The final movement of Henryk Górecki’s 1976 “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ includes a lament to those who died in the struggle to re-establish the Polish Republic. While the overall piece evokes themes of maternal love, it closes with the words from a Silesian folk song about a mother looking for her son killed by Germans in the uprisings of the 1920’s:

…. Even if I weep

My old eyes away,

Or if my bitter tears

Were to make another River Oder,

They would not bring back

My son to life.….

Commemorating the blood of martyred Poles, the finest sons of Pleszew, murdered by the Nazi gestapo between 1939 and 1945

Each and every rock that forms a cairn has it’s own story, the thoughts and feelings of a walker as they pass this evolving marker. Based on a tradition whereby soldiers going to war would place a stone and retrieve another on their return, this residue would become a monument to lost souls.

An isolated rock amongst a clump of trees bears the marks of time. Graffiti over 100 years old scratches its surface – markings made on journeys long completed. Accordingly, this glacial rock became known as Wallace’s Putting Stone and became subsumed into the political intrigues and mythologies of the Borders.

The first research trip took us to the Scottish Borders – unsure at this early stage of exactly how the story unfolds, an expedition across the hills came alive with potent symbolism. A cleaned carcass that lay across the path is both a reminder of the dead past we were uncovering and the need to find the skeleton of our story…

Uncovering old paths now crumbling and overgrown is exhausting. Revisiting places after a 35 year gap evokes an unusual sense of unreality. After exploring the alleyways around my first family house, I found that the next day I was unable to move – apparently this state of hypoactivity is common when revisiting scenes of past troubles.