vient, et qu’ils se
sentent furieux d’être en cage.

Et M. Fauche s’enfuit. Il avait le cœur serré comme s’il venait

d’entendre une prophétie.
 LES CHIENS
Jeanteaume, le berger communal de Gicey, après avoir mangé son
quartier de miche et son fromage, but un coup de vin et se coucha près de la
rigole de Champromain, au frais, pour dormir pendant la grosse chaleur.
Au-dessous de lui, c’était un grand breuil bourguignon, une vaste prairie
verte où croissaient cinq ou six beaux chênes trapus, presque noirs dans
l’air éclatant et sec, ceinte, vers le penchant du coteau, par un murger de
pierres sèches, et partout ailleurs de fossés d’eau vive. Le soleil de midi
plombait. Du silence, de la lumière, une chaleur pesante. Les bêtes,
ruminant à peine, restaient droites sur leurs pieds, sous les arbres à l’ombre
courte: huit vaches, quelques bœufs, un jeune taureau maigre, nerveux, ses
petits yeux sanglants clignés sous la frisure des poils du front; et tout ce
troupeau éclatait d’un blanc clair, fin, sans tache, signe de la pureté du sang
charolais.
Derrière le murger, la route de Gicey courait, étroite, bordée de gros
blocs calcaires, toute grillée de soleil, et si chaude que l’atmosphère, au-
dessus d’elle, devenue visible, faisait de petits tourbillons vaporeux. Du
confin de l’horizon, une automobile darda, espèce de comète folle, avec une
queue de poussière, et on l’entendit avant de la voir: grondement régulier du
moteur bien en règle, froissement de l’air qu’elle fendait comme un
projectile, et qui sifflait, puis un grand cri, le hurlement subit de la sirène
parce que la route tournait:
«Allez-vous-en! Allez-vous-en! Je suis la mort! Hou!»
Le taureau pointa contre la chose rouge, mystérieuse, et la rage lui vint
parce qu’elle avait disparu, du champ de ses yeux myopes, avant qu’il eut
compris ce que c’était; les vaches frémirent si fort qu’il en tomba quelques-
unes, des plaques de bouse collées à leurs tétines! Les bœufs furent plus
lents, mais ils se rappelèrent vaguement le courage de leur sexe aboli: il
firent le cercle, les cornes en avant, la bave aux lèvres. Réveillés de leur
sieste, ils attendirent l’ennemi: rien! Rien, après une si grande secousse, une
menace qui devait provenir d’une bête si formidable, ce n’était pas
possible! Le troupeau devint fou. Sur ses jambes tremblantes, il se mit à
danser.
 Jeanteaume, le vieux berger, restait toujours allongé sous son buisson,
les yeux fermés. Hubert Petite-Main, le facteur aux quatre phalanges
amputées, coupait au plus court, sa tournée faite, par la digue de
Champromain. Il cria:
—Oh! Jeanteaume, oh! Tu ne f’sôs mie garde. Tes bêtes qui vont zaguer!
Jeanteaume croisa ses mains, pour se lever, sur ses genoux perclus. Ses
deux chiens, deux grands briards au poil rude, avaient déjà compris. Ils
étaient debout, les pattes en ordre pour la course, et l’échine en arc. Mais ils
attendaient l’ordre.
—Qu’est aqui? fit Jeanteaume.
—Moi, Petite-Main, le facteur. Tes bêtes qui vont zaguer, que j’disôs!
Le taureau reniflait, jetait derrière lui la terre par grosses mottes
herbeuses qu’arrachaient ses quatre sabots, trépignait. Les vaches, autour de
lui, pivotaient, valsaient, entraînaient la folie des bœufs massifs et stupides.
Puis tous ensemble ils s’ébranlèrent, franchirent le murger d’un bond pesant
qui fit jaillir de la boue, coururent vers le grand canal, à une lieue de là.
C’est ce qui s’appelle zaguer: le coup de démence collective qui s’empare
de tout un troupeau, le disperse, fait que des bêtes parfois tombent fourbues
et mortes, après avoir tourné en cercle durant des heures.
Jeanteaume soufflait dans sa corne de fer: Pôôte! Pôôte! Bah! les
animaux n’entendaient plus ce langage séculaire. Heureusement, les deux
chiens étaient là. Un geste les jeta au galop vers le grand canal, où il fallait
arriver avant que le troupeau y tombât. Jeanteaume, lui aussi, essaya de
courir. La sueur de son dos séchait tout de suite, bue par la chaleur, et une
calotte de plomb lui pesait sur le crâne. Ah! comme il avait mal autour de la
tête, au-dessus des deux yeux! Mais les briards savaient leur métier. Autour
des ruminants précipités, ils retentissaient d’abois, les crocs sortis des
gencives. Arrêtant sa fuite, le troupeau se groupa en demi-cercle, retrouvant
la tactique héréditaire, faisant enfin ses gestes de défense habituelle, affermi
devant une menace qu’il connaissait. Jeanteaume n’eut plus qu’à le
reconduire au breuil.
