Next week sees the installation of our sound piece in the Arches that mark the entrance to the main quadrangle of Newcastle University. Built in 1911 from a donation by north-east mining magnate John Bell Simpson, the brick structure now houses the Arches Sound Project, which projects four-track audio pieces through the microphones that have been installed in each of its corners. Passers-by can sit on the benches under the Arches to listen to the sound works in full, or they might encounter fragments of them as they walk through, whether to visit the campus or to cut through it to the Royal Victoria Infirmary beyond.
In the area just in front of the Arches, Antony Gormley’s Clasp has been installed, a semi- abstract sculpture that depicts two people embracing. The sculpture was installed on this site to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of The Angel in Gateshead, and our project both recognises and reinforces the line of connection between the two. Those listening to Sounding the Angel can also see the Clasp sculpture, so that the two works are brought into a new conversation with each other.
Turning to look in the opposite direction, one of the trees that has been planted immediately behind the Arches is a handkerchief or ghost tree, named after its beautiful, white flower-like bracts that flutter in the breeze, resembling innumerable pocket handkerchiefs. The bracts have now mostly fallen from the tree and been dispersed by the wind, which resonates with how the memorial tributes are described by participants in the sound work.
The installation, which lasts 30 minutes, is played on the hour every hour from 6am – 10pm, from 1-7 July. It comprises four parts, organized according to the seasons, and you can hear two counterpointed conversations with participants who have left memorial tributes at The Angel. These are combined with field recordings from the site across the seasons, documenting the sounds of nature and the vibrations resonating through The Angel itself. The piece is punctuated by a loud boom that was made by the metal of the Angel contracting after the heat of a summer’s day.
Unsurprisingly, angels represent a common motif connecting many of the tributes left at the memorial site. The host of miniature angels hanging from the trees are scaled-down versions of Antony Gormley’s sculpture, and some are even direct representations of The Angel of the North.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The angels come in a range of different materials. Some have been knitted or crocheted.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Some are made from wood.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Others are made from plastic.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Many of these angel tributes are repurposed Christmas decorations, which have been chosen as memorial tributes because of their significance to the site.
Looking more closely at what is written on or about angels on the tributes can bring us closer to what they might mean for those who have commemorated loved ones here. Many notes left in the trees refer to The Angel as a guardian presence, watching over loved ones. The idea of a guardian angel watching over the dead can also be seen on some of the tributes.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
In the photograph below, the Angels referred to as watching over the dead are both heavenly and material in form, given that The Angel of the North stands directly above the tree from which the tribute has been hung.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The figure of the angel baby is often used in baby loss memorials, and the angel here represents or stands in for the deceased.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
This idea is echoed in other tributes. Angels might be inscribed with the name of the person who is being commemorated.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Or the person might be described as an ongoing guardian presence for the living.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
In the photograph above, wings stand as a shorthand for the angel figure. Feathers also serve this function, and both images are prevalent in the tributes left at the site.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Angels clearly represent a source of comfort for those who leave tributes in the memorial garden, and we can presume that the solace offered by The Angel of the North initially drew them to commemorate their loved ones there. Looking closer at the tributes, we can find some variation in the ways in which angels offer meaning in the face of death. For some mourners, it is the idea – made concrete in The Angel – that their loved ones are not alone and have a guardian presence nearby. For others, angels are expressive of a continued bond with a friend or relative, who is seen as a guardian angel watching over the living. The angel figure has a particular cultural resonance in the context of baby loss, offering grieving families a recognizable way to express their grief.
In a recent post, I observed that some of the trees in the memorial at The Angel have been marked as the ‘plot’ of an individual family, making the site feel increasingly like a more formalised cemetery or graveyard. At the heart of the wooded copse, immediately beneath The Angel, an alder tree has been surrounded by a small wooden fence and a metal plaque has been placed into the ground, inscribed with the name of a family’s daughter. This tree at the centre of the memorial garden, which commemorates a little girl, represents for me the emotional heart of the site.
