Travelling to the stones

2September 2023

I’d wanted to see the wreck, if not the wreck then the space the wreck was in - at least the space it had been once. In retrospect perhaps I distrusted the traces available to me and thought against any logic, that instead of evidence - the archives and footage and remnant's, that looking at the sea itself would be somehow enough. I’m not sure what I expected but the growing realisation that I was thinking about places and matter rather than abstraction made travel inevitable.

I imagined a compass. With the lack of an actual boat and diving suit it was really a question of getting close. I planned to go to Land’s End and look across the channel to the Scilly Isles, to go to the Scilly’s and look back. And to travel as well as I could near the wreck site to see at least something of the reef.

It was early September when I travelled to Cornwall with a friend who I’d tempted along with a promise of viewing some of the neolithic structures in the region. I had been interested in the landscape, but it sounds obvious to the point of banal really, but the structures we saw seemed to me to radiate from the point of my focus. I was staring towards lost ground, on which a ship had wrecked, but the markers around me seemed another kind of wreck, washed up on the cliffs and ridges.

What are these structures? Theres a curious human scale to them. Almost everyone is secretly disappointed with Stonehenge, coming up to it, it doesn’t tower like a monument is supposed to. These tunnel tombs, here for maybe four thousand years, are like a magic trick. At once entirely human scaled - you duck to enter like a Wendy house something almost impossibly old. Theres a feeling of connection almost intimacy - not walking through the grand halls of the dead but sheltering as I did from the rain at Las Verdes in Guernsey. But we look at them from the wrong end of the telescope - from the atom bomb back not from the red bead forward. They aren’t, except by some instinct to pile stones ever higher, some practice effort for a ziggurat, but the ossification of something from before - a tent or wooden longhouse. The kind of structure our highly mobile mesolithic foremothers strode across the still walkable ridge of Lyonesse with. Some instinct to defy death or rising water, to make a place to return to, to own or tend and mark out, made them do something new in the world - make an immortal thing. Maybe as the land shrunk and waters rose and the generous walkable plain were cut through with marsh and water a similar urge struck us, to divide up into our own islands, to pile high away from the tide. To be immortal.

We don’t see the sea, not really for what it is, we see it’s surface. Have you ever had that impossible sense of fall-less vertigo in water? The sudden realisation of the depth beneath. Once snorkelling near an island in Crete I followed a shoal of horse mackerel along the line of the seabed perhaps four or five meters deep when suddenly the shoal dashed through some weeds and following them I swam over the ledge of the plateau and the sea bed fell away as if it, not I, was in motion, to a deep blue black hole and I felt as if I could fall into. Like that moment high in the theatre circle when it seems entirely possible you can just step forward and be tumbling down onto the stage. I doubt the sea was more than twenty meters beneath me, and perhaps it was the sudden change in light and heat that the deeper sea brought, but I was deeply afraid of how strange it was.

We get the tourist bus to Land’s End to film and to inspect the various archeological fragments littering the cliff edge. There must be a word for the kind of tourist attraction it is, there’s no real reason for it to be there, its a headland and a view, a nice walk.

I’d flown into Guernsey the day before my appointment with the environmental health team at the quarry site. What little I knew about Guernsey was it’s status as an offshore centre and as a holiday destination. It’s not a place I’d thought about much and it seemed that my obsessive inspection of maps of the island to get a sense of the quarry’s position on the island hadn’t given me a sense of the island itself. We flew in low over the channel and ahead of me I saw the island almost like a mesa or table mountain in the sea - steep sided and field topped with black granite rocks scattered around the coast.

I wanted to get a good sense of the area before meeting on site. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this place; even before starting the project I’d remembered reading about the quarry and seeing the extraordinary photos of the black oil filled quarry. I’m not sure which of the things had really come first in my imagination, the wreck or the final resting place of it’s pollution, but the sensation of being finally at the site made me hurry towards it.

Guernsey’s small and the headland that contained the quarry had the strange illusion of a model world, the golf course and sea defences, archaeological sites and shooting club all butted up against each other. I found the quarry gates and looked in. In the break in the rain the sun had warmed the granite walls and oiled surface of the water and I could smell the crude oil. For the first time I wanted to own some of it.

The Seven Stones reef lies a few miles off the Scilly Isles in the channel between Land’s End and the islands. At low tide it’s the last above sea fragment of a line of granite bodies that run the spine of Cornwall down through to the Scilly isles, the channel now sunk perhaps 16,000 perhaps 10,000 years ago as the sea, flooded with ice water, rises. The Scilly were once one island, before that the end of the peninsular.

It’s been raining for days and on the news leaders are flying into Cairo to talk about the rising seas and rising temperature. Outside my studio the ground is sodden wet, the street drains flood, fetid water is washed down sewers into the sea. The roof leaks, nothing dries.

The folk tales talk of the lost land of Lyonesse, a rich kingdom - her knights brave and shining, her women beautiful, lands rich - like all lost countries - superlative in every way. And lost suddenly in a single night, a local Atlantis. The Seven Stones the last remaining part on view.

Sutton Hoo, not a boat but the trace of a boat, down to its nails and the grain of its wood. Not a shipwreck but a burial - but perhaps the difference doesn’t hold - the same thing, a fossil, resting just below the surface of the earth for 1300 years. A boat with treasure, such beautiful things, but one resting on older sites of bronze age and neolithic peoples, each marking the land in their own intentional and unintentional ways. There can be no such thing as a pristine resting place for a wreck - not the bottom of the sea, not the reef, not the land. The wreck brings a new combination of people and things into a loose alliance and then breaks it apart. One of those things carried by the boat builders of Sutton Hoo into their wreck grave is bitumen all the way from the tar fountain of Cheshmeh Qir Dehloran in modern day Iran.