Contre les flancs des bêtes matées, les deux chiens marchaient d’un pas
souple, insoucieux de la soif qui faisait ruisseler de salive leur langue molle
et pendante. Dans leur pupille orange, il y avait un éclair intelligent, le
sentiment fier de la victoire remportée. Mais Jeanteaume se sentait tout
drôle. C’était comme si on lui avait serré un ruban d’acier autour de la
cervelle, à l’endroit où ça peut faire le plus de mal. Il y avait aussi son cœur.
Qu’est-ce qu’elle avait, cette vieille mécanique, à taper contre sa poitrine
douloureuse, puis à s’arrêter net? Et alors sa vue se troublait, il avait envie
de vomir. Il sentait passer aussi, devant ses prunelles, des mouches qui
n’existaient pas; et il les écartait de la main, d’un geste incessant.
—Faut que j’rentre, songea-t-il, faut que j’rentre. Ça n’va point.
Il héla le petit Guillaume, le fils au Perdu, lui donna la garde du troupeau
et se dirigea vers Gicey.
—Hé! berger, lui dit-on sur la route, où c’est qu’t’as bu? T’étios tout
bleu, à c’t’heure, tout bleu du nez aux ouilles.
Mais il ne répondit point, parce qu’il n’avait plus la force.

Le lendemain, on fut étonné, dans le village, de ne pas entendre sa

trompe, car il cornait d’habitude au petit jour, pour avertir que c’était
l’heure d’ouvrir les étables. On les ouvrit tout de même et les bêtes,
d’instinct, se dirigèrent vers les pâtures. Ce fut seulement sur le midi que la
Louise, la servante du châtelain de Clomot, entra chez lui pour lui porter
une miche de sa fournée. Elle vit Jeanteaume étendu sur son lit, la face
bouffie et le nez pincé, tout habillé, avec ses souliers aux pieds, sa corne en
bandoulière; et ses deux chiens étaient couchés en travers de la couverture,
l’œil mauvais.
Elle referma la porte en criant:
—Le Jeanteaume est mort! Jésus mon Dieu!
Et tous ceux qui n’étaient pas encore partis pour les champs, les vieilles
femmes, les gosses, l’instituteur, le maire, le châtelain de Clomot,
s’assemblèrent autour d’elle.
—Il est mort! que j’vous dis: j’ai vu sa goule toute noire!
Le maire rouvrit la porte et voulut s’approcher du lit. Mais les deux
chiens s’étaient dressés tout debout sur la couette rouge. L’un gardait la tête,
l’autre les pieds du pâtre, ramassés pour bondir, grondant, les lèvres basses,
la fureur hérissant le poil de leur échine. Le maire s’arrêta net.
—Ça d’vôt échoir, dit-il. Il se f’sôt vieux, le berger, ben trop vieux pour
le métier.
Il ajouta l’air savant:
 —C’est une insolation. Faut dresser l’acte de décès et prévenir Tronchin,
l’charron, qu’il fasse la bière.
L’instituteur, qui était secrétaire de la mairie, s’en alla pour dresser l’acte
de décès, et le Tronchin arriva pour prendre la mesure du mort et lui donner
son habit de planches. C’était un géant, le Tronchin, un homme de force.
Les grands troncs de sapin que traînent les fardiers, il les soulevait à lui tout
seul par un bout, tandis que ses aides détachaient la chaîne qui les serre. Eh
bien, il recula devant les chiens:
—C’est qu’ils m’mangerôent! dit-il.
Quelqu’un dit derrière lui:
—C’est-y qu’t’as peur, le Tronchin?
—Vas-y, toi! répondit le géant.
C’était Petite-Main, le facteur, qui avait parlé. Il franchit la porte basse
en chantonnant d’un air doux, pour flatter les chiens:
—Bellement, Fidèle! Bellement, Poloche!
Les deux briards ne firent qu’un bond, et Petite-Main cria:
—Vingt dieux! ils m’ont mordu!
Il avait été happé au jarret, comme une vache mauvaise. On vit du sang
sous son pantalon déchiré, et il s’enfuit en boitant.
Le Tronchin haussa les épaules. Il connaissait bien ces bêtes-là: rien à
faire. Et puis cet homme de force aimait la force et le courage. Ces chiens
lui touchaient le cœur.
