Ian Hamilton Finlay at Little Sparta. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
My mum and dad encountered this place back in the day and they found the experience to be transformative.
My memory of visiting Little Sparta many years ago is of being on a quest in a fairy tale. The road was unmarked, opening times rare and any visitor had to be fully determined. The prize was a magical place set in wild hills, full of invention, humour, poetry and surprisingly – politics! A place of wonder, indeed.
Louise Robinson
In 1964, a concrete poem made of coloured cork letters is stuck on the white harled walls of the Gledfield Farmhouse as in the cheerful happy apple where the eye gradually picks out the swinging acrobatic movements along the lines of repeated letters.
Text from Jessie Sheeler – Little Sparta Guide Book, 2015
Set in the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, Little Sparta is Ian Hamilton Finlay’s greatest work of art. Finlay moved to the farm of Stonypath in 1966 and, in partnership with his wife Sue Finlay, began to create what would become an internationally acclaimed garden across seven acres of a wild and exposed moorland site.
Collaborating with stone carvers, letterers and at times other artists and poets, the numerous sculptures and artworks created by Finlay, which are all integral to the garden, explore themes as diverse as the sea and its fishing fleets, our relationship to nature, classical antiquity, the French Revolution and the Second World War. Individual poetic and sculptural elements, in wood, stone and metal, are sited in relation to carefully structured landscaping and planting. In this way, the garden in its entirety is the artwork.
https://www.littlesparta.org.uk/
The garden was first established in 1966 and was originally named Stonypath. Finlay chose the name “Little Sparta” in 1983, in response to Edinburgh’s nickname, the “Athens of the North”, and playing on the historical rivalry between the Ancient Greek cities Athens and Sparta. Little Sparta survived numerous disputes, or “Wars” as Finlay termed them, regarding the rating of the Garden Temple. Finlay lived there until shortly before his death in 2006.
Over their 23-year collaboration Ian Hamilton Finlay and Sue Finlay established Little Sparta as an internationally renowned composition, a combination of avant-garden experiment, Scottish wit and whimsy and the English landscape garden tradition. It comprised the front garden, the most intimate space, with many examples of Finlay’s ‘garden poems’; a woodland garden extending around a small pool; and a series of paths, areas and sculptures in the wilder hillside landscape. Finlay conceived the garden as composed around inter-connected pools, burns and a small loch, Lochan Eck.
Finlay later extended the garden in the 1990s, creating a small English Parkland in the former paddock. A walled garden, ‘Hortus Conclusus’, was added after his death. These areas were created in collaboration with Pia Simig and Ralph Irving.
The key concept he established at Little Sparta was that of the ‘garden poem’, sited within an ‘area’. Finlay defined the relationship between these poem-objects and their surroundings: “Usually each area gets a small artefact, which reigns like a small deity or spirit of place. My understanding is that the work is the whole composition – the artefact in its context. The work is not an isolated object, but an object with flowers, plants, trees, water and so on”.
Sue Finlay, who undertook the majority of the planting and cultivation, describes the generosity of this creative process in her memoir The Planting of a Hillside Garden: “The learning process. The love involved in this process. That loving absorption – the day-to-day tending of the poems. Their immediate surrounding areas, whether paved, grassy or covered with plants, always needed a lot of individual attention in the summer”.
The garden is now owned by the Little Sparta Trust, which plans to preserve the garden for the future by raising enough to pay for an ongoing maintenance fund. Trustees have included journalist Magnus Linklater and gallery owner Victoria Miro. The garden is open to the public on a limited basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Sparta
Ian Hamilton Finlay filmed in the garden in 1989, discussing the events of the Battle of Little Sparta
In a photograph taken in May 1968, a young Alec Finlay is seen aboard the Sea Eck with his father, IHF, squatting alongside on the bank. Behind them, AF’s mother, Sue, and sister, Ailie, keep a watchful eye. Photograph: Terence Spencer/Popperfoto/Getty Images
Little Sparta. Courtesy Little Sparta Trust. Photo: Robin Gillanders.
