RCAHMS Centenary Workshops

The European Landscape Convention has finally been signed, ratified and brought into force in the UK, but what does it mean for Scotland? Following a whistle-stop tour of the Convention and its recent history, plus an introduction to the Scottish Landscape Forum, I will briefly examine some examples of managing landscape-scale change of places in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. I will then go on to look at some of the issues associated with the ways we understand and care for landscapes in Scotland, considering such things as: setting; evaluating landscapes; dealing with multiple values; fuzzy boundaries; and developing the toolkit for making decisions about landscape change.

The European Landscape Convention challenges us all to think more deeply and broadly about caring for our landscapes. If we are to rise to that challenge we will have to change the way we think about landscape, and we will need to work hard, together, to work out how to do the best for one of the nation's greatest assets.

Biography

Born in Edinburgh, Robin Turner studied archaeology at Southampton University under Colin Renfrew. Graduating in 1977, he spent 9 years with Essex County Council as a Field Archaeologist, then 6 years as Principal Field Archaeologist with West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, running commercial field operations.

Robin became the first NTS Archaeologist in 1993. He leads a team of five full-time NTS archaeologists, and is responsible for the archaeology of the Trust's South Region.

Robin is also an active member of the wider archaeological and historic environment community. He is Vice Chair of the Built Environment Forum Scotland and of the SCAPE Trust, and a trustee of the Historic Rural Settlement Trust. He was Honorary Editor of Discovery and Excavation in Scotland from 1996 to 200?, and has been an ex officio member of the management team of the Council for Scottish Archaeology for the past 10 years. Recently Robin has been an active member of the Scottish Landscape Forum, in particular looking at the implementation of the European Landscape Convention in Scotland.

Robin has a broad interest in the archaeology and built heritage of Scotland, and has special interests in the archaeology of standing buildings and of gardens, the coastal and marine historic environment, and the care of Scotland's landscapes. He was one of the leaders of the promotion of the forthcoming Heritage Audit of Scotland, and led the team that saw the World Heritage status of St Kilda extended to include the cultural landscape. Robin is committed to the involvement of volunteers and of local people in the conservation and appreciation of Scotland's historic environment.

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The term 'oral testimony' includes the products of both 'oral history' and 'oral tradition'. This paper will argue that there is an important distinction to be drawn between these two concepts, that they must not be confused (although they often are), and that careful and informed use of both can bring rich pickings in any investigation of the Scottish countryside. The paper will begin with a brief theoretical discussion of the concept of 'tradition' within this context, and will then present some empirical examples.

Drawing mainly on material collected within his native Perthshire, Dr West will discuss ways in which oral testimony can be used to complement other data sources such as estate records, local newspaper accounts, government and legal records and material culture. In what specific ways can the use of oral testimony help to illuminate our rural past? Are there problems associated with interpretation of oral data? What of the fallibility of the human memory? Such questions are often asked of the oral historian, and shall be briefly addressed here. The conclusion, however, is that while both collection and analysis must be undertaken with rigour, the use of oral source data can and should play a highly positive role in our investigations of the countryside.

Biography

Dr Gary West is a Senior Lecturer in Scottish Ethnology at the University of Edinburgh. His teaching and research interests include Scotland's rural history, the theory and practice of oral history, the study of cultural representation and traditional music. He has published a number of essays and articles on these topics, and his book on Perthshire's rural history was recently published by the Edwin Mellen Press (An Historical Ethnography of Rural Perthshire, 1750-1950). Dr West is also an active musician and presents the weekly piping programme, Pipeline, on BBC Radio Scotland.

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This paper will compare and contrast two estates using the RCAHMS collections: Kinloch Castle Estate, a sporting estate designed to be used only in the shooting season, which encompasses the whole of the island of Rum in the Inner Hebrides; and The Glen Estate in Peebleshire, developed as the principal country house of a wealthy industrialist complete with farms, stables and productive gardens as well as shooting and fishing. This paper will demonstrate how the RCAHMS collections can inform the study of the Scottish landscape on a wide variety of levels.

Biography

After graduating from Edinburgh University and a scholarship in Philadelphia with the United States Park Service, Simon Green worked as a vernacular buildings surveyor for the National Trust in the Lake District. This was followed by work as a researcher for The Buildings of Scotland Research Unit working on the Glasgow and Dumfries and Galloway volumes. On joining the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland he worked in the National Monuments Record and is now an architectural historian in the Survey and Recording Division doing architectural fieldwork throughout Scotland.

Simon is Chairman of the National Trust For Scotland's Architecture Advisory Panel and the Honorary Secretary of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. He sits on the planning panels for the Cockburn Association and the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland Forth and Borders Group.