Pierre Bel, le garde-chasse, envoya sa femme chercher du pain trempé,
des os, des râclures de fromage.
—Il n’ont point mangé depuis hier soir, dit-il. Il voudront manger,
p’t’êtr’ ben.
On disposa la nourriture sur le seuil de la porte. Les deux chiens ne
bougèrent pas. Ils n’avaient pas l’air de voir.
Alors, tous les hommes qui étaient là se ruèrent sur eux avec des bâtons.
On était bien obligé d’en finir, on ne pouvait pas rester là toute la journée, il
fallait bien les assommer. Les morts c’est fait pour être enterré: ces brutes
de chiens ne comprenaient pas ça.
Ils ne comprenaient pas çà, mais ils savaient la manœuvre! Ils étaient
d’attaque, ils étaient de combat. A chaque assaut, ils reculaient un peu, se
tassaient sous le lit, puis lançaient leur gueule puissante: un seul jappement,
un seul coup de crocs, et le compte y était! S’ils étaient atteints à leur tour,
ça ne se voyait pas, sous le rude matelas de leur poil gris; et l’étroitesse
même de la porte basse les empêchait d’être tournés.
Alors, le châtelain se tourna vers Pierre Bel:
—Avec deux cartouches de chevrotines!... fit-il.
Le garde-chasse leva les bras.
—Moi, dit-il, moi! Un chasseur, un garde!
Il ne savait pas dire, il n’avait pas d’éloquence, mais il sentait bien, dans
le fond de son âme, qu’il ne devait pas tuer des bêtes d’une race alliée à
l’homme depuis des milliers de siècles, des bêtes qui le servent contre les
autres bêtes. Ça ne se peut pas, c’est un crime.
—Eh bien! dit le châtelain à contre-cœur, qu’on aille me chercher mon
fusil.
On lui apporta le fusil, et des cartouches de double zéro. Il chargea
lentement. Quand ils entendirent le bruit du levier qui basculait, Fidèle et
Poloche levèrent la tête. Leurs yeux prirent un air d’étrange douceur et de
terreur résignée. Ils étaient de la campagne, ils savaient à quoi ça sert, un
fusil. Mais ils n’abandonnèrent pas leur poste.
Le châtelain visa très attentivement Poloche à la tête, et fit feu. Le beau
chien s’affaissa comme si on lui eût fauché les pattes; il avait le crâne
broyé. Mais Fidèle se précipita. Il avait l’instinct des animaux braves, il
voulait mordre avant de mourir. Le châtelain tira nerveusement et ne lui
cassa qu’une patte. Fidèle lécha son moignon brisé et fit entendre une
plainte horrible, déchirante, qui remplit la chambre, envahit la rue, monta
jusqu’au ciel parce que les femmes du village, à leur tour, eurent des
hurlements de chiennes. Et beaucoup d’hommes aussi pleuraient.
Le châtelain rechargea son arme et tua Fidèle d’un coup de fusil dans
l’oreille.

Ce furent la Couterotte et la Pierre Bel qui veillèrent Jeanteaume, la nuit,

quand il fut dans le cercueil. On n’avait rien allumé, qu’une petite lampe à
pétrole et le feu de l’âtre, pour mettre la bouilloire et faire le café. Vers
minuit, la Couterotte crut entendre comme une espèce de sifflement léger.
Elle crut d’abord que c’était la bouilloire qui chantait. Mais ce n’était pas la
bouilloire: c’était de la bière que venait ce bruit! La Couterotte saisit le bras
de la Pierre Bel, sans rien dire: le sifflement continua. Les deux femmes
tombèrent à genoux, non pas pour une prière, mais parce que la peur leur
coupait les jambes. Il s’écoula une minute encore. Il y avait dans la chambre
une vieille horloge, un coucou. La Couterotte eut l’idée d’en décrocher les
poids pour arrêter le mouvement, et mieux entendre. Elles entendirent: le
corps venait de se retourner dans le cercueil! La Pierre Bel cria:
—Au secours! au secours! au secours!
Des lumières parurent aux vitres; il y eut des bruits de pas.
—Au secours! répétaient les deux femmes; le berger n’est pas mort!
Quand on eut fait sauter le couvercle de la bière, on aperçut Jeanteaume
qui reprenait son souffle, la figure encore violette, les veines du cou
gonflées. Il ouvrit les yeux d’un air hébété, sans voir où il était. On le jeta
sur son lit, on porta la bière dans la rue, on la brisa en morceaux, qu’on
cacha dans le fournil. Des femmes sanglotaient; et le vieux Jeanteaume,
parce qu’il était ressuscité, leur paraissait une espèce de dieu.
Le lendemain, on voulut lui donner à manger. Le berger secoua la tête.
