Tourist cairns and the materiality of symbolic ownership

Calum Macleod just wrote a fascinating blog post about the phenomenon of tourists building rock cairns at the ‘Fairy Glen’ in northern Skye, and the actions of annoyed residents who went and disassembled them. I don’t have a huge amount to add to his thoughts – particularly as I try to get back into the swing of this blogging thing – but as Dr. Macleod highlights, the connections to the notion of ownership as currently contested in rural Scotland seem particularly relevant.

The tourists, clearly, seem aggrieved that the “mini-monuments to themselves” were being removed, which highlights a particular way of thinking about the spaces they visited. On the one hand, their behavior clearly demonstrated a difference in their understanding of what was permissible in Fairy Glen versus what would be permissible in, say, the yard of someone in an urban area. As I can imagine one of them opining, “the Fairy Glens belong to everyone,” with an understanding that the effort and capital they expended to get there and pose gave them an implicit right to mark their territory.

To be honest, I do not know who holds the deed to the Fairy Glens, although online guides refer to it as “private property.” MSP and tireless land reform advocate Andy Wightman’s Who Owns Scotland does not have a listing for ownership there. Scotland’s law includes the “right to roam,” which allows walkers reasonable access to cross and camp on private land so long as they take precautions to not disturbe actitivies there.

Formal land ownership is theorized by planners and theorists as a “bundle of rights,” which often are kept together under fee simple ownership but which can be split apart and deployed. Under this framework, Scotland’s right to roam means that some piece of ownership does confer, although there is clearly no general “right to collect stones and stack them in little cairns.” The question beyond formal rights, then, moves into the informal rights – who is allowed to erect cairns, and who is allowed to remove them – and thereby into informal ownership. And the cairns, then, become a material mediator of that informal relationship to the landscape. The tourists assert the right to erect the stones and have them unperturbed indefinitely. The residents assert the right to disassemble them and treat them as safety and environmental nuisances.

I write this musing about rural Scotland while looking out on urban Richmond, the mishmash of which brings to mind two things. First, I wonder how many of the tourists horrified at the disassembly of their monuments are similarly horrified at graffiti which tags outdoor urban spaces – tags which are often created by youth with little control or ownership over any degree of public space, attempting to assert some degree of right to occupy and, at times, defend from rival intrusion, the urban spaces they spend their days in. In the addition, modification, and removal of tags, both by state actors and by rival graffiti artists, both inclusion and exclusion are expressed as part of informal ownership and control of a space.

More pointedly, though, I’m currently sitting just a few blocks south of the eastern end of Monument Ave., Richmond’s most egregious collection of Confederate monuments. As has been painstakingly argued (to willfully deaf ears of Confederate apologists), these monuments were explicitly erected as actions of re-asserting white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction period. The monuments, like the Fairy Glen cairns and graffiti tags, assert aspects of informal ownership over the landscape, both inclusion and inclusion. Whiteness is included, blackness is excluded, and so long as the monuments stand, they passively but obdurately declare those rules and rights.