2025 Terminalia Festival of Psychogeography is coming soon! Terminalia is a festival of walking, space, place and psychogeography on and around 23rd Feburary. Terminalia was the festival of Terminus, Roman god of boundaries and landmarks.
2025 has the theme of “hope”.
See https://terminaliafestival.org/ for more details about each event.
As part of this Steve Poole and Janette Kerr have designed a Shetland Terminalia – Walking between cairns.
If anyone wants to join us we will be meeting on Saturday Feb 22nd at 11am at the carpark behind the bus stop at the West Burrafirth turning, opposite Loch of Murraster and about two miles before Bridge of Walls (the OS map show a ‘P’ for parking). Bring sandwiches or whatever, and something to drink, wear walking boots and warm waterproof coat
There will be pauses for drawing, photographs and moss searches.
Our Terminalia walk imagines and conjures a processional route connecting four prehistoric burial cairns in Shetland on the OS 6 inch first edition map of 1878. We’ll begin by considering two chambered cairns that face one another on either side of the Merki Burn (HU279535) and their relationship as terminal monuments to the life-giving waters of the burn that divides them.
We’ll then climb the Hill of Murraster SSW to the Ward of Browland where a well-preserved heel cairn (HU267515) shares the 100m hilltop with an ordnance survey triangulation point – a place where boundaries between ancient and modern freely coexist, the latter offering a degree of protection to the former and a barrier to modern excavation. Earlier plundering was prevented because 19thC cartographers thought it a watch tower rather than a place of burial.
From here we’ll descend NW, skirting Skula Water to an unscheduled cairn beside the Upper Loch of Brouster (HU263524), before heading back over the Hill of Murraster to our starting point.
As we walk, we’ll be thinking about the transhistorical meaning of ‘hope’, the temporal distance between ourselves and the people laid to rest in these great stone tombs, and the points of cognitive convergence that we share across the centuries.