RCAHMS Centenary Workshops

The workshop was opened by Dr Margaret Mackay who identified three objectives for the day:

1. To Explore a range of materials and approaches;
2. To identify research areas and questions; and
3. To help make connections for potential collaborations.

The first speaker, Robin Turner of the National Trust for Scotland, outlined the development of the European Landscape Convention and its significance for the management of cultural landscapes in Scotland. To this end landscape is defined as 'an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors'. The convention recognises that change is an inevitable and an ongoing process, and the speaker contended that we are even now redesigning our contemporary landscape. If change is to be sensibly managed to the benefit of posterity, research is required on a wide range of issues. These can be briefly summarised under five headings:

1. Identification and recording — acquisition of knowledge
2. Values and benefits — acquisition of understanding
3. Strategic planning — managing change
4. Public awareness and participation — involving people
5. Building on best practice — sharing experience in a global context

The speaker then illustrated these with mainly NTS projects and how these informed current management practice, ranging from palaeoenvironmental research to Historic Landuse Assessment and Scotland's Rural Past.

Dr Gary West followed with a presentation on oral testimony and its potential to explain aspects of the countryside and its history. Two approaches were identified, one using existing testimony, in which the process of collection is beyond the control of the interrogator, and the other creation of new records, in which the interrogator is in control and setting the agenda. The term oral testimony was used to embrace two strands, oral history being first hand witness to knowledge or events, and oral tradition the retrospective verbal account of an event, structure or process; while in general historians might prefer the former, and folklorists the latter, he contended that historians needed to embrace both. He suggested that historical sources tended to focus on changes or events rather than on the process of continuity, the latter heavily bound up in tradition. To get the best from oral tradition and oral history requires that they are used in tandem.

Simon Green presented a case study of the way in which the evolution of two estates — Kinloch on the island of Rum and The Glen near Innerleithen, Peeblesshire — had impacted on the landscape. At Kinloch a major house of no great architectural merit had been erected by a wealthy industrialist as the focus of a sporting estate with little interest in other estate buildings. At the Glen wealthy industrialist had set out to create a family seat, building an important Bryce house (1854) but with a philanthropic ethos that also saw investment in other buildings on the estate; the family still reside at the Glen, albeit in the service wing and exploiting the commercial potential of the house and its policies. Drawings and photographs from various collections in the archive were combined with more recent survey work to illustrate the importance of integrated approaches to historic collections and modern survey to record and understand the landscape.

John Harrison focused on approaches to vernacular buildings and their role in the landscape, taking as an example the houses of the 'elite'. He pointed out the discrepancy between the numbers of houses of the elite recorded by survey when set against those that might be anticipated from the documentary record. This was not to challenge the key role played by active recording programmes, characterised as looking at houses, but suggested that there was also a vital need for documentary studies looking for houses. He demonstrated the huge potential of documentary sources to expand the understanding and interpretation of the landscape; examples ranged from the understanding of the composition of townships recorded by survey, to the shift of the geography of power in the parish of Eddleston, Peeblesshire, and the professionalisation of the building trade from the 17th century and its implications for the countryside.

Christina Noble, Alice Beattie, Dot Chalmers and John Macdonald presented a case study of what can be achieved by a recording project based in the community. They traced the origins of the study of their home parish of Cairndow at the head of Loch Fyne, Argyll, and the range of material they have drawn together, with old photographs, maps, drawings, oral testimony and new photographs. Not only did they reveal a remarkable, ongoing, record of their landscape, but also a community engaged with its past to create the platform from which to participate in the decisions that will affect its future.

Professor John Hume's presentation on transport in the countryside pointed out that existing literature has tended to focus on the mode of transport, covering vehicles (and vessels) and routes. He suggested that it was important to couple the form and evolution of transport systems with the wider role of transport in relationship to human settlement and the ways in which this might relate to, and indeed alter, the countryside. He indicated that the very construction of such a narrative required new research, and that such an approach opened up other avenues, for example, to explore the relationships between the remains of different types of transport systems and settlement patterns, population shifts, administrative structures and the creation and distribution of wealth.

Dr Jeanne Cannizzo explored the representation of landscape in art and photography. The landscapes are multivocal, they have biographies, they embody relationships and construct identities. The images are not neutral, and many represent a shorthand critique of contemporary attitudes, but used with oral history and texts they provide an important source of insight beyond any factual content into a sense of space and place. Examples reflecting tourism on Loch Katrine and the projection of Sir Walter were discussed. Research areas that were identified included: being in the countryside and the engagement in the processes of the countryside, exploring for example the relationships between historic and contemporary views of the same scene; building on Ingold's concept of a taskscape to create new graphic maps of the human experience, for example soundscapes; and world heritage sites and their relationships to local practices.

