Studying the Universe from Blackford Hill

Photo: Macumba, Wikimedia Commons Public Domain – Link

By Pippa Goldschmidt: 

Blackford Hill is one of the seven hills of Edinburgh, situated a couple of miles due south of the city centre. The hill seems to mark a boundary of the city, on its north side are the city’s suburbs, arrays of tenement buildings as evenly spaced as any mathematical grid. To the south, the artifice of a golf course soon gives way to fields and moorland. If you travel up the main road to the top of the hill you must first pass under an ornate sandstone arch with a florid inscription and medallion so typical of Edinburgh Victorian architecture. An arch that could be a portal in a Scottish science fiction novel, acting as a gateway to an earlier time or place. Perhaps it also does so in real life, because the hill is host to one of the largest astronomical observatories in the UK, internationally renowned for research on objects in the early Universe.

So far in my life, I must have walked up and down this hill around a thousand times. Very few of these individual journeys have created their own distinct memories, other than the first one. I had been invited to an interview for a PhD place at the Observatory, and even though I had already looked at the route in an A to Z, I was not prepared for the experience of walking up a hill that becomes steeper as you approach its summit. By the time I finally reached the entrance, I was sweating profusely in my smart interview suit and already regretting my journey, my application for the PhD and the whole endeavour. 

However, I was successful and spent the next four years studying at the Observatory. My project was concerned with quasars, incredibly luminous centres of galaxies. Because they emit so much light we can see them from billions of lightyears away, in fact they are the most distant objects known in the Universe. At the time I was studying them, they were comparatively rare; thousands of galaxies had been detected but only a few hundred quasars were known. My job was to find more of them, determine their distances, and try and understand how they were connected to their surroundings – both their underlying ‘host’ galaxy and the wider environment. 

My experience of quasars was formed almost entirely through measuring the numbers attached to them. First, I knew them by their coordinates on the sky. Then they became redshifts, luminosities at different wavelengths and distances. I found that this tendency in the Observatory to experience physical objects through quantitative information started to spill over into the surroundings; as my studies progressed I couldn’t help transforming the hill into data such as the numbers of the houses, and the length of time it took me to reach the summit. (Seven minutes on a good day.) Studying this part of Edinburgh on an old Ordnance Survey map told me that the hill was 1/3 of a mile long. Contour lines centre on the summit like a fingerprint, the bottom of the hill corresponding to 200 feet altitude above sea level, while the Observatory is at 475 feet. 

With time, the hill’s intangible aspects started to become both smaller and more precious: the coconut-almond smell of the flowering gorse bushes in summer, the jagged-tooth view of the castle and the Royal Mile to the north, and the sparkle of the sea to the north-east. The few days each spring when all the frogs in that part of Scotland travelled to the hill to mate and I couldn’t walk more than a few metres in any direction without encountering a gravity-defying tower of them. The oddity that I couldn’t actually see my destination as I walked up the hill, the road rises to meet an open area of scrub land and the Observatory is situated off to one side. The abrupt transition between that scrub land of gorse bushes and thin birch trees, and the estate of the Observatory which is boundaried by a handsome stone wall. The  dichotomy between standing outside on a clear winter evening and gazing up at the anonymous stars, and studying quasars which are all invisible to the naked eye. 

The distinction between the hill and its representation on the map seems straightforward; the hill itself is real rocks, soil, trees and buildings whereas the map is a symbol of the hill on paper or screen. This relationship between the two must be one-sided, the map can’t exist without the reality and many things are present on the hill that are not (yet) mapped. Yet I realised from my work at the Observatory that maps and their corresponding realities are not so easily divided into two separate categories. All we can know of the Universe beyond the solar system is derived from maps. We have constructed maps of the stars in Milky Way, of surrounding galaxies in the Local Group, and of more distant galaxies. Furthermore, these maps don’t have to be of specific objects, like charting the seas on Earth we can plot diffuse gas. We can even map an entity we have not yet directly detected, such as dark matter. We can never hope to know or experience anything other than the maps, so they must always stand in for the reality. In the absence of any other knowledge, perhaps eventually they become that reality. 

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The Observatory is not the only structure on the hill, about a hundred metres from it is a radio transmission tower used by the police. In the same way that the two poles of a bar magnet oppose each other, these two structures are apparent opposites; the tower is responsible for sending out invisible waves while the Observatory’s purpose is to receive waves from the sky above. Although it does this more indirectly than it used to, its two copper-topped domes (aligned along an East-West axis) each used to house a large telescope but these have long since been mothballed; two mechanical eyes blinded by obsolescence. Many astronomers who work there either travel to telescopes in other locations with better weather and less light pollution, such as Chile or Hawaii, or – increasingly – observe remotely. Telescopes in these places are sent instructions, carry out the observations in an automated fashion and transmit the data back to the Observatory.