‘1794, A Beheading of Bouquets’, 1987
with Richard Grasby
Portland stone
30 x 81 x 11.5 cm
Continuing the theme of Revolutionary execution, the inscription on this work references the Spring of 1794 when the poet and politician Philippe Fabre d’Églantine was sent to the guillotine. The previous year the then in favour poet had the job of rewriting the new republican calendar, removing all religious and historical associations. The months were named to reflect the seasons and nature, celebrating plants, creatures and the rural economy. Fabre, who had added Eglantine to his name after spuriously claiming to have won an Eglantine rose in a literary competition, was guillotined on 5th April 1794, in the middle of the new month of Germinal – ironically the time of growth. Finlay’s laconic inscription plays with this irony and nods to d’Églantine’s assumed name, and the inevitable deadheading required by a diligent gardener in tending the roses.
‘The World Has Been Empty Since The Romans – Saint Just’, 1982
with Nicholas Salon
Toppled column
Cast stone, partially rusticated, with ruined plinth
The ruined stone blocks and toppled column represent a lament for the decline of the West since the grandeur of classical Rome, and again the spokesman is Saint-Just.
The Last Cruise of The Emden, 1975
with John Andrew
Memorial tablet
Portland stone
Text on a stone memorial tablet accompanies a carved ship in relief:
THE LAST CRUISE OF THE EMDEN
KLEINER KREUZER SONATA
The Emden was a German cruiser of the First World War whose captain was renowned for his chivalrous treatment of captured crewmen. Little Cruiser Sonata recalls Tolstoy’s tragic story, as well as the small perfection of the musical form, exemplified by Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. The work becomes the Emden’s epitaph.”
Texts from Jessie Sheeler – Little Sparta Guide Book, 2015
The weight of time is deeply felt at Stonypath, as is the presence of those who have nurtured the garden. This was in many ways a collaborative project between the poet-artist and his wife Sue, who was given the farm by her father in 1966.
During a period of recovery following a heart attack in 1967, Hamilton Finlay resorted to making model boats. Sue explained: ‘I shopped for balsa wood and magazines with plans for fishing boats, sailing boats, and even submarines. These were then sailed on the pond. Gradually—over years—the garden took shape. I learnt about plants and planting. Ian found new collaborators to make the works. Little Sparta was created one turf at a time.’
In the following decades more than 270 artworks—mostly sculptures—were installed across the moorland. They reflect Hamilton Finlay’s fascination with tempestuous periods in history—among them Classical antiquity, the French Revolution, and the Second World War.
Corinthian pilasters are painted on one side of the house with the inscription, ‘To Apollo, his music, his missiles, his muses’, above the windows; Doric columns frame barn doors and garden gates; and a cluster of roses are celebrated with a wall text in French tricolour that reads, ‘Les femmes de la Révolution’. Elsewhere, his wit and humour are uncovered: a tombstone commemorates a dead birch tree with the inscription, ‘Bring back the birch’, and nuclear submarines emerge ominously from the ground.
Richard Ingleby, Hamilton Finlay’s gallerist and trustee of Little Sparta, described the garden’s maritime influence: ‘The sea is hugely present there with references to fishing and naval boats, but more than anything, the sounds: the trees that rustle in the wind, mimicking waves breaking on the shore. It’s an island kingdom, despite being land-locked. It has this Homeric quality, as if he’s finding his way home’.
Hamilton Finlay suffered from chronic agoraphobia and for decades barely left his small kingdom; he once wrote that ‘our true home may be found in exile’. Ingleby recalled the artist’s amazement at his first-ever visit to a supermarket in the 1990s.
There are also artworks riddled with references to controversial incidents that took place in Hamilton Finlay’s lifetime—attributable to what Ingleby described as his ‘very strong sense of moral purpose’. There was the dispute between the artist and the Strathclyde Regional Council over the rates relief he believed he was entitled to, immortalised in the form of numerous works detailing the ‘Battle for Little Sparta’, including an epigraph from the French revolutionary Saint-Just, ‘The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future’, inscribed into stone blocks laid out on the ground above Lochan Eck.
