Tag: memorial

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Baby loss

Wooden bootee hanging in tree
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

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.

Wooden heart with inscription tied to branch
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.

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January

seed heads on blue ground
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Over the last year, I have been been recording the Angel of the North site by making cyanotypes of the plants that grow there across the seasons. For each month of 2024, I will post photographs of the cyanotypes made in the same month of 2023. Over the course of the year, these images will comprise an archive of the flowers and trees that grow in the field on which The Angel stands, including at the memorial site itself.

Cyanotype is an early form of photography in which an object is placed on chemically treated paper, laid under glass, and placed in the sun. The sun reacts with the chemicals to expose the image, and the print is developed by rinsing the paper in water, which produces the distinctive deep blue ground. I have used the process of dry cyantoype, which means that the treated paper is dry when the object is placed on it.

Last week, I visited York Art Gallery to see the British Museum touring exhibition Drawing Attention: Emerging Artists in Dialogue. My eye was drawn to the work of Irish artist Miriam de Burca, who makes meticulous drawings of clods of earth dug up from the edges of cillini, burial grounds across Ireland that mark the resting places of those considered unworthy of an ‘official grave’: babies and children who died before they were baptised, women who died in childbirth, and those who ended their own lives. De Burca’s studies are an act of paying close attention to those whom society wished to forget, an assertion of remembrance that challenges a collective amnesia. In the exhibition, de Burca’s drawing was paired with Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi’s Design for a Catafalque (1621-58), which represented a memorial for someone that society wished to honour and esteem. The intricate detail of De Burca’s ink drawing encouraged close and sustained attention to it, and I found myself returning several times to the image as I went round the exhibition.

De Burca’s project is very different to documenting the memorial at The Angel. The burial sites in Ireland are obscure and often remote, situated on the edges of bogs, lakes and seashores, or just outside the walls of graveyards. Lacking any visual markers, the earth that de Burca digs up, draws in her studio, and then returns to the site, is a way of rendering the unseen burial ground visible, and each drawing is titled with the co-ordinates of the site’s location. The memorial at The Angel is not a burial ground, although the ashes of loved ones are sometimes scattered there. The objects that people leave behind give visibility to the memorial, and its location next to The Angel means that it is neither obscure nor hidden. The memorial objects are nevertheless sensitive and personal. Although the cyanotypes do not share the same political purpose of de Burca’s drawings, which deliberately set out to expose and challenge an institutional architecture of disappearance, they hold in common with them a mode of looking at a memorial site that is attentive yet oblique.

white seed heads on blue ground
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

January’s cyanotypes capture the sculptural seedheads of the previous summer’s flowers, and they appear as doubly spectral: the negative image of a form that itself represents the ghost of an earlier season. The weak winter sun is also documented in these images – despite long exposure times, they have a more faded blue ground than the cyanotypes that are developed in the summer months.

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Sunday

angel of the North with man looking up at it
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

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.

References

Antony Gormley, ‘Making the Angel of the North’, https://www.antonygormley.com/works/making/angel-of-the-north

Peter Stanford, Angels: A History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2019).

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Bottles

Two pink bottles with autumn leaves
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Sarah Gensburger’s Memory On My Doorstep (2019) chronicles the spontaneous memorial that commemorated those who lost their lives either in the terrorist attack on the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in January 2015, or in the shooting at the Bataclan Café, 50 Boulevard Voltaire, in November 2015. Both incidents took place in the same neighbourhood of Paris, which is where Gensburger lives. She documented the memorial and its visitors over the course of a year, from 2015 to 2016, drawing on her position as a resident to consider the ordinary dynamics that characterise living beside events such as the shootings on an everyday level. The places which families, including her own, inhabited daily became ‘the stage for memorialization, for tributes and homages to the victims’ (p. 17), and Gensburger decides ‘to pay attention to the social relationships people build with their environment, and to the role that environment plays in memory dynamics’ (p. 17).

The spontaneous memorial with which Gensburger is concerned is different from the memorial at The Angel, in that it has emerged at the site of one terrorist event and in proximity to another. There are nevertheless correspondences between my own project and Gensburger’s. We are both interested in chronicling a public space of remembrance, as a means of enabling ‘the expression of multiple narratives’ (19).  Both projects record a local memorial, which is regularly observed and that forms a backdrop to our daily lives and activities. We are also both concerned with how spontaneous memorial activity adds new meanings to the environment in which it takes place – in the case of The Angel, I am interested in the ways in which the objects and tokens left at the site re-create Gormley’s sculpture as a place of collective remembrance.