I was always aware of a special irony in analysing images taken of the night sky during a Scottish winter day so full of cloud and mist that the Universe seemed like nothing more than a fantastical story written in numbers and graphs.

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The map of the hill also has an iron age fort marked on it, although I’ve never managed to find it. On the other side of the hill is an eighteenth century house called the Hermitage which stands in a grass clearing, and now functions as the headquarters of a nature reserve. The Observatory, the radio transmission tower, the Hermitage and the fort all can be seen as emblems of specific eras, reminding us that each instance of time must carry along with it earlier times. 

Similarly, we tend to think of places as static and fixed, but one of the first things I learned was that the map of the Universe itself is expanding outwards with almost every galaxy moving away from each other, continuously adjusting their relationships with each other.

The walk at the beginning and end of each working day separated me not just physically, but also psychologically, from the rest of my life in Edinburgh. Its role as a ritual and a boundary was reinforced by the substantial wall surrounding the Observatory. All observatories are inherently not quite of their surroundings, constructed from metal and stone and grounded in the earth, their purpose is to study distant light. Walking up the hill towards the sky was a symbol of my efforts to understand what was far above me. 

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Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Frankfurt and Edinburgh. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (both published by Freight Books). Her work has been broadcast and published in a variety of places, most recently in Litro, Mslexia, the Times Literary Supplement and on Radio 4. Website: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk

End of the Line

By Catherine Marshall:

This is a story of a rather unusual bus journey to the end of the line in Edinburgh, a discovery of an industrial museum witness to centuries of change and my own transition in moving to a new city and country.

I have always been drawn to the theme of transition both in my private life – often moving flats, cities, countries – and in my photography – which often features urban spaces undergoing change. When I first moved to Edinburgh from Germany, I had a reverse culture shock. I had to relearn a British culture that I had left behind fifteen years ago. To be honest I was happy that I had washed up in Edinburgh and not South of the border. It felt closer to Europe, the tenement-style buildings also reminded me of Berlin. As an English person, it was also nice to still feel foreign, to learn Scots phrases, hear poems read in Gaelic and learn about Scottish culture through my sons' school education. 

When it came to taking photographs and negotiating the city I was less comfortable. I almost felt that as an English person I didn't have the authority to go out there and reframe the landscape through my camera. Apart from that, I had no idea of the geography of the city and didn't know where to start. Then I came across came across (g)Host City, a kind of sound-map of Edinburgh to download where you can hear a story or a poem set in a particular location of the city. I decided to take an 'unreliable bus tour' by Japan-dwelling Scot, artist and musician, Momus. It gave me the framework (and courage) to set off to those mysterious sounding destinations on the front of buses I had seen in town: Wallyford, Ocean Terminal, Hyvot's Bank and Bonally. I cannot really describe the surreal, dark and funny tours he gave, as that is something to discover for yourself.

On one journey I wasn't sure if the bus had actually reached the end of the line. It seemed to circle back so I just decided to get off. The audio tour had ended, my google maps app was not working and suddenly I found myself off map. Two bus stops stood baldly on opposite sides of the country road, the only punctuation marks in an otherwise unreadable flat landscape. Should I go left or right or take the bus back? I decided to follow my nose. Walking down a winding B-road I saw another marker in the landscape, an exclamation mark of an industrial chimney stack. I was alone, not having seen another pedestrian since I had left the bus, and was glad to see some sign of civilisation. A pit head winding-gear came into view. As I walked closer I saw a bricked wall with tiles with illustrations of former industries; fishing, pottery, coal, and brickworks. Through serendipity I had found the Prestongrange Industrial Heritage Museum located on the north-east coast of East Lothian. For centuries this area was the centre of intense industrial activity, with a busy harbour, Morrison's Haven. Now you can just see where the harbour used to be, a rectangular outline on the grassy bank, marked with a sign on the ‘bygone years’, the sign itself nearly faded away through the erosion from the sea air. 