For Ingleby, one of the most important ideas of Hamilton Finlay’s work and Little Sparta is how the process of transformation becomes a form of poetry. ‘A personal favourite is the bird tables with aircraft carriers,’ Ingleby says, ‘so the starlings arrive as starlings and they take off as Harrier jump jets carrying bread. There are so many little visual amusements throughout the garden that are sometimes overlooked’.
Artists’ homes and gardens offer us a rare glimpse into their private worlds, and Hamilton Finlay’s garden can also be understood as his most important work of art. At Little Sparta, it feels as though at any moment the artist might step out of his house in his wellies. There is something romantic about imagining him exiled in the remote Pentland Hills, making art that touches on such grand, eternal themes. His vision has influenced people far beyond the borders of Scotland and remains just as intriguing today, with much of Little Sparta’s charm to be discovered in the smaller details that reveal themselves like secrets. For these, it’s well worth the trip.
Rory Mitchell
https://ocula.com/magazine/spotlights/ian-hamilton-finlay-little-sparta/
The “Grove above Lochan Eck” at Little Sparta
Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, ‘avant-gardener’ and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure in the true sense, a limitlessly inventive visionary whose Lanarkshire home and garden remain a site of pilgrimage. To his detractors – notably, a number of vocal Finlay-bashers in the English press – he was a crank, a provincial megalomaniac possessed of artistic, literary and dictatorial pretensions quite out of proportion to his ability. These were opinions you voiced at your peril: anyone who dared ridicule, misrepresent or merely misunderstand Finlay in print ran the risk of being ‘visited’ by his heavies, the so-called ‘Saint-Just Vigilantes’ – ‘a band of impressionable Scots art yobs … sent to terrorise others and defend his honour’, according to the critic Waldemar Januszczak, one of many naysayers who upset the artist. (And yes: he was among those who received a knock on the door.)
It’s not entirely clear whether the self-styled ‘vigilantes’ did anything more menacing than vandalise an office (that of The Spectator’s sister magazine, Apollo, when the late Brian Sewell published a vicious hatchet job in its pages in 1989); nor as to whether the otherwise agoraphobic Finlay himself was interested in anything other than the notoriety such stunts might generate. If so, he might well have shot himself in the practically shod foot: the habitual adjectives ascribed to him whenever his name appears in the press seem to be ‘prickly’, ‘difficult’, and most of all, ‘cantankerous’. Small wonder. Finlay actively cultivated enemies where it suited him and fell out with almost everyone: with his best man, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, over some perceived slight or other; with the French government, for cancelling a planned commission; and, most famousl, the Great Satan that was Strathclyde council.
All of which is to say that it’s perhaps unsurprising his reputation has suffered over the course of the past decade and a half.
Digby Warde-Aldam
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-polarising-poet-sculptor-and-avant-gardener-who-maintained-a-private-militia/
Sculpture, words and landscape: part of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poet-philosopher garden, Little Sparta. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, a unique artist’s garden slung on the sinuous Pentland hills southwest of Edinburgh, has been described as the greatest Scottish work of art of all time, and one of the greatest contemporary pieces of art anywhere.
Little Sparta is more than a garden: it is a complete artwork that uses the landscape, trees, plants, paths and pools as its materials; employing sculpture, inscriptions and poems to create something that combines intellectual rigour, philosophical profundity and imaginative allusiveness.
It is infused with references to Finlay’s preoccupations of classical myth and poetry, the French Revolution, and the second world war. It has its pastoralism – bucolic quotations from Virgil’s Eclogues abound – but also a steely combativeness and revolutionary purity.
Finlay – born to Scottish parents in the Bahamas who ran bootleg rum into prohibition America, has long been an outsider figure in Scottish culture. That took actual and violent form in 1983 in the so-called First Battle of Little Sparta, in which Finlay’s supporters successfully prevented the removal of works from the garden’s temple by the Strathclyde Regional Council in a dispute over rates.
“He probably hasn’t ever received proper recognition here in Scotland,” said Paul Nesbitt, director of exhibitions at Inverleith House, Edinburgh, “He is better recognised abroad, and he is an artist’s artist, who has influenced generations of artists working today. He is not a household name – and he should be.”
