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Contribution short abstract:

A presentation which considers the past, present and possible future of Aberdeen's Freedom Lands, a circular territory dating back more than 700 years, revisited and reclaimed by combining the creative exercises of running and writing.

Contribution long abstract:

For more than seven centuries, Aberdeen’s Freedoms have taken circular form, as a territory known to its residents through their exercising of rights of common law, and by an annual practice of riding the bounds. The limits (or marches) of this jurisdictional geography were first landmarked by a ring of earth-bound boulders, then later by sixty-seven numbered and engraved march stones. Those stones remain in situ: on city streets and field margins, along country roads, in woodlands, and by the banks of burns. Based on passages of creative non-fiction writing, and an archive of images, this presentation will offer a personal account of geographical discovery, one where the exercise of learning about these Freedom Lands fuses the process of academic inquiry with a daily habit of long-distance running. What emerges is a deep map, charted according to associative connections made between landscape, locality and biography. Hereabouts circularity exists as prevailing spirit, and a residual property that eventually coalesces into a practised art of place. The presentation will not so much "unwrite" the effort of circulation, but instead reclaim and reenergise it.