Sean McHale

The weather is cold, the memories warm.

Density of infrastructure starts to peel back when heading further north in north-east Scotland. Roads to empire fall away. The towns, villages, and countryside are often reminiscent of a romanticised past and a hard to look at future. A spectre of London rule, possibly.

The landscape does not feel anachronistic, just forgotten, and that’s the beauty of it. Though, nauseatingly, this is perhaps a result of vast swaths of the country’s land being owned by a few wealthy individuals. Nevertheless, the joys to be found here seem smaller yet more nourishing than their metropolitan cousins. Could those at Balmoral possibly feel the same way?

Offshore, you can see the Beatrice Windfarm along with the oil ships intermingled at the turbine bases. For a long time the turbines comforted me greatly. On nice days, given the chance, I would sit high on the sea-side dunes and watch them, pin-wheel-like, turning silently in their distance, to the soundtrack of lapping waves and, often, a fierce wind. It felt the appropriate stage to be contemplative upon: I would muse on society, its enormity, and ceaselessness, and scale; ever producing and now so, passively to a further extent. Liberation through technology? Privately owned technology at that.