Charlotte Higgins, 2005
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/08/edinburgh2005.arts1
“A teak signpost pointing to VINCENNES commemorates a turning point in the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
When the philosopher Diderot was imprisoned in Vincennes as a result of his irreligious writings, Rousseau regularly walked from Paris to visit him. One hot day he stopped to rest, and read in his newspaper of an essay competition set by the Academy of Dijon. The subject of the piece was to be whether mankind had been improved by progress in the arts and sciences. He entered an essay arguing that those pursuits had caused the corruption and decline of natural virtue and morality, and he won the contest.”
Through A Dark Wood – Midway, 1974
Circular stone with slate plaque
Michael Harvey
“On a plaque set on a circular stone is inscribed: THROUGH A DARK WOOD MIDWAY. It commemorates the sea Battle of Midway fought in the Pacific in 1942 between the USA and Japan. It was a crucial turning point in the war. The reference to a dark wood evokes Dante’s words at the beginning of The Divine Comedy, describing a despairing and critical inner struggle: In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood.”
MAN. A PASSER BY, 1989
Waystone, York stone, Keith Bailey
“A milestone solemnly reminds us of our brief and sometimes unconcerned span of life.”
Texts from Jessie Sheeler – Little Sparta Guide Book, 2015
IHF – as Ian Hamilton Finlay was known in tribute to the Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson, or RLS – was a poet of marble and mutability, force and lyrical sensitivity, Doric columns and the gently nodding bog cotton of our Pentland hillside. His most identifiable style may be the word inscribed in stone, but he experienced language as a Heraclitan and oracular medium. To him, the poem was an exemplary device that had a gift for revealing the metamorphoses words contain. The internationally known garden at Stonypath (known since 1983 as Little Sparta), which fuses the poem-as-object with the composed landscape, was a metamorphosis too. And, as IHF and Sue, my mother, were well aware, without constant vigilance the spot was likely to return into the wild arms of the moor around it. ‘He builds the paths and she plants the flowers,’ as I used to say of them.
The distinctions between home and art weren’t always easy for a boy to make out. When I decided to be helpful and stew some rhubarb, IHF was appalled. I was informed that the stems by the pink bridge dedicated to painter Claude Lorrain were, in fact, ‘sacred rhubarb’. This distinguished them from the kitchen variety, which grew out of sight of visitors in the donkey’s paddock. How was I supposed to know pudding ingredients were integral elements in a composed landscape?
Most people view the world through the varied windows of home, car, office or studio. But once agoraphobia descended, in the late 1950s, IHF’s home was his world. The garden he made at Stonypath was not a plan, or a whim, but a necessity, and a world. Soon after he met Sue, in 1965, she helped him escape a bedsit in Fettes Row, Edinburgh, where he had use of an attic room to make his first toys. That May they ran away to Ardgay, on the Dornoch Firth. There, at Gledfield Farmhouse, IHF could fish, manage wee evening walks, take in the horizon of low hills and begin to construct his first garden – with ‘a real pond, with real cement: the rain is filling it with real water’, as he wrote to his friend the art historian Stephen Bann. Sue used to bump into the actor James Robertson Justice in the local post office, and there were visits from poets including the Austrian Ernst Jandl, and the Americans Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson, who made a famous lemon meringue pie. IHF was always better pals with literary figures from outwith Scotland.
I was born in March 1966. And then disaster. As the poet seemed to have no ‘job’, the kilted laird requested he lend a hand to muck out the stables. This precipitated our flight south to Stonypath, as IHF rebelled against the presumption he should drop his real work – on the new garden, or Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology – and take on such mundane labour. IHF was never required to do anything, by anyone, ever. Depending on others to such a great degree because of his illness, which he redefined as ‘exile’, he felt it impossible to be depended on. He had charm and an implacable will that drew others to protect him, desperate he should feel secure, and, together with Sue, they had the generosity to share their garden with anyone who wished to come.