Picture credit: Anne Whitehead
I do not know the girl’s surname, or her story. I only know her through this memorial tree. Over the few years that I have visited the memorial site at The Angel, the child’s family have decorated the tree each year on her birthday with tokens of the gifts they would have given her, including a birthday balloon which records that she would have been three, and then four, years old. I have found it moving to witness these tributes, both because of the parents’ ongoing ritual of remembrance, and because of the evident care with which the objects have been chosen and placed. The annual decoration of the tree takes place in the winter months, and the bare branches of the alders mean that The Angel is clearly visible above.
Picture credit: Anne Whitehead
This tree raises questions for me about how I represent the memorials at The Angel, which are at once both public and private. The tree is so central to the memorial site – both physically and emotionally – that I do not feel I can tell the story of the grassroots memorial without documenting it. At the same time, there is a sensitivity in relation to it, because of the nature of the grief that it represents.
Picture credit: Anne Whitehead
In an earlier post, I wrote of artist Miriam de Burca, whose work records the cillini: memorial sites in Ireland, which were burial grounds for those deemed unworthy of an official grave, including babies and children who had died before baptism. De Burca makes meticulous and detailed drawings of clods of earth from these remote and hidden sites, which she digs up, draws in her studio, and then returns to the site once the drawing has been made. De Burca’s drawing represents not only an act of recording, but also a quality of attention. The drawing takes time – it is not the instant image of the photograph – and it requires a sustained and careful process of observation.
Following de Burca’s lead, I have chosen to draw the tributes on this tree, with each pencil sketch taking several hours to complete. I hope that these works, which record just a selection of the many objects left on the tree, both recognise and honour a family’s acts of love and remembrance.
Picture credit: Anne Whitehead
I have pointed out in a previous post that, while objects that are left on The Angel sculpture tend to be moved, the tributes left in the trees usually remain in place, disturbed only by the wind. This is true of the objects suspended from this tree, which visitors will often hang from its branches again if they are blown to the ground. On a recent visit, a toy monkey, which had been left at the side of the path leading out of the trees and which was getting muddy in the rain, had been placed in the fork made by two branches of the tree. This gesture protected the toy, and its positioning suggested that other visitors had also been moved by the memorial, wishing to leave their own gift for the little girl alongside those of her family.
Picture Credit: Anne Whitehead
In a moving piece of writing, Marcus Weaver-Hightower – the father of a stillborn baby, Matilda – reflects on the importance of things to parents who experience baby loss. He writes that material objects connected to the baby can help parents to resist ‘a pressure from others to forget (get over it)’, as well as offering a focus when there is ‘a lack of adequate quantities of memories and few people who share these memories’ (476). Weaver-Hightower adds that some parents actively create memories by buying new toys and other baby things, which can ‘provoke memory’, and which ‘might be kept in private or publicly displayed’ (476). His words chime with the memorial rituals that I have observed at the tree beneath The Angel, and my drawings of some of the tributes that have been left there seek to register their affective power, not only for the family but also for those who visit the site and encounter them.
References
Marcus Weaver-Hightower, ‘Waltzing Matilda: An Ethnography of a Father’s Stillbirth’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41.4 (2012), 462-91.
Most of the posts in this blog focus on the memorial tributes that are left in the trees, which stand immediately below The Angel of the North. A variety of notes and trinkets are regularly either suspended from the branches of the trees or placed beneath them. Less often, memorial objects are also left on, or at, the sculpture itself, and it is these tributes that form the subject of today’s post.
The construction of The Angel means that a series of enclosed ‘shelves’ is created where the ribbing between sections meets, and these alcoves are readily accessible at the height of The Angel’s calves. That these ‘shelves’ can be easily reached is attested to by the layers of grafitti that are inscribed there – another way in which visitors to the site leave traces of their presence behind. When I visit, I often walk round The Angel first to check whether any objects have been left there, before proceeding down to the stand of trees.
I have written in a previous post about the difficulty of being able to tell whether an object is a memorial tribute, or if it is something discarded, or perhaps something found that has been placed there in the hope that it will be reunited with its owner. I observed that this problem of identification increases on the perimeter of the memorial site in the trees, and the same issue arises when faced with those objects that have been left at or on The Angel. It can be impossible to determine sometimes why a particular object might have been left there. In this post, I therefore focus on four tributes that I believe have been left with memorial intent, even if I do not know who or what is being commemorated by them.