Sarah Parkinson outlined the history of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park and some of the research that had been undertaken to audit the landscape of the park and evaluate its benefits and values. The objective was to bring together both specialists and the community to identify what they value about the park, what makes it special and where there are gaps in knowledge, in order to feed these into a Park Plan to manage and develop the resource. The approach is geared to landscape and focuses on the cultural landscape, biodiversity and geology. The work revealed large gaps in knowledge, including a lack of architectural and archaeological survey, a weak understanding of the cultural associations of the landscape, the lack of detail inherent in the Historic Landuse Assessment and the lack of information relating to unpublished historical sources. Future research topics are aimed at filling some of the gaps in knowledge that have been identified; expanding cultural knowledge; the history of individual settlements and the settlement pattern; medieval and later rural settlement; vernacular architecture; transport history; and routeways.

Anne Bethune presented the work of the Dunbeath Preservation Trust, another initiative based in the community but working with a wide range of local and national bodies — the latter include RCAHMS who have worked in partnership with the Caithness Archaeological Trust in a new survey of the Yarrows. The trust concentrates on the archaeology and history of Caithness and is playing a vital role in the schools, helping teachers to develop their own curriculum in ways that engage the children with the surrounding landscape and its history. The engagement of the children, the community and the past was self-evident in the faces of the children of Keiss, working on a project relating to the local brochs. This emphasises the potential for community-based groups, even though working on a shoestring, to connect the past, the present and the future in ways that the national bodies struggle to achieve.

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Morning session — Chaired by Dr Margaret Mackay

• John Hume — asked if each of the speakers could identify one topic for research.
• Simon Green — identified sporting estates as a theme, what they involved and what was their effect upon an existing landscape and its evolution thereafter.
• Christina Noble — identified the ways in which house building was affected by landownership; the impact of large estates on house-building patterns.
• Robin Turner — identified the intangible dimension of peoples values for landscape or countryside.
• John Harrison — identified building materials in relation to vernacular buildings; where have they come from, were they accessed by right, were they self-built or bought, how important were aesthetic considerations and what happens once the lifespan of the building is finished.
• Margaret Mackay — mentioned the unpublished work of Basil Megaw on creel houses which could be taken further.
• Gary West — emphasised the importance of recording people doing things and the contexts within which they were done. He applauded the approach of the Cairndow project, and emphasized the importance of involving children.
• Diana Murray — suggested that training in one discipline needs to have links that lead to work in other disciplines. There should be more cross-disciplinary working, with a pooling of knowledge and skills to ensure that everyone benefits from the information contained in the wide variety of resources from artefacts to oral history.
• Sarah Parkinson — identified the problems for curators of accessibility to and awareness of research and sources.
• Noel Fojut — suggested that people are more interested in the things around them than highly focused expert-led research, but pointed out the difficulties of assembling funding for community and local heritage groups. He indicated that national bodies needed to work together so that local groups can tap resources more easily. Funding needs to be made available to foster the abundant enthusiasm that can be found in the countryside; umbrella groups such as BEFS are very important.
• Donald MacLeod — The Centre for Research into Regional Development (www.crred.org.uk) is happy to help groups to network regarding current information and research.
• Susanna Wade-Martins — emphasised the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, for example the use of archive photography as stimuli in the gathering of oral testimony.
• John Hume — emphasised the importance of being visible in the international landscape; there needs to be a central fund to help people from throughout the research and curatorial community to participate in international events, and raise the Scottish profile within the global society.