Non, il ne pouvait pas manger! Mais il dit:
—Faut seulement donner la soupe aux chiens.
Les autres blêmirent. Le berger continua, la langue embrouillée:
—Mes chiens... où c’est qu’ils sont?
On n’avait pas eu le temps d’enlever leurs cadavres. On les avait jetés
seulement dans le petit jardin, derrière la maison. Jeanteaume se leva,
prenant son bâton parce qu’il chancelait. Tout nu sous sa chemise, il ouvrit
la porte en trébuchant et aperçut les deux corps jetés l’un sur l’autre, les
pattes raides. Il cria:
—Mes chiots, mes deux pauvres chiots! Qui c’est qui les a tués?
Comment que j’vas faire berger, maintenant?
Ses genoux étaient encore bien faibles. Il s’abattit près des deux bêtes
dont le sens mystérieux avait compris ce que les hommes ne voulaient pas
voir. Personne n’osait rien dire. Pendant longtemps, on n’entendit que la
voix du berger qui pleurait:
—Mes chiots... mes deux bons chiots!
 LE SECRET
Madame Hermot ouvrit la porte du cabinet de travail de son mari.
—Armand, dit-elle, tout est prêt pour le bain de bébé. Tu viens? Tu as
encore le temps, avant de partir pour le bureau.
Ils n’avaient qu’une servante, et pour que le tub de bébé fût préparé
avant le départ de son mari, il fallait à madame Hermot quitter son lit de
bonne heure, accorder moins de temps à sa toilette, sacrifier un peu des
soins qu’elle donnait à sa beauté. Mais sa maternité prêtait à son corps
jeune et à ses traits charmants une souplesse et un éclat qui triomphaient des
négligences. Toute sa chair était comme pénétrée de ce bonheur délicieux et
calme qui n’était plus seulement, comme aux premiers jours de son
mariage, celui de la volupté révélée et satisfaite. Pour connaître toute la joie
que peut donner l’amour, il faut aimer encore son mari, et avoir eu, depuis
peu de temps, son premier enfant. On est si reconnaissant à l’un de vous
avoir donné l’autre, on éprouve dans tout son être une telle impression de
renouvellement, de jeunesse et d’ardeur! Le plaisir même prend un sens
magnifique et fort qui le prolonge et l’ennoblit. On se dit: «C’est donc à ça,
que ça sert, à ça!...» Alors, il y a des instants où l’on met dans l’étreinte une
espèce de reconnaissance fougueuse et sublime.
Hermot se leva, plein de l’impression d’un bonheur paisible et radieux. Il
y avait un peu de gris sur ses tempes, la quarantaine avait déjà sonné pour
lui. A cet âge, certains hommes éprouvent plus fortement encore l’orgueil
de la paternité que la passion de l’amour. C’est la nature qui le veut ainsi:
ils sont fiers de se perpétuer, de prolonger dans l’avenir une puissance de
vivre qui bientôt chez eux va décroître. Ils disent: «mon fils» ou «ma fille»
presque avec le même sentiment de douceur étonnée qu’ont les femmes.
Voilà pourquoi le mari marchait d’un pas si vif et pressé. Mais il était
amoureux aussi. En suivant, dans le corridor étroit, la forme mince et légère
qui le précédait, il sentait son cœur bondir.
La bonne tenait le petit, déjà tout nu, au-dessus de la vasque en métal
clair, qu’un rayon de soleil, entrant par la fenêtre, illumina gaiement; et
l’enfant que ces reflets faisaient un peu loucher, fermait les yeux par
instants. Il avait sept mois; des plis de graisse formaient des bourrelets sur
ses cuisses et ses bras, et son ventre un peu gros mettait une ombre vers son
sexe innocent.
La bonne le posa sur le tub, bien assis sur son derrière, les jambes
croisées; l’eau était tiède, exactement à la température de son corps délicat.
Pourtant ce contact le surprit, il cria quelques secondes. Puis, il se calma.
L’éponge, passant sur son dos très gras comme une caresse, détendit ses
nerfs dans un plaisir très doux; il essaya de la saisir; ses gestes encore mal
adaptés dépassaient le but, ses gencives, où une petite dent laiteuse perçait,
riaient voluptueusement. Ses cheveux, courts comme un pelage, s’emplirent
de savon, et on lui faisait renverser la tête pour que la mordante écume
n’atteignit pas ses paupières.
A ce moment on sonna.
—Madame, c’est le boucher, dit la bonne.
Madame Hermot eut un moment d’hésitation. Elle avait l’habitude de
commander elle-même les provisions du jour. Hermot sourit.
—Laisse-moi seul avec bébé, dit-il, je ne lui ferai pas de mal.