Alec Finlay
https://www.worldofinteriors.com/story/ian-hamilton-finlay-stonypath-scotland
Sea Flower CY22, Young Alec LH166 , Hawthorn LH25, Wayside Flower II BH65, 1995
Four Waystones
Keith Bailey
“Emerging from the huff we see four milestones, each wit a boat name and number, from Castlebay, Leith, Blyth and Hull, encouraging us to set sail. Finlay’s son, Young Alec, is embowered in blossom”
Jessie Sheeler, Little Sparta Guide Book, 2015
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p.s. Hey. This weekend you get a total treat courtesy of a guest-post by _Black ‘Ben Robinson’ _Acrylic that devotes the blog’s time and space to an extant sculpture garden/artwork by the sublime cult artist/poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. The place looks lovely, and Ben’s post certainly is, so entrust your local devotion therein, please, and give a shout to your guest-host if you’re drawn in that direction. Thank you, and ever so many thanks to you, Ben. ** scunnard, It is funny and proof that my amusement park curiosity knows no bounds. ** Charalampos, The Book Exchange, yes, that sounds right. Sounds like a heck of a solo party. Might try that. Hi back from continuingly strangely temperate Paris. ** Carsten, my blog aims to be the ultimate travel agency. I’ve seen a doc about Woodstock ’99, not sure if it was that one, but, yes, it made Altamont seem like a virgin. Pop/rock culture was at a major sucking low back then. Like Altamont is considered the official end of the 60s, I think that Woodstock might well have been the official end of Rock ‘n’ Roll as a predominate force. But, yes, other than the bands themselves, fascinating. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks in person for what’s up above, Ben! ** lotuseatermachine, Hi. I just followed you back on Instagram not five minutes ago. For me, a bunch of the most exciting fiction and poetry right now is being made by trans authors of both stripes. I see something really vital and even innovative going on the work there, and I guess that’s where my feeling that ‘queer’ is in an upswing springs from maybe. Or I think it’s a new and activating queer cultural center perhaps. I’ve never been a bar person, so I’m not sure about where that’s at. I feel like there’s a kind of broadening, multiplicitous ‘queer’ scene/community happening at/around readings, or so seemed to be the case during recent visits of mine to LA and NYC. I feel a lot of possibilities right now even if I’m not sure if/how they’ll pan out. ** JL, Hey, agreed. Chris did a great job long ago that still holds up, obviously. ** Nicholas., Oh, yes, you should speak here however you wish. It’s all good. When I write to commenters here, I always feel as though I’m writing only to them, but I also know others can and do access the exchanges. There are lots of people who read the blog but don’t comments who talk about the commenters almost like they’re characters and the blog is a novel or something. I find that very interesting. ** Misanthrope, Man, hopes however faint that the asshole in change has a charge of heart or a revelation, but such things are sparse these days. So sorry. I’ll be looking for you. ** julian, Hi. I forget, are you still mostly Chicago? I ask because, and I can’t say much about it yet, but ‘Room Temperature’ is going to screen in Chicago early-ish this fall. ‘Safe’ is collected in my short fiction book ‘Wrong’. I’m not sure if it’s still in-print. No, no plans for the early poetry books to be reprinted. Maybe someone will do a Collected Poems or something at some point, but I kind of doubt it. Haha, yeah, I get that bleak is no foreigner to you, okay. ** Justin D, Hey there, Justin, how you been? ‘Cold Water’, no, I’ll check it. The only Assayas I really like is ‘Irma Vep’. It would be nice to find another. Thanks. And I’ll try to addict myself to that Daniel Avery track, and thank you kindly for the fodder. ** tom, Cool, happy to have helped or happy to have facilitated Chris’s help. Ultra-solid reading there. Pursuing psychoanalysis as a profession (I’m guessing) or as a subject? ** Steve, Nice re: Houston rap, thank you. I saw that you were boiling there. ‘Prayers’ that it’s a blip. Chris Dankland has been known to pop in here on very rare occasions. Maybe he’ll find out that I reposted his thing and use that as a prompt to visit again. My weekend: My friend the writer Bruce Hainley is in Paris and we’re doing vegan dinner tonight. My friend and collaborator Ishmael Houston-Jones is going to pop through Paris and I’ll see him. I’m in the middle of trying to set up a couple of ‘RT’ screenings, and I’ll continue