Afternoon session — Chaired by Dr Margaret Mackay

• Richard Tipping — observed that all the participants worked in the same place - the landscape - but we all measure different attributes, and suggested that there were difficulties in how we talk to each other and the meaning of the vocabularies that we use. He also asked Robin Turner and Sarah Parkinson about the 'democratisation' of the decision-making process; there must be conflicts between users, communities and specialists, but how are these resolved.
• Sarah Parkinson — indicated that there was no need for conflicts to arise in the process of establishing values, but that process would help identify where the conflicts would lie.
• Robin Turner — emphasised that value is in the eye of the beholder, and that this means that every individual's view should be taken into account and respected. This does not mean that that view should prevail. The consultation was a process of democratisation, it was an aspiration of government.
• Piers Dixon — observed that some of the difficulties in the implementation of National Scenic Areas could be attributed to a failure of the consultative process with local communities.
• Diana Murray — observed that one of the strongest themes that had emerged throughout the day was the role of local communities and the work they were carrying out.
• Antonia Thomas — ESSENCE project at Orkney College seeks to link a wide range of researchers locally and nationally and build multi-disciplinary approaches to bridge gaps between natural and cultural research programmes.
• Bob Powell — reiterated the importance of community involvement and proposed that the workshop could be reconvened at some point in the future and linked into other community groups.
• John Hume — Observed that in the way that Walter Scott (Cannizzo) and Neil Gunn (Bethune) had given us new views of their worlds, so the local case studies were generating new views of the landscape. He indicated that we needed to redefine the links between local and supra-local perspectives. He echoed a general feeling that the day had been less about taking a research agenda forward, so much as gathering views from which research agendas could be formulated. The next step needed to focus on gathering together lists of research questions.
• Lesley Ferguson — Drew the participants attention to the web site and expressed RCAHMS's wish that the discussion page there would serve as an intermediate step in gathering wider views and research questions.
• Sarah Parkinson — emphasised the importance of ensuring that knowledge once gained is disseminated, and making research results accessible; ensuring that the work of universities etc. is available to all members of the community and interested bodies (Sarah Parkinson).
• Margaret Mackay — indicated that institutions needed to help with the knowledge gap and help to put people in touch for mutual benefit.
• Elaine Edwards — in response to the suggestion that the long term preservation of some locally derived archives may be at risk, she mentioned the Scottish Life Archive as a resource that was available in the National Museum and had an interest in ensuring that such material was not lost.
• Gary West — stressed the holistic aspects of recording oral tradition, how to ensure that today's children continue to view this as an important aspect of learning, and that the local is as important as the global. The recording of the present for the future is as important as the recording of the past for the present.
• Anne Bethune — noted that the speeches of politicians praising national institutions often did a disservice to small local bodies. She noted that Highland Archaeology Week was now one of the biggest events in the calendar and stemmed from the local. She indicated how local people were put off by the mountains of paperwork that were often involved in raising funds to get projects up and running, and the continual change of the systems. Small organisations needed to feel that they could contribute as equals.
• Noel Fojut — observed that the priorities of national organisations are set by ministers. The question is how can local community groups to get their message across ministers most effectively; as a whole they are multi-tongued, and none of them are sufficiently loud or distinct to be heard above the babble.
• Diana Murray closed the discussion with thanks to Margaret Mackay for chairing the sessions and asked the participants to contribute thoughts, however brief, to the discussion page of the web site.

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Themes of the day

Acquisition of knowledge was a theme that consistently emerged throughout the day, both to fill perceived gaps and to fill out datasets to allow better understanding. The corollary of the identification of gaps is the auditing of existing published datasets, and the potential of unpublished sources.

Holistic approaches and multi-/inter-/cross-disciplinary working were also recurring themes. This was not about, for example, the use of scientific techniques as an adjunct to cultural landscape projects, but about widening the whole scope of enquiry into the landscape.

Research into the values that are attached to landscape recurred in the presentations. Introduced in relationship to the European landscape convention, it was an important strand in the work in the Loch Lomond National Park, it was present in the sense of space and place of historic and contemporary landscape imagery, and was implicitly embedded in the case studies in Cairndow and Dunbeath. The exploration of the intangible dimension of landscape.

The importance of community-based work recurred throughout the day. This was evident in the process of recording knowledge in the community-based case-studies and the investment of knowledge in the community, particularly in the schools, but it played through into the development of landscape values, space and place, and holistic approaches to recording oral testimony.

Knowledge transfer was an issue, rather than a research theme. Nevertheless, there was a clear requirement that knowledge derived from all forms of the research needs to be easily accessible. It is needed to inform the development of best practice in landscape management by curators, but it is also needed to support other research programmes in the institutions and the community.

Specific Research Areas

• Peoples' values within the landscape and countryside, and how these values have been respected by planners and the legislature. How to protect the intangible. Knowledge of special qualities and involving communities in the decision-making process is the best tool for managing change. (Robin Turner)
• Recording the present for the future is as important as recording the past for the present. This requires holistic approaches but can be taken forward at both the local and the national scales. (Gary West)
• Vernacular building types (Sarah Parkinson), but also much wider research into materials used in their construction; where have they come from, were they accessed by right, were they self-built or bought, how important were aesthetic considerations and what happens once the lifespan of the building is finished. This spans both field and documentary research. (John Harrison)
• The sporting estate; how the dynamics of these estates created a dramatic change in the landscape and to the local economy; its social impact. Stress the importance of looking at buildings within the landscape as one entity, not just isolated buildings (Simon Green and Margaret Mackay). By extension, the role of other estates in the countryside is an important theme.
• Space and place in the countryside. Being in the countryside and the engagement in the processes of the countryside, exploring for example the relationships between historic and contemporary views of the same scene and peoples reactions to them; building on Ingold's concept of a taskscape to create new graphic maps of the human experience, for example soundscapes; and world heritage sites and their relationships to local practices. (Jeanne Cannizzo)
• The role of transport in the countryside throughout human history. The relationships between the remains of different types of transport systems and settlement patterns, population shifts, administrative structures and the creation and distribution of wealth. (John Hume)

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