2 days ago
Cairn-builders are harmless, until suddenly they're a menace
The novelist Iris Murdoch collected stones, which she saw as having a numinous, almost sentient quality. She passed on her fascination to many of her fictional characters, including Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers, who finds a sense of the divine in the infinite variety of the pebbles on a Cumbrian beach.
Murdoch's veneration of stones was shared with countless others throughout the ages: the practice of building a pile of stones to mark some significant place – a tomb, a holy place, a trail – is prehistoric in origin and culturally ubiquitous. Across the globe from Greenland to Hawaii, Somalia to Mongolia, cairns are to be found wherever there are rocks.
The landscape of the UK and Ireland is seeded with cairns – the reasons for their construction often mysterious, their mythology ancient and haunting. A similar resonance surrounds the modern cairns made by the landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy. The university of Hertfordshire, which commissioned the Hatfield Cairn from Goldsworthy in 2001, describes his site-specific works as 'masterfully contribut[ing] to the natural beauty of rural locations'. Which brings us hard up against the question of who, now, may build a cairn.
In wilderness landscapes around the world, tourists who wouldn't dream of carving their name on the Colosseum are building rock stacks and posting pictures of their handiwork on social media. It might seem a harmless, even a creative act: a Goldsworthy-esque embellishment of the beauty of a wild landscape. But in fact it has become a disfiguring menace: in Iceland, where there is an ancient tradition of cairn building, rock piles made by tourists are known as varta, or warts.
Nor is cairn-building the pure, free-spirited activity that its amateur practitioners imagine: ancient monuments have been despoiled and fragile landscapes and habitats rudely disrupted by people bent on making their stony mark. While official pleas to desist go unregarded, tougher measures are being explored. In some Australian states, unofficial cairn-building is classified as vandalism, punishable by a fine.
In the peak district national park, where guerrilla rock-piles have become an increasing problem, National Trust volunteers are dismantling tourist cairns, while Stuart Cox, a chartered engineer and hiker known as the Peak District Viking, is battling the social media rock-pilers on their own ground: posting videos of himself enthusiastically demolishing their erections.
Cairn-builders with a taste for Murdochian sophism might argue that we cherish ancient graffiti in Pompeii, and venerate neolithic cairns built (presumably) by ordinary people like us. So why the handwringing over the modern iterations of these practices? To which the answer must be: numbers.
One lovelock on the Pont des Arts is a romantic gesture; a million threaten to destroy the bridge. Each was significant to the person who put it there, as each cairn meant something to the person who built it. But as the Pompeian graffito puts it: 'I admire you wall, for not having collapsed at having to carry the tedious scribblings of so many writers.'
In a pickle
Preserving season is in full swing. While I plan to experiment with green figs in syrup, Telegraph reader Robert Ward, busy pickling onions and making chutney, is frustrated by the labels on his recycled jam jars, which stubbornly decline to be removed.
One correspondent suggested sticking new labels over the old ones. Which is practical, but not very elegant, if you want to give away the surplus. But I think I have the (literal) solution. After removing as much of the old label as possible, the remaining adhesive succumbs quite meekly to a brisk rubbing with white spirit. Happy pickling!