At the museum I found myself donning my headphones again, this time to listen to an audio-tour of the outdoor exhibits narrated by the late artist John Bellany who grew up nearby, conjuring up, not so different from Momus, an alternative world to the one you see with your own eyes. From Bellany’s stories of Prestonpans you visualise a lost industry; the smoke billowing from the Beehive Kilns that once produced bricks for the buildings of the New Town. Or you find yourself at its mid-eighteenth century heyday with ships loaded with salt, oysters, ceramics, sulphuric acid and coal, or bringing silk, furs from Canada, whalebone and French brandy in return. In the nineteenth century, Irish workers, who first arrived in the West of Scotland, are brought with their families and their traditions to the East by new investors, Summerlee. These new owners also improved workers' conditions, installing indoor plumbing to the mining workers’ housing. Electric generators replaced the steam engines in the powerhouse and electric street lighting was brought to the area. Today the powerhouse houses art exhibitions. I was so taken with the museum, and the fact that I was free to wander with my camera making my own discoveries of an overgrown railway bridge and train tracks in the surrounding forest, that when I returned to the visitor centre the assistant said that she had been thinking of sending out a search party. 

As I left Prestonpans, walking west along the coastal path towards Musselburgh, I came across a quite alien landscape. This was not the Edinburgh that I could have imagined existed when I had set out on my 'unreliable bus tour' that morning. I had found, however, something equally strange. A vast cracked grey landscape stretched out before me towards the sea, made infinite by the fog that was closing in. These are called 'lagoons', a salubrious name for a place where Scottish Power deposited waste ash from the now closed Cockenzie power station. 

In these coastal areas, the delicate balance of man and nature is most apparent. The oysters that the Edinburgh population once enjoyed with their French Claret disappeared towards the end of the nineteenth century overfishing, new dredging methods and pollution from sewage and industrial waste. As industry disappears, nature reclaims, and also in this case offered opportunity for recreation. Bellany recounts several generations of Prestonpans children using the disused harbour as their own swimming pool after the 1930s, conveniently heated by the water dispersed from the pit boilers. Now this coastal area is a destination for walkers and bike enthusiasts. There are also plans to create a nature reserve on the site of the lagoons. Although the lagoons in themselves are dead, they have provided a sanctuary for both sea and wading birds and there are three hides for birdwatchers in the area. In the photographs I took that day, I was drawn to the themes of transition and change, nature reclaiming land itself. But I also wondered about the transitions that families had to go through in the passage of time when industries that had sustained them for so long, came to an end.  

About the author:

Catherine Marshall is an artist and writer based in Edinburgh. She studied photography at the London College of Communication and Glasgow School of Art. She has lived in different countries and cities including Berlin, which she made her home for a decade.

www.catherine-marshall.com

Should've Gone

By Sibyl Kalid:

We’re standing at the top of Carlton Hill and there’s a fire burning at the oil rig across the water. It doesn’t look like a fire; it is too whole, like someone has trimmed its edges. It’s almost Christmas. M is leaving tomorrow, and I’m going back to London next week. Neither of us is sure when we’ll be back. The city is indifferent.  It winks obstinately, as it has done for four years, cars beating down tracks through the long stems of buildings, pace unflustered by M’s stifled tears. In the time we’ve been here Scotland hasn’t left the UK, the UK has decided to leave Europe, and the Starman has left the earth. We’ve been living on the endless rumble of national events, registering them with the stable acceptance of a barometer. It’s unnerving to discover that now we’re the thing moving, and it was this tumbling collapsing city that was the constant all along.

Last night I had that strange feeling of sleeping in a different room to the one I’m used to – my flatmate’s, mine having been taken over by its new tenant and her green bed-sheets. Most disorienting were hearing footsteps to the bathroom and not being able to place them. I had the realisation that, through the past year, night-steps have been like little sonic messages, bouncing back from a friend to my half-asleep consciousness, orienting them in an identity and route through the mumble of slipper on carpet. Eternally scornful of those with a domestic inclination, I’ve discovered nesting instincts I never knew I had.

In October we started receiving packages from Specsavers addressed to someone called Hannah Steeds. We knew nothing about Hannah Steeds, other than that she was, presumably, either long or short sighted, and had at some point lived in our flat. The Specsavers boxes piled up next to the front door, as poor Hannah must have found everyday tasks increasingly difficult, and our shared apathy halted us from either contacting our landlord or returning the boxes to sender.

The mystery then spooled when a postcard arrived from someone self-determining as ‘Mumsykins’. We assessed from this moniker, and from the quaint stone-walled house featuring on the front of the postcard, that this wasn’t just a gaffe from a friend who had fallen out of touch. The writer of the card indicated that she was looking forward to seeing Hannah at home, that she had recently visited a small rural town in the West Country that she thought Hannah would have liked. The baffling thing was how a mother cosy enough with her daughter to call herself ‘Mumsykins’ could have not kept abreast of her daughter’s address. Using the digitised Yellow Pages we tracked a Hannah Steeds to a family address in Bristol.  It’s not an uncommon name, but we were worried about Hannah’s eyesight and didn’t have anything else to go on, so we were prepared to take the punt and send Hannah’s accoutrements on to that address.