Et madame Hermot sourit à son tour en s’en allant.
Hermot essuya lui-même le corps poli et gracieux. Il embrassait
prudemment cette chair tendre qui sentait les caresses et s’étirait sous elles.
Quand les baisers couvrirent le front, l’enfant leva la tête, d’un air
intelligent et ravi. Alors le père le posa sur le tapis, du côté du ventre, et
cette petite chose vivante, qui ne pouvait encore marcher, essaya de se
dresser sur les pieds et sur les mains. Hermot claqua des doigts derrière lui,
mais il ne se retourna pas.
—Marcel, mon petit Marcel! fit Hermot presque involontairement.
Les enfants, dès les premiers mois arrivent à répondre à l’appel de leur
nom. Pourtant, Marcel continua de jouer sur le tapis sans entendre. Hermot
frappa dans ses deux paumes, assez fort, sans parvenir à attirer son
attention.
—C’est étrange, murmura Hermot. C’est très étrange!
Cependant comme sa femme venait de rentrer dans la pièce, il ne dit
rien.
Il y a peut-être quelque chose de contagieux dans les inquiétudes les plus
silencieuses. Quand son mari eut quitté l’appartement, madame Hermot, en
rhabillant Marcel, fit entendre ce léger bruit des lèvres où les enfants, même
quelques semaines seulement après leur naissance, savent reconnaître un
baiser. Celui-ci ne bougea pas plus que lorsque venaient du dehors ces mille
rumeurs que les jeunes êtres ne remarquent jamais, parce que l’expérience
leur apprend vite qu’elles ne sont pour eux les causes ni d’une peine ni d’un
plaisir. Alors, elle aussi, d’une voix troublée, presque douloureuse déjà,
appela, comme l’avait fait Hermot:
—Marcel, mon petit Marcel!
Et l’enfant continua de sourire aux choses, inconscient du cri, n’ayant
rien perçu. Madame Hermot le saisit passionnément dans ses bras,
l’emporta comme pour le sauver d’un danger.
—Mon Dieu, mon Dieu! Mon petit, mon cher petit!
Elle pleurait silencieusement. Tout à coup, elle se dit:
—Ce n’est pas sûr. Et tant que ce ne sera pas sûr, il ne faut pas qu’il
sache!
Elle venait de penser à son mari.
Ils vécurent ainsi des mois et des mois, et chacun cachait à l’autre une
crainte qui grandissait. Hermot n’avait pas voulu consulter le médecin du
ménage. «Il dirait tout à ma femme, songeait-il; ou bien il ferait des
expériences qui lui révéleraient cette angoisse.» Mais il alla interroger un
spécialiste. «Il faudrait que je voie votre fils», lui dit celui-ci. Cela était
impossible. «Alors, continua le spécialiste, il faut attendre. C’est peut-être
un retard de développement. Ou le contraire: il y a des enfants qui ne
prononcent leur premier mot qu’à quinze ou seize mois justement parce
qu’ils sont très intelligents. Ils sont distraits parce qu’ils emmagasinent des
sensations. Espérez.»
Mais à mesure que le temps coulait, Hermot sentit qu’il n’avait plus rien
à espérer. Sourd-muet! C’était un sourd-muet qu’il avait engendré. Il se
l’imaginait vivant toute une vie affreuse dans un silence mortel, séparé des
humains; et les sons, la musique, les paroles devinrent à ce père une
douleur. «Il ne connaîtra pas ça, pensait-il; il n’entendra jamais ce que
j’entends, il ne m’entendra jamais. Et j’avais tant de choses à lui dire, tant
de choses!»
Puis il réfléchissait que sa femme ne savait pas encore leur malheur, et il
ne lui parlait, avec gaîté, que de choses indifférentes. Madame Hermot
l’imitait. Elle mettait, à dissimuler sa douleur, un acharnement plus
farouche encore. Elle avait consulté leur médecin habituel; elle avait été
voir, elle aussi, un spécialiste. Non, il n’y avait plus d’espoir, on le lui avait
dit, il n’y avait rien à faire. Son enfant était muré dans le silence, pour
jamais. Ah! si elle avait pu parler, soulager sa peine! Mais pourquoi enlever
à son mari les quelques mois de tranquillité, de bonheur qui lui restaient?
Hermot ne voyait l’enfant que de rares minutes chaque jour, il ne pouvait
avoir deviné, toutes ses paroles montraient assez qu’il ne se doutait de rien.
Parfois, regardant Marcel, il disait:
—Quels yeux, quels admirables yeux!
