The Dechmont Hierophany
On New Towns, UFOs and utopias.
Below is a piece I wrote last summer that I had wanted to improve somewhat as it’s a bit clunky in the way it splices its disparate material but I feel like it stands as a draft for a more developed work about New Town Utopias and the weird that may come to fruition one day.
Standing in the middle of the reservoir, it is nearly impossible to see beyond it. The undulating, worn concrete, a concave mirror of the overcast skies above but mottled with inscrutable glyphs in obscure languages. It is only the thrum of urethane that gives away the terrestrial use for this alien megastructure: as a skate park.
The true origin story of Livingston Skatepark for reasons unclear has hitherto been shrouded in secrecy. Mysterious forces have repelled its telling until now. The commonly accepted narrative is that the skate park was the brainchild of Iain Urquhart, an architect of leisure facilities for the Livingston Development Corporation. Just as the craze for skateboarding was peaking, Ian and his skateboarder wife, Dee, visited California to seek inspiration for their park in Livingston. Ian then went on to design one of the first bespoke skate parks, as part of a sports landscape. The architectural achievements of Iain Urquhart’s creation are not under any dispute but they belie a deeper history.
Just three miles north west of the site of Livingston skate park on the 9th November 1979, a forestry worker for the Livingston Development Corporation, Robert Taylor, was out on his rounds with his red setter Lara on Dechmont Law, checking fences and gates and looking out for stray cattle. He turned into a clearing and encountered what he described as a ‘flying dome’. Two spheres with protruding spikes emerged from within and dragged Taylor towards the dome. Hours later he came to, face down in the grass, his trousers torn and the mysterious entities nowhere to be seen. His truck would not start so he wandered home in a dwam. Upon arriving, his wife called the police on account of his dazed and dishevelled state. Returning to the site, the police found markings that were not from any known vehicle. Their report states that Taylor was assaulted by ‘persons or a person unknown.’
The Taylor Incident is the most high profile UFO encounter in Scotland. What is never questioned though, is why Livingston was a destination for these extraterrestrials. The much maligned crank Trotskyist, J. Posadas, believed that aliens would only voyage through the cosmos to observe other species rather than obliterate them. They must have already achieved an egalitarian society to be able to marshal their resources for interstellar travel. ‘If they exist,’ Posadas argued, ‘we must call on them to intervene, to help us resolve the problems we have on Earth.’ Livingston being a new town must have been of great interest to our cosmic comrades.
The New Towns Act of 1946 was legislation founded on utopian principles. In an impassioned speech to Parliament, the Minister of Town and Country Planning Lewis Silkin directly invoked Thomas More’s Utopia, boldly proclaimed that new towns should embody the ‘friendliness, neighbourliness, comradeship and the spirit of helpfulness’ only usually seen in the villages and the slums. Silkin fervently believed that the new towns ‘must be beautiful’ and that they presented ‘a grand chance for the revival or creation of a new architecture’ which would shape ‘a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride.’ Nowadays this grand chance is seen as a failure, a misguided paternalist experiment that never lived up to its bold egalitarian aims.
Such laudable aims would nevertheless have appealed to our alien anthropologists, who, seeing Livingston’s potential, decided to intervene, breaking good observational ethics. Its significant that the person that they presented themselves to was an employee of the Livingston Development Corporation, the quango that was responsible for all aspects of the new town: the provision of housing, leisure amenities and employment to create a cohesive community. ‘Livingston Development Corporation will undertake to make Livingston a self-contained vital and happy community of some 100,000 people enjoying all that is best of gracious living,’ as its chairman David Lowe put it to the Secretary of State for Scotland in its first annual report in 1962. By 1979, however, most of Livingston’s major infrastructure had been built and there was talk of winding up the corporation.
It was at this crucial juncture that through the conduit of Robert Taylor the galactic visitors bestowed the fruits of their advanced communist civilisation in the guise of Livingston Skate Park, fulfilling the promise of the New Town project. The nature of how this was precisely communicated remains opaque but the egalitarian credentials of their gift are undeniable. Aside from sowing the seed for Scotland’s most unique artefact of post-war architecture, it generated a space that embodies the ‘friendliness, neighbourliness, comradeship and the spirit of helpfulness’ that Silkin had made the cornerstone of his vision for New Towns.
In my skateboarding years, Livingston Skate Park was very much a utopian realm, a place so completely other, not governed by the same rules and principles that organised the rest of my existence. Here I met people from all different backgrounds on this same rippled concrete plane. We were not in competition but in comradeship. I was initiated by elders into the park’s elaborate workings, its instinctively discovered routes and strange rituals of appreciation (tapping your board when someone lands a trick). Such customs were not handed down from authority figures, they grew organically from the community that had blossomed in and around the park. The police very rarely visited; they would occasionally pass by on their rounds but they never seemed to care about the reek of weed smoke.
From a drone’s eye-view, the park must look like a self-regulating organism, insects moving across the surface in formation with some ineffable purpose, a Gaian marvel of nature’s ingenuity. To those with a higher vantage, it may appear to be the detritus of a roadside picnic, or a monolith promising a social revolution yet to come.
***
Just six years before it was disbanded in 1997, the Livingston Development Corporation erected a plaque at the site of Robert Taylor’s encounter. West Lothian Council, Livingston’s new administrative guardians, added a waymarked path and a more thorough information board at the site in 2018. After reading a news story gently mocking what the writer perceived as a somewhat barmy use of public funds, I took it upon myself to lead an expedition to this most sacred place, one year shy of the encounter’s fortieth anniversary.
In her extraordinary book American Cosmic, the religious studies scholar Diane Pasulka describes being taken to a UFO crash site and calling it a sacred place ‘because it marked the location where it is believed that nonhuman intelligence revealed itself to humans. In my field the word that describes the kind of event is hierophany.  A hierophany is a manifestation of the sacred.’ We had ventured to Dechmont Law in the hope of bearing witness to a similar site where the sacred briefly manifested from an extraterrestrial realm. Following the posts marked ‘UFO TRAIL’ through the woodland, remarkably verdant for early November, we arrived at the landing site. In a vain effort to summon the ghosts of the beings that visited in 1979, I played The Internationale on a music box then read from Alexander Bogdanov’s poem ‘A Martian Stranded on Earth’ which relates the travails of a Martian coming to terms with spending the rest of his life on earth after his ship crash lands. The creature laments of the benighted humans he now has to live with:
The harmony of life is outside their ken
Though their souls swarm with hazy ideas,
The inherited past is lord of these men;
It has ruled them for so many years.
Their infantile babble and rapacious desires
Veil all but a rare flash or spark
Of other dreams and passions that vaguely aspire
To a culture that glimmers afar.
While this improvised ritual was being played out, the King Charles Spaniel that was part of our expedition team was running manically round the zone, yelping in either fear or delight.