One day Hannah Steeds herself turned up at our door. I wasn’t in when she arrived, so it was my flatmate who passed over the postcard and contact lenses. He reported her as ’25-30, tall, but quiet and shy with the body language to match. Glasses. No Bristol accent’. And, apparently, absent-minded; she lived at 26/4, the flat below ours. She had just given out the wrong address, both to her mother and to Specsavers.

As with the solution to most mysteries, big and small, I found this disappointing. Hannah’s post wasn’t the imprint of collateral scattered in transition. Simply a casual mistake of the misplaced mind, as it unwittingly misplaces the body. There was no great conspiracy of illness, or amnesia, or filial alienation. My bank statements and reminders to renew my National Galleries of Scotland membership still roll into my flat in Edinburgh. But I don’t get the same wistful satisfaction from these forlorn reminders of my past inhabitancy as I did at the prospect that Hannah Steeds once lived in that flat, and that in the lost universe of some long-delayed postcard, or long-neglected mother, still did.

That endless pouring in of ancillary admin also seems like a taunting wink from whatever household god has observed the wearying tugging up of physical anchorage. The sentimentality of moving is always quashed by the picking up of detritus, as we concern ourselves with box sizes and bubble wrap and the turbulent ownership history of a frying pan. Every time I shift I am bewildered by my astonishing ability to explode myself over all available surfaces. My handwriting scrawled over paper pinned to the wall. My broken dvd player, rejected from my family home. Flour I bought for a cake I didn’t make. The fruit bowl with my name carefully painted on it above a picture of kiwis. Four mugs. Three cacti. A duvet. One pillow with case. A soup bowl. Matching coloured spoon. Shampoo. Half empty gin bottle. My desire to become a monk alternates with an impulse to gather everything up and attach it to me in a memorialising shroud, as I assess the ghostly inventory of the things I did do, and the things I could have but didn’t. That’s always the real sting of leaving anywhere. That gnawing concern that you didn’t live a place well enough. The minute you start walking away time horse-shoes and you remember your initial expectations of a place, before you first arrived. What you thought you’d do there. Who you thought you’d meet. Who you thought you’d be. I also start to mourn every grumble, and remember the sense of guilt I felt when my uncle came up for my graduation and commented on how beautiful the city was, how many levels there were to it, as if there were two cities sloping on top of each other. My vision of the city had plateaued into my daily grudge across the meadows, and now I felt like I needed to touch every corner, to make sure I’d appreciated it properly.

On the way home from Carlton Hill M and I climbed up into the alcoves in the wall that faces a graveyard. We felt like statues, whose only duty was to watch, that if anyone walked by we’d be offered the privilege of being an invisible onlooker, eternal and impassive. But no-one did.

Sibyl Kalid’s website

Edinburgh and Elsewhere at the Artists' BookMarket

We are extremely pleased to be taking part at the Artists’ BookMarket at the end of this month, a two day celebration of books and artist-led publishing that is hosted by the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. We are being represented on a stall titled ‘Edinburgh and Elsewhere’, and as well as the many different stalls featuring a wide variety of artists and publishers, there are also talks and workshops to take part in.

‘Edinburgh and Elsewhere’ at the Artists’ BookMarket brings photography, illustration and publishing together with a special emphasis on place in all its forms, including the imagination. Edinburgh-based artist Catherine Marshall will be launching her book Fleetway, an imaginative story based on a failed roll of photographic film taken at the Cammo Estate in Edinburgh. Elaine Robson will be showing her artist book inspired by Japanese urban landscape and found text, Under City. As the Scarrow press co-founder, she will also present the contemporary photography 'zine Simulacra.

Husband and husband team O'Brien & Chiu will showcase their illustration and photography projects. 'Drawings in a Time of Dreaming' by Gerald O'Brien, features tiny mixed-up buildings and invented structures, humorously subversive in their resistance to daily life norms and expectations. In 'An Unexpected Return on my Journey to the West', Yi-Chieh Chiu embarks on a personal photographic journey in his partner's home country. He finds an Ireland suffused with colour and abstraction, finds poignancy in the everyday; a way back home even as he is far from his real home in Taiwan.

We are extremely pleased and proud to be in such company, and we think that if you are going to be anywhere close to Edinburgh on the 25th and 26th February you should certainly check it out.

The Artists’ BookMarket at the Fruitmarket Gallery
25-26 February 2017
Sat: 11am – 6pm
Sun: 11am – 5pm
Free Entry
Website