The first tribute is a cap and a single red rose, which were left on adjacent ‘shelves’ on The Angel (pictured above). The rose had a card attached, but I could not see if any message was written on it and I followed my usual practice of leaving the objects undisturbed. It was tempting to read the grafitti behind the objects – the ‘Jacob was here’ behind the rose and the series of three kisses inscribed above the cap – as accompaniments to the objects, but it is more likely that their placing was either accidental, or that the person, or people, who left the objects there felt that they formed appropriate backdrops for their tributes – although the accompanying image behind the rose seemed to discount that theory.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The rose was more ephemeral than the cap, and it had disappeared by the time of my next visit. The cap had been moved to the memorial site in the trees and it was hanging on a branch of the oak tree near the entrance to the copse. Over my next few visits, the cap changed position in the memorial site a number of times. I was unsure whether it was being moved by the person who had originally left it there, or if other visitors were positioning and repositioning it across the site. I found that this degree of mobility often characterised objects that were left on or at The Angel; much more so than with the objects that were left in the trees, which tended to be moved by the wind but not by other visitors.
Photo credit: Anne WhiteheadPhoto credit: Anne Whitehead
The second tribute also makes use of adjacent ‘shelves’ on The Angel, this time to place two bouquets of flowers, which were seemingly purchased on the way to the site and with the shop label partially removed. One of the bouquets is accompanied by one of the wild flowers that grows on the edge of the field on which The Angel stands. The next time I visited, there was no sign of these flowers; these seemingly quite spontaneous tributes are often ephemeral in nature. These two bouquets were left on The Angel, but it is more common to find them leaning against The Angel’s feet, at the front or side of the sculpture.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The third tribute that was left on the ‘shelves’ of the ribbing was a pair of plaster-cast wings. I spotted them as soon as I arrived, because they had been placed on the eastern side of The Angel, visible from the path that leads from the car park. Occupying a single ‘shelf’, the wings had been carefully positioned to echo but not to touch each other, and other visitors, like me, were looking at them but leaving them undisturbed.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
When I returned the following week, I could see that the wings were no longer on their original ‘shelf’. Walking round to the west side of The Angel, however, I found both of the wings positioned on adjacent shelves, and arranged vertically to form a different kind of pairing.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Once again, I had no way of knowing whether the wings had been moved by those who had originally left them on The Angel, or whether subsequent visitors had altered their positioning and their placement. The movement from east to west had shifted the wings from sunrise to sunset, and I was tempted to find some meaning in this, even as I was aware that it was most likely coincidental. On my following visit, the wings had disappeared, and, even though I looked for them in the trees over succeeding visits, there was no further sign of them. This disappearance of the object was unusual, unless it was itself of a more ephemeral nature: it was more common that a tribute left on The Angel would turn up in the trees, if it was no longer visible at the sculpture itself.
The fourth tribute left on The Angel was a small, artificial candle. Smaller than the other objects, it had been positioned on The Angel’s north side, where the ribbing is narrower and the ‘shelves’ correspondingly smaller. There was no accompanying note or message, although its memorial purpose seemed clear. There was something touching in the contrast of scale between The Angel and the diminutive candle; something too, perhaps, in the way in which The Angel seemed to shelter the candle’s tiny flame and to offer it protection. I thought of The Angel, unlit at night, forming a vast shadowy presence, and I wondered if this solar candle would then illuminate a tiny scrap of the surrounding dark. There was something of the altar about this tribute; the positioning of the candle transforming the domestic ‘shelf’ into something with a more sacred resonance.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The placing of objects at or on The Angel is facilitated by the design of the sculpture itself, which, as I have noted, forms ‘shelves’ of varying depths onto which the tributes can be placed. It is nevertheless striking that the memorial tributes are more commonly left in the nearby trees rather than at The Angel itself. This might be due to practical considerations – objects left here are more exposed, both to the weather and to other visitors, and so are often moved or disappear. Objects left at The Angel accordingly tend to be ephemeral and disposable in nature – tributes such as flowers, or a candle. The exceptions to this – the cap and the plaster wings – were subsequently repositioned, whether by the same visitor/s or others, with as much apparent thought and care as when they had originally been placed there.
