48 CONTEXT 189 : SEPTEMBER 2026 CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 45 The inspector-general Dryburgh Abbey. September. 10 am. Deserted. Light rain. Silence. Two unseen crows debate a point. Silence again. Spellbinding. The trees of the Earl of Buchan’s 200-year-old arboretum imbue Dryburgh with a special enchantment. In the shelter of the standing remains of the abbey church there is a plain, red, polished granite chest tomb. The minimal inscription reads, ‘Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, died September 21, AD 1832’. Given this self-chosen simplicity and seclusion, one does wonder what he would have made of Edinburgh’s memorial, the gothic extravaganza festooned with 68 statues of characters from his novels. Trivia question (you’ll thank me in a pub quiz some day): which two antiquaries provided stories for operas by Bizet? I have trailed one. Scott’s The Fair Maid of Perth scarcely survived her translation to the far-too-prosaic Jolie Fille and has had perhaps 50 performances ever. Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen scores possibly a quarter of a million. Scott is chasing with Rossini’s La Donna del Lago and Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor, but Mérimée wins by a distance. Scott was an antiquary of the old school. He collected historic artifacts with abandon, although he was a bit of a sucker for dubious provenances. His house at Abbotsford is still stuffed with them. In his novel The Antiquary (his self-declared favourite) the eponymous axial character, Jonathan Oldbuck, is a satirization of himself and his cronies. It seems plausible to assume that Mérimée styled himself on Scott. Scott was a generation older, but the parallels in both literary approach and antiquarian interests is strong, both seeing national heritage as cultural capital, and both using tangible and intangible historical contexts in their fiction. Mérimée translated Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor into French as La Famille Ashton and, as a polyglot polymath might, translated Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev and Spanish literature. Mérimée’s theretofore lacklustre literary career took off in 1829 when he discovered his metier: the novella, of which he was the first notable exponent. He did not, like Scott, aspire to a long and affectionate marriage. His bachelor lifestyle, in which the wives of illustrious men featured strongly, resulted once in his being runner-up in a duel. Nevertheless, this did mean that he knew a lot of influential people. In 1831 he started a meteoric rise through the civil service of the new bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Mérimée’s passion for heritage was shared by Louis-Philippe and by 1833 Mérimée was inspectorgeneral of historic monuments for France. There followed a 27-year career cataloguing and restoring France’s architectural heritage after decades of neglect, revolution and war. His approach to conservation – restore authentically without invention – aligns pretty well with modern practice, although his protege Viollet le Duc and other successors had more freestyle approaches. By the time of Mérimée’s retirement in 1860, having survived two turbulent regime changes, the official list of monuments historiques had fewer than 3,000 entries. This was because private owners, notably the church, could object to inclusion. Mérimée’s own survey list was much longer, and today the online Base Mérimée contains over 300,000 entries. Mérimée used his tours of inspection and travels abroad to collect ideas for his novellas. In several of these he employs a ‘frame narrative’ in which a narrator (say, a wandering archaeologist) hears a story from a person he meets. Many authors have used this device, one of them being Walter Scott in Old Mortality. Restoration of the great abbeys of the Tweed valley would never have been possible even in French hands, but modern 3D renderings help keep the cultural memory alive, as do Scott’s novels The Monastery and its sequel The Abbot. The eponymous monastery Kennaquhair is most commonly supposed, from its architectural description, to be based on Melrose Abbey. But the first paragraph of The Monastery specifically contrasts Kennaquhair with ‘the no less splendid establishments of Melrose, Jedburgh and Kelso’, and the rest of the description is a better fit for Dryburgh. So shall we let popular opinion have its way about Melrose? That leaves the enchantment of Dryburgh to me, you, Walter Scott and two crows. James Caird Mérimée: a passion for heritage In the land of the Votadini St Paul’s Church, Jarrow (Photo: John Armagh, Wikimedia) A conversation. Place: Newcastleupon-Tyne. Date: 1846. Participants: Robert Stephenson, engineer par excellence, who built railways and George Hudson, railway entrepreneur par infamie, who financed them, until his dodgy dealings caught up with him. Robert: ‘This Berwick railway will have to go pretty close to the castle keep. How much leeway can we get away with, do you reckon?’ George (indicating the length of a cricket bat): ‘Oooh! About so much?’ Robert: ‘All right. I think we can work with that.’ And thus it was. Those who attended this year’s Annual School in Newcastle, themed Adaptive Reuse, will have seen that ‘about so much’ at the castle subsequently became the norm for transport infrastructure in Newcastle. Mott, Hay and Anderson adopted it in the 1920s for the Tyne Bridge, which clears the buildings in Lombard Street with scarcely the headroom for a kittiwake to fly through. Developments adjacent to the 1970s Burns-Bradshaw Central Motorway have kept the tradition going. This is just adaptive reuse at city-wide scale, a phenomenon as old as cities themselves. Adaptive reuse has not been restricted to physical means of communication. Cablescapes now pervade the urban scene, with festoons of wires, both current and long redundant. We nostalgically incorporate vestigial transport infrastructure, like cobbles and tramlines, into revitalized streetscapes, so it is a shame that the railway lines that defined the energy of the Newcastle quayside 60 years ago have entirely disappeared. Fortunately I do not foresee entries in the statutory list ever including the likes of ‘various cables from the 1950s onwards, some zip-tied to downpipes’. The Metro stop Segedunum is also signed as ‘Wallsend’, and the bilingual Latin/English signage in the station is a nice touch. The Roman fort’s visitor centre, museum and viewing tower opened in 2000 following several years of archaeological work. The museum has a timeline video realization of the history of the site from preRoman to the present day, showing a long history of adaptive reuse: agriculture, coal mining, railways, housing, social infrastructure, ship building and back to Roman fort, or at least a ground-level layout of what had been where. There is a sotto voce background commentary on fort life in Latin; but was Latin in the land of the Votadini really spoken with an Italian accent? We are told that the cohorts once stationed at Segedunum came from all over the Empire. From Segedunum is a good view of the great swathe of concrete hardstandings of the former Swan Hunter shipyard that are again waiting for an adaptive reuse. With a riverside location and a nearby Metro stop, the prospects ought to be favourable. Three miles away, in Jarrow, on a site also chosen for its sea access – just 250 years after the Romans abandoned Segedunum – St Paul’s monastery was established by the Benedictines. The monastery had an eventful history of foundation and refoundation, sacking by both Viking and Scottish raiding parties, and ultimate closure with all the others in 1545. But the little church has survived it all. On entering the churchyard, the Saxon church is hard to spot behind its later extension. From Gilbert Scott’s spacious interior, in a refined early English of his own devising, the eye is led through the double arch under the central tower into the intimate space beyond, peacefully comfortable in its 1,300 year history. Here the masonry gives us reminders that adaptation is also necessary to keep buildings in the uses they were designed for. And what can one say about Seaton Delaval Hall? Unfinished. Burnt down. Partial restoration also unfinished. Periodically abandoned. More partial restoration. Reduced to a curiosity. It was designed by John Vanbrugh, serial over-estimator of clients’ needs and resources, the tercentenary of whose death was in March, and whose ‘rockstar baroque’ contrasts starkly with the economic engineering elegance of Stephenson. To Vanbrugh ‘about so much’ would have been at a very different kettle of fish. James Caird
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