Ils étaient pareils, en effet, à des fleurs extraordinaires et sombres,
croissant dans un abîme où nul n’oserait aller les cueillir. C’est que déjà les
autres sens se développaient pour se substituer à celui qui ferait toujours
défaut. L’enfant était aussi très adroit de ses mains, d’une singulière
intelligence tactile...
L’existence du mari et de la femme devint atroce. Dans le dévouement
sublime qu’ils mettaient l’un et l’autre à garder ce secret, ils ne retrouvaient
plus leur amour, ils se sentaient tristes et lointains. C’était leur affection
même qui sombrait dans leur effort, et aucun pourtant ne se décidait à
parler.

Ce fut vers cette époque qu’on acheva, sur le boulevard presque

suburbain qu’ils habitaient, les travaux du Métropolitain. La chaussée était
devenue sonore et vibrante comme une caisse à violon; un jour les trains
électriques commencèrent à courir sous terre. Les objets se mirent alors à
danser étrangement, les meubles tremblaient. Parfois, sans qu’on sût
comment et qu’on y touchât, un verre se brisait. Un jour qu’ils étaient dans
la salle à manger, à la fin d’un repas mélancolique et muet, Hermot
distingua au plafond un bruit qui lui fit lever les yeux. C’était le tenon de la
suspension qui descendait, descendait d’un mouvement de plus en plus
rapide, au milieu d’une fine poussière de plâtre. Il eut à peine le temps de
crier à sa femme:
—Prends garde, la suspension! La suspension qui va tomber!
Tous deux, repoussant leur chaise, s’étaient reculés vers le mur. Marcel
était assis sur une chaise très haute, près de la fenêtre, hors de danger. Le
lourd lampadaire de cuivre s’abîma sur la table, écrasant les faïences,
broyant jusqu’au bois, le perçant pour tomber sur le plancher; et une
explosion n’eût pas retenti davantage dans cette pièce étroite. Mais Marcel
n’avait même pas fait un geste. Ses regards étaient demeurés tournés vers la
fenêtre, d’où l’on apercevait un pan de ciel et des oiseaux.
—Il n’a pas eu peur! dit madame Hermot.
—Non, dit son mari, il ne pouvait pas avoir peur.
Et à ces simples mots, une même révélation éclata dans leurs âmes.
—Tu savais! dit madame Hermot. Oh! mon ami, tu savais donc!
—Et toi aussi! cria Hermot. Ah! que tu es brave! Ma pauvre, ma pauvre
femme!

Ils venaient de comprendre qu’ils avaient maintenant le droit de pleurer

ensemble, et qu’ils allaient s’aimer, pour leur long sacrifice commun,
comme jamais encore ils ne s’étaient aimés.
 LA PEUR
—C’est très drôle, dit le peintre Bervil en posant sur la table brune de la
brasserie le journal qu’il venait de lire. C’est vraiment très drôle.
Il riait silencieusement. Son amie Suzanne Demeure demanda:
—Qu’est-ce qui est drôle?
—Ça ne vous amusera pas: vous ne connaissez pas la personne. Mais le
maître, dit-il en se tournant avec une nuance de respect vers le sculpteur
Darthez, le maître l’a connue, lui!... Ce n’est qu’une annonce de quatrième
page: «Mademoiselle Élise Dorpat, somnambule extra-lucide. Tout le passé!
Tout l’avenir!»
—Eh bien, dit Suzanne, ce n’est pas neuf. Il y en a vingt par jour, des
annonces de somnambule. Et les somnambules, on a beau dire, il y a des
jours, des jours...
—Oui, dit Bervil, j’entends. Toutes les femmes ont besoin du miracle.
Elles vont de la grotte de Lourdes à l’antre des pythonisses qui vaticinent
pour cent sous. Mais s’il fut jamais une de ces pythonisses pour démontrer
que, de nos jours, la prophétie est un métier comme celui de mercière ou de
marchande à la toilette, c’est bien Élise Dorpat. Darthez l’a connue, et c’est
pour ça que la nouvelle doit l’amuser autant que moi. Elle était modèle, il y
a quinze ans, cette Élise, elle posait l’ensemble, à dix francs la séance, dans
les ateliers: une fausse maigre, fine, mince, blême, avec un air de rêverie
mystique. Je ne sais quel étudiant en médecine, sans doute, s’avisa de
découvrir en elle un «sujet» et en fit un médium. Je dois avouer qu’elle
avait le physique de l’emploi. C’est quelque chose, et je présume que sa
nouvelle industrie lui donna des bénéfices, car lorsque au bout de quelques
années elle épousa un brave employé de l’octroi parisien, on prétendit qu’il
ne l’avait pas prise tout à fait pour ses beaux yeux.