Why, then, do the trees rather than The Angel seem to have a gravitational pull, such that even objects placed on The Angel seem to end up there? One factor certainly seems to be the shelter that they afford from the elements, especially the force of the wind. But the trees also offer shelter from other visitors, who venture less frequently into the copse, and are less likely to disturb what they find there. Leaving a memorial tribute on or at The Angel is a more public act, even if it is conducted when nobody else is there. The memorials in the trees constitute tributes that are public and private, and that speak not only to The Angel, but also to the community of other memorial objects that they join, and by which they are surrounded.
There are a few sounds that are particularly evocative for me of the memorial site at The Angel of the North: the rustling of the alder leaves overhead in the summer months, the steady background hum of traffic on the nearby A1 motorway, and the tinkling of wind chimes when they are caught by a gust of wind.
Over the several years that I have been visiting the memorial, I have photographed a number of different wind chimes that have been suspended from the branches of the trees. Some, as in the photograph above, have been comprised of several bells, while others are made up of a single bell. The placing of wind chimes at the memorial is unsurprising, given their traditional association with good luck and the summoning of benevolent spirits, as well as their conventional placing at the site of a shrine.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
When I visited The Angel last Friday, it was late afternoon and there was a high wind carrying occasional spatters of rain. There were only a few visitors and they did not venture down to the memorial site, which does not yet have its sheltering canopy of leaves. The strong winds had brought down even more branches since my last visit and the site felt raw and exposed with the late winter gale and darkening skies.
As I emerged from the memorial site up the little banked path that leads to The Angel, I caught the intermittent notes of a wind chime as it trembled in the wind. I headed along to one of the trees that edge the path leading west from The Angel to listen more closely to its strange music. As David wasn’t with me, I captured the sound by holding my mobile phone close to the chimes and pressing record.
Audio credit: Anne Whitehead
When I listened back to the recording, I could hear the tinny tinkling of the chimes, the gusts of wind, and the ever-present background noise of the traffic.
David’s recordings of The Angel with his contact microphones enable us to hear both the wind and the traffic resonating through its hollow structure. I have written in a previous post about the ways in which listening to these vibrations through his headphones shifts our perception of the sculpture, so that it is transformed momentarily into a vast musical instrument. If The Angel resonates with the wind that buffets its wings and vibrates down through its body, then the wind chimes in the trees form a high percussive complement to its deep notes.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Attending to the various sounds of the memorial site enables us to register the invisible but powerful presence at The Angel of the wind. Its destructive effects can currently be seen in the fallen branches and scattered tributes. But the wind can also be heard as it sets into motion the chimes that hang from the trees. With the help of David’s microphones, we can also capture the wind’s eerie booming and droning within the interior space of The Angel itself, as it forms a mighty echo chamber. The influence of the trees on the memorial site is evident, because it is visible. But if we attend to the auditory aspects of the site, we can encounter the vital agency of the wind, in its creative as well as its destructive aspects.
When I first visited the memorial at The Angel, a wooden baby bootee hung from the branch of a tree that was situated in the centre of the copse. The bootee had been painted but the decoration had largely weathered away, except for a residue of pink remaining on the toe. In conversation, a colleague had remembered the memorial at The Angel some years ago as a grassroots site of remembrance for baby and child loss, and she recalled the trees being decorated with many more of these painted wooden tokens. When I saw the bootee again, I thought of my colleague’s story and considered this object to be a surviving remnant of the original memorial, which she had described so vividly to me. The wooden bootee has since disappeared, but I recall it whenever I pass the tree from which it hung.