Gensburger’s perspective as a resident who passes the memorial daily means that she has a heightened awareness of the objects that are placed there. The objects are subject to theft as well as to the elements, so that many ‘ultimately become invisible for history’ (p. 180). Gensburger distinguishes between those visitors who leave laminated messages, and thereby ‘plan for posterity’, and those who leave more fragile tokens (p. 180). In my last post, I thought about the ribbons and fabric items that are placed in the trees at The Angel, and the ways in which synthetic materials do not disintegrate like traditional cloth. Other objects at The Angel demonstrate the same divide that Gensburger points out, some of which are protected while others are exposed to the elements. Gensburger notes that, as she observes the memorial, it develops ‘a kind of autonomous existence’, so that new messages respond to those that are already there (p. 98). At The Angel, too, objects and messages respond both to The Angel and to each other, so that they form a kind of loose collective, as well as representing individual memories and tributes.

I am particularly struck by a passage in Gensburger’s book in which she discusses a key challenge of observing a memorial closely over time. On November 25, 2015, Gensburger took a photograph of a bright pink child’s wand taped to a pole, together with a branch which she took to be an olive. She interpreted the object as ‘one of optimism’, and the branch as a symbol of peace (p. 42). Returning to the photograph on January 4, 2016, Gensburger is no longer sure what she is looking at. She reflects:

Today, with hindsight, I cannot ignore the possibility that this magic wand was simply lost by a child in the street and stuck to the pole by a well-meaning passerby. Just like the lost gloves or scarves we often see draped over the railings of the park in winter, in the hope their former owners retrace their steps to find them. (p. 43)

To what extent, Gensburger asks, is she seeing all objects in the neighbourhood as memorials, when they might have other significances? ‘When this photograph was taken’, she writes, ‘I was so accustomed to encountering homages and tributes in the neighbourhood, that this encouraged me to interpret every unexpected object through this analytic frame’ (p. 43)

On recent visits to The Angel, I have experienced the same doubt as to whether some of the objects I see are deliberately placed as memorials, or if they do not hold such commemorative significance. A pile of stones recently appeared near the entrance to the group of trees at The Angel; these were still in place on my visit today, although I felt less confident than I first was about whether they are tokens of remembrance. Other stones have been placed under trees, or are painted or inscribed, but these rocks are unmarked and are ambiguously positioned on the perimeter of the site. Am I, too, seeing everything at The Angel through a single lens because I am so accustomed to encountering memorial objects in, or near, the group of trees?

At the other side of the copse, where a fence separates the trees from the nearby A1, two bottles have been placed as objects of remembrance. The decorative nature of the bottles and their location beside other memorial tokens make their significance clear. Less evident, though, is the meaning of a nearby empty bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale, which today lies in the leaves on the far side of the fence, having blown down from the fence rail where it stood when I last visited. The bottle has been here for some time, always in the same area but occupying different positions; I cannot ignore the possibility that, even though it has appeared in the memorial site, it may not hold the same significance as the twinned bottles nearby. Several objects that have been placed near the fence have local reference points, so I had originally thought that the bottle of Newcastle Brown might have been left alongside them as part of a commemorative ensemble, but I am increasingly doubtful of my own interpretation.

I might never know whether the bottle of Newcastle Brown, or the pile of stones, represent memorial tributes or have different stories to tell. Both objects are located on the edge of the trees, where it is difficult to read their significance. In the absence of other information, all I  – like Gensburger – can do is ‘consider the limits of my initial interpretation’ (p. 43). The meaning of objects and traces left at The Angel is not self-evident; if  we are not able to recover their stories from the people who left them, their significance lies largely in the way they are perceived and interpreted.     

References:

Sarah Gensburger, Memory On My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighbourhood, Paris: 2016-2016, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019.

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Clootie or rag trees

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Following the article in The Guardian about the memorial objects at The Angel of the North, a number of people kindly emailed me about clootie or rag trees, wondering whether there might be a connection with the memorial activity at The Angel. Clootie means cloth in Scots and the trees, usually hawthorn or ash, are located close to sacred wells or springs. A rag or cloth would be dipped into the holy water and tied to the tree in order to cure a sickness or ailment. The cloth would often be from a garment associated with the body part affected by the illness, and it was believed that the sickness would fade even as the material disintegrated over time. Holy wells were visited by people from across the area on special days, such as Beltane, the May Day festival marking the beginning of summer.  

The Dictionary of English Folklore records that rag trees had become rare by the nineteenth century, although a few remained in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cornwall. In 2003, it records three active wells in England: two in Yorkshire (St. Helen’s Well at Walton and St. Helen’s Well at Eshton) as well as an unnamed well at Madron in Cornwall. As the name clootie suggests, a number of trees in Scotland are also associated with this ritual: the best known and still much visited are the Munlochy Clootie Well on the Black Isle peninsula, and St. Mary’s Well in the woods near the battlefield of Culloden. Scotland passed an Act of Parliament in 1581 banishing pilgrimages to holy wells and those which lasted became associated with Christian saints: the well at Munlochy is dedicated to Saint Boniface Curitan. The ritual of the clootie tree nevertheless remained popular in Scotland, and Alexander Crow has observed:

The Clootie Well is mentioned by several historical writers and collectors of folklore and tradition. Writing in his 1869 Book of Days, Robert Chambers mentioned a well to the east of the current Munlochy site, called Craigach Well, in Avoch. He describes the scene on the first Sunday of May as ‘like a fair’, with English, Scots and Gaelic all spoken as the pilgrims made their offerings, also noting that each person drank from the well. Thomas Pennant made two famous journeys around Scotland and in 1769 recorded that he saw many such places ‘tapestried with rags’.