»Jusqu’ici, rien que de banal. Mais voilà que, l’autre jour, je la rencontre
sur le boulevard Raspail, son ancien quartier, en grand deuil, vieillie, fripée,
déformée, un filet de ménagère au bras. Je la salue, elle me rend mon salut,
vient à moi, me prend la main mélancoliquement.
»—Hélas! dit-elle, j’ai perdu mon pauvre mari. Que faire? Et je
m’ennuie tant! Je crois que je vais reprendre le sommeil.
 »Entendez-vous? Elle parlait du don de seconde vue, du mystère, des
voiles de l’avenir, comme un épicier retiré qui dirait: «Je vais reprendre le
commerce.» Vous ne trouvez pas qu’il y a quelque chose de changé depuis
le chêne de Dodone, les prêtresses de Delphes et la sybille de Cumes?
—Je ne sais pas, dit Darthez d’une voix lente. C’est plus compliqué que
vous ne croyez, Bervil, c’est plus compliqué!
Ses doigts palpaient l’air comme pour modeler des formes. Habitué à
traduire sa pensée par des lignes et non par des mots, ses mains étaient
devenues plus adroites que son langage.
—Vous croyez à la veuve de M. Dorpat, commis principal d’octroi,
somnambule extra-lucide! s’écria Bervil.
—Ce n’est pas, comme vous l’avez dit, un carabin qui a lancé la petite
Élise dans sa nouvelle carrière, continua le vieux sculpteur, c’est moi. Et je
puis vous assurer que je n’oublierai jamais dans quelles circonstances.
»Vous n’avez pas connu Élise il y a vingt ans. Une figure délicieuse et
supra-terrestre qui semblait descendre des nues. Elle avait des yeux
inoubliables, un peu effrayants, extraordinairement clairs; clairs et vides,
tant qu’on n’y versait pas une pensée. Mais voilà justement pourquoi c’était
un modèle incomparable. On n’avait qu’à lui dire: «Élise voilà ce que
c’était qu’Ophélie, Penthésilée, Imogène.» Et c’était Penthésilée, Imogène,
Ophélie, que vous aviez devant vous; non pas telles qu’elles furent pour le
premier qui les créa, mais telles qu’on les imaginait soi-même. Elle lisait
votre pensée, elle devenait votre pensée vivante, incarnée. Et si l’on cessait
de songer à la chose qu’on voulait faire, elle perdait la pose, ce n’était plus
rien, tout de suite, que l’effigie toute pâle d’une jolie petite fille morte.
C’était étrange, je vous dis, très étrange.
»En ce temps-là, je rêvais d’un groupe qui devait s’appeler Immortalité:
une femme soulevant la tête d’une enfant, et la regardant avec un air tout à
la fois de doute déchirant et d’espoir passionné... parce qu’on ne sait pas,
qu’on ne saura jamais ce qui se passe après l’arrêt définitif des mouvements
chez les êtres; mais on voudrait tant qu’il y ait quelque chose qui survive
d’eux, quand on les a aimés! La maquette achevée, il se trouva que mon
atelier n’était pas assez haut pour la masse de glaise que je voulais élever et
que la terre y séchait trop vite. J’en louai un autre, dans une partie de
l’impasse Boissonnade, qui a été détruite depuis. Je n’étais pas riche, alors,
et cette pièce assez vaste, froide et grise, n’avait rien de somptueux. C’était
une ancienne écurie que le propriétaire,—jugeant sans doute qu’un artiste,
même pauvre, paierait malgré tout plus qu’un cheval,—avait transformée en
ouvrant une baie vitrée au-dessus de la porte. En face, une espèce de
galerie, ou plutôt une soupente, servait de chambre à coucher. Le sculpteur
qui l’avait habitée avant moi, un Américain, paraît-il, n’y avait rien laissé
qu’un énorme bloc de plâtre, carré, adhérent au sol par son poids et les
qualités mêmes de cette matière. Sans doute, il avait dû en faire un socle
pour un de ses essais, et je lui donnai dans mon esprit la même destination.
En attendant, je le recouvris d’un lambeau d’étoffe et m’en servis comme
de support pour une lampe à réflecteur, assez puissante, dont je me servais
quand la fantaisie me prenait de dessiner le soir. Mon mobilier, à cette
époque, tenait dans une voiture à bras. Le lit même, une espèce de divan
assez large, fut bientôt hissé dans la galerie, qu’il remplissait tout entière.
Puis je fis venir de la glaise et me mis au travail avec ces alternatives de
joie sans borne et de découragement que connaissent tous ceux qui ne sont
pas de purs instinctifs.
»Je ne pensais qu’à mon œuvre. J’entendais la question, pleine de cris et
de larmes, que se posait la mère devant ce corps frêle, à jamais froid, déjà
diminué; je portais en moi la forme rigide et désolante de la petite morte.