Even though the wooden bootee has gone, baby loss is still commemorated at the memorial site. The symbolism of The Angel resonates with the imagery that surrounds baby loss: the term ‘angel babies’ is used to describe babies who have died at or before birth, or in their first year of life. A number of tokens at the memorial site refer specifically to ‘angel babies’, their wording resonating powerfully with the nearby figure of The Angel.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
In her alphabetical dictionary of baby loss, Monica J. Caspers writes an entry for ‘angel babies’, writing of this popular term of remembrance:
Influenced by religious iconography, angel babies are believed to inhabit both heaven and earth. Their ‘presence’ brings peace and comfort to those left behind to mourn them, especially parents. Many baby lost parents, particularly mothers, report that when asked how many children they have, they list their living children and angel babies. Some bereaved women share stories of communicating with their angel babies through dreams and conversations. (p. 10)
Given the prevalence of angels in memorial tokens relating to baby loss, as well as in the bereavement support literature for grieving parents, The Angel becomes vibrant with meaning as a site of remembrance in this context. The copse of trees, situated between the motorway and The Angel, is itself expressive of a place between the worldly and the spiritual realms. The Angel both amplifies the angel symbolism, and represents a guardian presence for those babies and infants who are commemorated there.
Linda L. Layne has written of the ways in which it is still socially unclear how to mourn pregnancy and baby loss, which can be at once the loss of a baby and of parenthood. Layne observes that ‘baby things’ take on a particular significance as memorial objects; in the face of continuing social denial of the loss, these objects ‘make the claim that a “real” child existed and is worthy of memory’ (p. 324). Layne notes that parents often give gifts to the baby after death that the child would have received had it been living – clothing, toys, and balloons are especially popular. On my last visit to The Angel, a pair of cloth bootees had been tied to a tree branch in the copse, together with toys and a birthday balloon, representing at once a tender gift to a lost baby and a moving memorial.
I have already considered the specific symbolism of The Angel in the context of baby loss. Layne also opens up the significance of the trees from which the tokens are suspended at the memorial site. Trees are, in Layne’s words, ‘alive and capable of growth’ (p. 337), and the adoption of a tree by parents is itself a form of living memorial. Trees can form the centre of commemorative rituals and be decorated with lights or objects to mark anniversaries and birthdays. A token left in a tree at The Angel is placed in the sculpture’s protective embrace, and the memorial site thereby continues to hold poignant and powerful significance in the context of pregnancy loss, and of baby and child bereavement.
References
Monica J. Caspers, Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A-Z (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022).
Linda L. Layne, ‘”He was a real baby with baby things”: A material culture analysis of personhood, parenthood and pregnancy loss’, Journal of Material Culture 5.3 (2000), pp. 251-367.
I met Catherine Murray at The Angel on a wet and muddy November morning to record a segment for Radio 4’s Sunday programme. We walked from the base of The Angel down the hill to the memorial, and through the trees. As we stood at the feet of The Angel, sun broke through the clouds and visitors posed for photographs on the slope below us, arms outstretched.
Walking with Catherine, I was aware once again of the importance of sound on the site. The traffic noise was constant, and I registered how much it encapsulates the atmosphere of this place, representing more than ambient noise. I noted in my last post that the movement of the traffic counterpoints and calls attention to the stillness of The Angel standing in its midst. Due to the surrounding roads, this contrast of movement and stillness is present if you are approaching The Angel from the carpark, standing beneath its wings, or walking through the memorial site in the trees. Catherine recorded her feet plodging through the mud beneath the trees to capture the acoustic resonance of our walk, a record of our movement which struck me as a further point of contrast with the recordings that David and I have been making of the static form of The Angel.
I was delighted to hear the recording aired on today’s New Year’s Eve programme. It was paired with author Peter Stanford speaking about what angels mean today and observing that, even as organised religion is in decline, angels offer a framework through which we can imagine continuing our conversation with the dead. Angels, like Gormley’s sculpture, offer a contact with spirituality without the need for affiliation to a specific faith or religion.
The Angel of the North appears in the dictionary of angels in Stanford’s Angels: A History, listed under ‘G’ for ‘Gormley’. Stanford highlights the importance of angels ‘in troubling, even hopeless, times’ (p. 74). Gormley has likewise indicated that his angel figure was intended as a guardian for the north-east of England at a time of ‘painful transition’, as traditional heavy industries gave way to the information age. On his website, Gormley speaks of The Angel as a ‘focus of hope’, and as a memorial that ‘bears witness to the hundreds and thousands of colliery workers who had spent the last three hundred years mining coal beneath the surface’. Although the specific historical resonance of the site may not be as present for visitors now as when the work was first installed, the sculpture still represents a place of hope, to which people turn at times of grief and personal crisis.