Poignantly, Crow records that the well in Culloden Woods was decorated with coloured ribbons and rags when the 51st Highland Division was lost during the Dunkirk evacuations in 1940. He observes that this revival demonstrates ‘how an ancient practice still had meaning in recent times’. This example also suggests that the traditional association with hanging ribbons on the clootie tree has merged more recently with the memorialisation of the dead.

There are many holy wells scattered across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland: 187 are recorded by the Northern Ireland Sites and Monuments Record, while 2,996 have been officially recorded in the Republic of Ireland. Many more have not been documented because they are small, unnamed springs of local significance, and in 2021 a research project at Queens University Belfast, Hidden Heritage of Holy Wells, set out to map these sites county by county. Examples of rag trees in Ireland include St. Brigid’s Well in Kildare, the Well of St. Lasair in Roscommon, the Holy Well at Tobernalt, and St. Feichin’s Well in Westmeath.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

The clootie tree at Munlochy has recently brought into focus some of the sensitivities around these sites. Traditionally, the cloths tied to the trees were scraps of cotton or woven wool that would disintegrate over time. With man-made and synthetic fibres now more commonly used in clothing, some of the cloths that are left do not deteriorate, meaning that the sites can become crowded. Forestry and Land Scotland, who manage the Munlochy well, have teamed up with local community groups to clean up the site periodically, leaving in place those items which are biodegradable and environmentally friendly, and removing only plastics, polyesters and other items that won’t disintegrate. A major clean-up in 2019 responded to the concerns of locals about the deteriorating condition of the area. In 2022, there was community concern when a visitor decided to clean the site without permission from Forestry and Land Scotland, following a build-up of offerings during the Covid-19 pandemic and tree damage by Storm Arwen.

There are undoubtedly correspondences between the clootie or rag trees and the memorial at The Angel, most obviously the tying of ribbons and pieces of cloth around the branches of trees, or hanging items of clothing from the branches. Some of the emails I received speculated about whether The Angel served a similar function to the holy wells, prompting a feeling that the nearby copse of trees was a place of spiritual significance or power. Unlike at the holy wells, however, the ribbons and cloths tied to the trees seem to be items of remembrance rather than placed there in the hope of healing. This prompts the question of whether the rag tree tradition is adapting and merging with grassroots memorialisation, as the example of the tree in Culloden Woods would suggest. It also raises the question of whether cloth tied to a tree as a memorial would be more likely to be made of fibres that will last, so that the memory is preserved. Or would the disintegration of the cloth over time be experienced as the lost person gradually merging into the surrounding landscape? To what extent, too, does the healing function of the rag tree carry over to the memorial at The Angel, so that tying a cloth or ribbon to the branches not only commemorates a person who has died but also represents a healing ritual for those who have been left behind?

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

The mapping of the holy wells in Ireland and Northern Ireland raises a further question about the delicate balance to be observed between recording and preserving a site and interfering with it. The same sensitivities about removing objects are felt at The Angel and the holy wells, and when I visit the memorial I am careful to disturb the site as little as possible. Like the memorial at The Angel, the holy wells are important to local communities, and the offerings are private and personal to those who leave them. At the same time, it is precisely this grassroots and localised memorial activity that is often overlooked and undocumented; it represents what Professor Keith Lilley from the Hidden Heritage of Holy Wells research team has called ‘small heritage’. By recording the site through sound, our hope is that this project can document the memorial at The Angel of the North, and capture what it means to those who leave objects and tokens there, whilst also respecting the site and the sensitivity of what is being remembered. 

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

  

References

Alexander Crow, ‘Why Do Celts Hang Rags on Trees?’, Culture Trip, 23 February 2017, Why do Celts Hang Rags on Trees | Culture Trip (theculturetrip.com)

‘Eerie tradition or eyesore? The Clootie Well Clean-Up Row’, 25 January 2002, Eerie tradition or eyesore? The Clootie Well clean-up row – BBC News

Forestry and Land Scotland, ‘Cleaning up the Clootie Well at Munlochy’, Monday 28 October 2019, https://forestryandland.gov.scot/blog/clootie-well-cleanup/

‘Holy wells: mapping Ireland’s hidden heritage’, 7 March 2021, Holy wells: Mapping Ireland’s hidden heritage – BBC News

Jacqueline Simpson and Steven Roud (eds.), A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

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Media

The Angel of the North and a microphone
Photo credit: David de la Haye

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.

If you are interested in participating in the project, please get in touch with me at: anne.whitehead@newcastle.ac.uk