J’avais décidé tout de suite qu’Élise me poserait ce cadavre puéril et
douloureux. Qui donc plus qu’elle portait sur son visage cette expression de
vide hagard et inquiétant? Mais, avant même que je me fusse mis à plaquer
les blocs de terre grise sur le bâti de bois qui les attendait, je fus envahi par
un sentiment qui m’avait été inconnu jusque-là. Jusque-là? Non. Je l’avais
éprouvé dans mon enfance, comme vous, sans doute, comme tous les fils et
toutes les filles des hommes: la peur sans cause qui vous prend dans une
chambre noire, la peur qui vous fait appeler maman, la bonne, n’importe
qui, pour qu’on apporte une lumière, parce qu’on deviendrait fou, à force de
trembler et de pleurer, s’il n’y avait pas de lumière! Et quand on vous dit:
«Tu n’es qu’un poltron, il n’y a personne, il n’y avait rien!» c’est seulement
par fausse honte qu’on n’ose pas répondre: «Il y avait quelque chose! J’en
suis sûr, je l’ai senti.» Si l’enfant avait déjà la connaissance des mots
abstraits, il dirait: «C’était une Présence, un être invisible, mais qui flotte,
qui plane, qui existe.» Eh bien, et surtout précisément aux heures obscures,
dans cet atelier, dès les premiers jours, je sentis une Présence! J’avais peur
comme les enfants, sans savoir pourquoi, peur atrocement. Une angoisse me
prenait à la gorge dès que j’entrais dans cette pièce nue, banale, froide, où il
n’y avait rien que des moulages apportés par moi-même, des linges
humides et l’ébauche de mon groupe, ce que, dans notre argot d’atelier,
nous appelons un «boulot». Et puis si, au crépuscule, je n’allumais pas ma
lampe tout de suite, c’était une sensation affreuse que je vais essayer de
vous faire comprendre. J’ai visité, sur les confins du Siam, le temple
sublime d’Angkor, miracle de beauté qu’une forêt vierge tient enseveli
depuis mille ans. Dans la plupart des immenses galeries, aux ouvertures
obstruées par les éboulis et les lianes, la nuit est presque absolue et
perpétuelle; et si on entre brusquement, voilà que, sans bruit, sans aucun
bruit, on se sent enveloppé, baigné, noyé dans un grouillement larvaire, un
tourbillon silencieux qui vous étreint depuis les pieds jusqu’aux cheveux.
Mais la cause d’une si grande épouvante est risible: des milliers de chauves-
souris que l’invasion a troublées et qui, en s’envolant, effleurent vos mains,
vos joues, tous vos membres. C’est ça que je ressentais dans mon atelier!
Seulement, il n’y avait pas de chauves-souris. Il n’y avait... il n’y avait que
la Présence, la Présence avec ses invisibles ailes, sa viscosité, son horreur
indicible. Comment moi, qui ne suis qu’un sculpteur, pourrais-je mieux
m’expliquer? Le plus grand poète ne trouverait pas de mots; il n’y en a pas.
»Je pris l’habitude, aussitôt que je voyais baisser le jour, de fuir mon
atelier, d’errer par les rues. Je ne rentrais que tard, le plus tard possible.
Parfois, je ne rentrais pas du tout. Allez, les hommes, je vous le répète,
restent toujours des enfants: quand ils sont malheureux, souffrants ou
terrifiés, ils ont encore bien plus besoin des bras d’une femme qu’aux jours
où ils se sentent forts et sans crainte. Mais quand par hasard il me fallait
rester chez moi, toujours cette impression d’ailes invisibles, cette angoisse à
la gorge, et la lampe! Je ne vous ai pas encore dit: la lumière de la lampe
dansait comme si vraiment des ailes avaient passé dessus; et toutes les nuits,
vers une heure, un souffle froid, venu je ne sais d’où, l’éteignait net, net,
net! Vous vous rappelez les paroles de la Bible: «Les poils de ma chair se
sont hérissés.» J’avais, à ce moment, la peau comme une râpe et un goût
dans la bouche... la peur donne un goût amer, dans la bouche. Il y a
beaucoup de gens qui l’ignorent: moi, je le sais, je vous assure.
»Sans ce dernier phénomène, évident et brutal, je me serais persuadé, je
crois, que seul le caractère funèbre de l’œuvre que j’avais commencée avait
mis mon cerveau et mes nerfs en désordre; je fus quelques jours sans y
travailler. Mais l’oisiveté m’était encore plus pénible que l’effort; elle me
laissait livré tout entier à cette abominable hantise. Un matin, ayant résolu