Many thanks to Catherine for editing our conversation so beautifully for the programme. Our conversation begins at 18:11, at this link.
Yesterday I received an email from Liz Shaw, who had heard the Radio 4 broadcast about our project on the Today programme. Elizabeth is a member of the Watford Writers’ Group and had been set the task to write a piece that was inspired by an artwork. Based on my interview, Liz wrote a beautiful piece which constitutes its own eloquent and moving response to The Angel.
Liz has kindly given me permission to include her writing on the blog, and you can read it below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Angel of the North
My arms are not raised up high in anger or in defiance. They do not bend and curve to cherish and protect. Nor do they hang in despair or in defeat. They stretch out wide, wider than I am tall, parallel to the earth. My arms are winged and spread to catch the wind. I am genderless and ageless. My face is emotionless and featureless. I was created blind to your existence, deaf to your voices. I watch unheeding as your traffic and trains stream below me.
Born in a blast furnace, forged in steel, I am municipal, magnificent, agnostic, secular, classless.
And yet. And yet. You leave your hopes, fears and prayers at my feet. Slips of paper sealed and curled within my iron ribs. Nearby trees hang heavy with your memorials, charms, ribbons and fairy lights. I have become a road-side shrine, an altar, a minaret, a bridge of sighs, a wailing wall.
You conceived me, you built me, you know this. So why do you believe that I have power over your fate? Do you hope to see me spark to life and stride the fields like a modern-day Prometheus, take flight to intercede with the Gods on your behalf?
My feet are planted in a landscape once blighted by industry. I feel the souls of the colliers who mined the seams beneath me. I feel their heaving lungs and their black coal-ingrained scars. Your messages seep into me with their raw emotions of hope, grief, love and hate.
And now the sounds of my structure will be added to your voices. Your memories and stories will be forever entwined with the rush of the wind as it wails around me. The eerie groans of my metal body expanding and contracting with the summer heat and the winter ice will be added to birdsong and the sound of children playing at my feet. The gentle rustle of the leaves will blend with the tinkle of your votive offerings. A soundscape will be created of what I have come to mean to you.
Are you hoping to wear away at my cold rusting heart? If your wishes came true, if you were wealthy, loved, cured, avenged, then what? The deep scars of your life will fade in time as will your life itself. I cannot bring them back, the people who you mourn and grieve. They will not return from death.
Better to stand tall and strong with arms wide open to accept your future, to feel your feet firmly planted in history, to gaze ahead to the distant twinkling northern city lights.
It’s been a busy week as we have focused on trying to reach as many people as we can who have left objects, messages or tokens at the memorial site near The Angel.
David and I went to out to The Angel on a blustery day to meet the university photographer for a press release. You can read the piece here.
I spoke to local journalist Tony Henderson, who could help us reach out to people who live nearby, and who either visit the memorial or might know more about its origins and history. This interview was covered by the Newcastle Journal as well as by The Chronicle. I also had the pleasure of being in conversation at the Angel with Gilly Hope for Radio Newcastle, and Gilly hopes to follow the progress of the project as we develop the sound piece.
We were delighted that there was interest in this story beyond the region, that might help us reach a wider audience. I spoke about the project in the last few minutes of Radio 4’s Today programme as well as on Radio 5 Live. The Guardian covered the story today.
We’d love you to get in touch if you have left memorial objects, messages or tokens at The Angel of the North, at any time. We’d like to record a short conversation with you, the content of which would be defined by you, and we are particularly interested to know what The Angel means to you and the significance to you of what you have placed at the site. All contributions can be anonymous.
We are seeking to create a record of the memorial through a sound work, which will combine extracts from recorded conversations with the sounds of the site, including the resonance of The Angel itself. The piece will be played as part of the Sound Project in the Arches of Newcastle University, and Antony Gormley’s sculpture ‘Clasp’ – which represents two people embracing – is nearby, so anyone listening to the work will be able to see it. Everyone who is recorded for the project will be invited to a launch event in July 2024.
We’d also love to hear from anyone who knows more about the origin and history of the memorial site, so that we can understand it more fully.