with that. I did interact with EZ-TV a bit, yes. Nice about the retrospective. I wonder how their work looks now. Have fun. ** Uday, Hi. Yeah, the blank page thing is very interesting. I think the fact that he has so little actual talent as an actor, imo, adds to that. I thought he was a dreary, hollow, tic-filled nothing in the Dylan film, but, yeah, people seem to think he was terrific, so that’s more fuel to the fire or lack thereof. Could be an interesting fiction character if I can keep interested in the idea maybe. Nick Drake, for sure. ** Chris KELSO, Hi, Chris. I def. look forward to seeing the film. It’s great how a finished film can erase all the problems that went on behind the shots. Fascinating. We need to look into the Scotland screening possibilities, yes. I’ll get on that. ‘His extended writing’ … what do you mean? I liked his writing in general a lot. I think he was a much greater writer than visual artist. Cool re: the book, and, gosh, thanks for sneaking ‘TMS’ in there. July ’26, it’s a date. Thank you! ** rewritedept, Yeah, it’s crazy, all that time. Spooky, but good. I’m much less interested in serial killer stuff these days, but I’m sufficiently intrigued to look into that case, of course, so thanks for the tip. Tricks are fine with me, relatively speaking. Just focused on film stuff now and for a while. Have the weekend of your wildest dreams. ** Alice, Hey, A. Okay, understood about why that book seemed appropriate. ‘The Wild Boys’ is my favorite Burroughs. Very interesting about your deep experience with Lain. Makes me want to re-see it even more. Never heard of ‘Boogiepop Phantom’, but I’ll make quick work of that ignorance, thank you. I’ll chase shenanigans too. I wonder where they’re hiding. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. Yeah I get that aspect of how it works, but I guess I mean there are so many people making them, and I wonder how one stands out enough to make things lucrative. Although I guess that, for instance, gay guys’ hunger for slutty or masturbating twinks with cute faces and fairly meatless bodies is gigantic. I could really see and even hear that old punk guy in detail in my mind. But I guess there are enough geriatric ’70s era punk bands out there still playing to pay the rent that it’s not so hard to imagine one of them moored on the sidewalks. ** Malik, Hey, hey, Malick. I was very happy to have had the inspiration to restore Chris’s paean to the great man. Congrats on the staged reading and the bug that built in you. Exciting, What’s the plan then, more auditions basically? ** Hugo, Excellent. Serious fingers seriously crossed for you and that grant. My books don’t have plots, and people who ask me about them want to know what their plots are, so, yes, I hate trying to describe my books to people whose eyes start glazing over after two seconds. Happy birthday a day late! I always try to forget my birthdays but then I usually end up in some funnish restaurant with friends trying to change the subject. ** Steeqhen, Yeah, I’ve mostly stuck to, say, ‘Resident Evil’ games by default. Not to say I don’t love ‘RE’. The most recent one was great. And have you arisen at a reasonable hour? ** BimboFagDoll, Hi, BFD. I saw your email in my box, thank you. I can be really slow with email/ correspondence, but I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Fine weekend to you in the meantime. ** Bill, Well, I know Chris is involved/behind that site XRAY. I’m not sure what else he’s doing. He’s a very good writer, so I hope he’s still doing that. You’re back in the orient, well, of course. That’s your most usual destination whence departing SF, I think? How did the gig go? How was the gig and/or I mean what did you do/play and how it did feel/come off? ** Corey, Hi, Corey! I was of course thinking about you during that recent big kerfuffle down there. Paris is strangely lovely. I was away in the States screening our new film in SF plus visiting LA. Every city needs a Village Voice and almost no cities have one anymore. Paris doesn’t, that’s for sure. Great prospective project, in other words. Poorly projected Nathaniel Dorsky is a seriously terrible idea, yikes. I’ll go investigate your Instagram and pass it on. Everyone, Corey has ‘a new Instagram for short weird videos that will probably end up getting edited into experimental films’, which is your cue to poke this and then, once you’re over there, poke ‘follow’. ** Right. I leave you in the very capable hands of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ben Robinson, and I will see you again on Monday.
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