News, Articles, Letters

Renewable Energy and Cultural Heritage

Concerns have been raised about the inclusion of high value areas with respect to cultural heritage within new renewable energy project boundaries, in the region. These concerns are currently focused on the Craig Nab Wind Energy Hub Project near New Luce, the Blair Hill Wind Farm Project to the north of Newton Stewart and the Lairdmannoch Energy Park Project to the north east of Gatehouse of Fleet.

The Craig Nab Project originally included a large area of the East Rhinns ASA (Archaeologically Sensitive Area), and is now sited next to the boundary of this ASA, and also has a significant number of non-designated archaeological sites within the current boundary. The Blair Hill project has a good number of very significant scheduled archaeological sites within the current site boundary, and also has a number of designated and non-designated native woodland conservation areas adjacent to or near the proposed site, and also within the proposed boundaries. The Lairdmannoch Project also has a large ASA area adjacent to the proposed project boundary, and this ASA area is crossed by a proposed access road to the site, the road passing through a particularly dense concentration of sites.

The Dumfries and Galloway Regional Council has a policy statement (HE 4) on ASAs, to the effect that it undertakes to ‘safeguard the setting of the ASA’, which means that it is committed to preserving the landscape setting of the archaeological area, which would clearly extend beyond the archaeology itself. Neolithic long cairns and/or stone circles, a feature of all of these project areas, are considered to have a large radius of landscape consideration (HES). This applies even when these kind of sites are scheduled only.

To the Committee, these are examples of significant regional heritage assets which would be damaged by the renewable energy proposals as they stand, and where that damage can be avoided.

The reader is invited to keep up to date with these projects, via local press releases and through the project websites as below:

https://www.craignabwindenergyhub.com

https://blairhill-windfarm.co.uk

https://lairdmannochenergypark.co.uk

The second consultation for Craig Nab will occur at the end of March, with the full application outlined for Q3, 2024. Blair Hill will have a second consultation in Spring 2024. It is assumed that Lairdmannoch will launch an application in summer 2024.

A Note on Neolithic Long Cairns

There is now increasing consensus that Neolithic long cairns are lineage tombs. Recent re-analysis of the skeletal assemblage recovered from the Hazelton North long barrow in the Cotswolds in the 1990s has shown that the 5 generations represented in the two chambers are mainly (27/35, or 77%) descended from one founding male ancestor, who had 4 female consorts, who each founded their own sub-lineages. Male descendants are over-represented in the chambers, female descendants very much under-represented, so the society was patrilinear and exogamous, the missing females presumably being ‘married out’ into neighbouring lineages. The polygamous tendency declined over the 5 generations however, and there is plenty of evidence of unrelated individuals being adopted into the lineage, a thing made and not purely natural. 

What is striking however is that there are parallels between the architecture of the tomb, with two lateral chambers opening via passages out to either side of the long mound, and the structured social ‘architecture’ of the lineage. Each chamber ‘belongs’ to a pair of the original female consorts, perhaps as communal wombs, and the stone bays which were laid out either side of the ancestral male spinal axis of the trapezoidal mound as a founding action were probably established by the individual family units of the clan, organised as oppositional pairings.

It is reasonable to suggest that ideas of oppositional pairings were at times carried out into pairs of contrasting monuments, as at Cairnholy, noting in this case that each cairn has a single terminal axial chamber and passage. The links these two cairns have with the surrounding landscape are now well established, and are also contrasting.

It is important to note that these long cairns were built by the first farmers, in landscapes which up until that point had been the domain of hunter/gatherers, people who were much more children of nature. While building from nature in the first instance, farmers intervene in nature towards a desired end at times, like parents in place of nature. These farmers were then the first to engage in that great enterprise which we remain very much part of, a more human-made world, with its benefits and costs. The first farmers will have developed confidence and assertiveness in what they were making, aware of the benefits, but will have been conscious that they were not the original inhabitants of these places, so will have been particularly concerned about the legitimacy of themselves and their project.

So we have striking and deliberately permanent-looking monuments, but which are also reticent in the landscape, and using natural materials and subjects, mimetic in character, borrowing legitimacy. At the same time, these are statements about farming as an alteration of the natural.

Alistair Buckoke, February 2024