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The study of Scots vernacular buildings over the last century or more has been mainly concentrated on description and survey of surviving upstanding buildings - albeit sometimes ruinous or semi-ruinous. Inevitably the higher-status buildings - for example tower-houses or stone doocots - have received more attention than the humbler cottages; the most ephemeral such as allotment huts have been largely ignored. Work on farm buildings is particularly urgent, given continuing rapid changes in farming practice, but all Scotland's vernacular buildings except the highest status or exceptional, are under threat of one kind or another. Those descriptions and surveys - the best clearly relating structure to function - must be the basis of work for the future. That said, it would be very useful to have more integrated regional studies and more synthesis, to have a fuller national overview and more comparison with related types elsewhere, in northern Europe for example. There has been some work on building materials (not all published) but again, a fuller overview than anything yet available would be very useful. Equally pressing, it will be suggested, is to integrate the study of upstanding buildings with the insights to be gained from archaeology and from documentary studies. Such studies are the only way to understand how typical the survivors are and to gain any understanding of their lost antecedents of the medieval and early modern past.

Biography

John G Harrison is a graduate of the Universities of Glasgow and of Stirling. For some twenty years he has been a freelance historian, conducting research for (inter alia) RCAHMS, Historic Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage. He has published on issues ranging through landscapes to both urban and rural vernacular buildings whilst his paper on the punishment of 'scolding' women included some vividly 'vernacular' language. His interest in vernacular buildings grew out of his work on Stirling and the Stirling area in the early modern period and the realisation of the potential for documentary evidence to illuminate the past, including its vernacular buildings, their evolution, structure and use. He is a former chair of the Scottish Vernacular Buildings Working Group.

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Nearly a decade ago, the Here We Are community project created a large map of the parish of Cairndow, Lochfynehead marking every building including ruins. This led to research into occupancy, drawing on voters roles and censuses, and illustrated by old photographs. Success in collecting photographs led to a Lottery-funded digitization and cataloging project, which in turn has fed into an ongoing exploration of the interaction between the houses and the people who lived in them.

The project demonstrates how communities can work together with support from local government in order to bring to life the unfolding history of their built environment and in turn give the local people self-confidence and control over their future.

Biographies

Christina Noble; project director Here We Are; originator of HWA concept and community member.

Alice Beattie; Board member of HWA: without her local history expertise HWA would not be where it is today; she collected data on the residents of the houses from census and other local records and is the memory behind many of the stories

Dot Chalmers; project leader Our Houses,Their Stories; archivist, researcher and collator of the photographs, and designer of the Our Houses exhibition.

John Macdonald; Vice chair of HWA; local builder and technical information provider for the project.

All four have lived in Cairndow all their lives, and have been involved with HWA since its inception.

Downloads

• Our Houses Presentation (Powerpoint, 46Mb)

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One can disentangle several strands in the role of transport in the countryside. There is the relatively permanent movement of people and their personal belongings into, out of, or within the countryside. There is the movement of equipment. Then there is the use of transport to move goods into, out of, or around the countryside on a regular or continuing basis. Finally, there is the transient movement of people into, out of, or around the countryside.

The extent to which these processes are documented is very variable, but there can be no doubt that they are critical to an understanding of the nature of life in Scotland (as a subset of human life as a whole). It is, however, easy to gloss over them, as difficult to quantify, or too fail to see them as significant - to take them as 'given'.

As far as can be ascertained, there is no narrative account of the nature of these processes as a framework for a research agenda. The first part of the paper constructs such a narrative. There is much published material, and publication is active. Much of the literature is, however, is intended to appeal to enthusiasts for the physicality of transport: the vehicles (and vessels) and the routes which they used. These aspects of transport are not irrelevant, but to address these processes there is a need to re-examine this literature, and to look at other evidence.

The second part of the analysis reviews some of the sources for addressing issues which emerge from the narrative account. Finally it will be argued that there are some questions which cannot be answered conventionally, but which should be identified as important 'hanging' questions.

Biography

Professor John Hume has had a lifelong interest in transport, principally in Scotland, starting railways, trams and ships. In that context he served for nine years as chairman of the Scottish Railway Preservation Society, from 1967-76, and was involved in the early 1980s in founding the Scottish Maritime Museum.

He was a lecturer in economic history at the University of Strathclyde from 1964-1984, specialising in the history of science and technology, and in industrial archaeology. Between 1974 and 1976 he published three volumes on the industrial archaeology of Scotland, all of which included much material relating to transport. Subsequently he wrote several articles on Scottish road bridges. He was joint editor of the journal Transport History throughout its existence. He is joint author, with Colin Johnston, of a book on Glasgow's railway stations, and contributed the Scottish section to a book on Britain's Railway Heritage. His article on 'Transport and Towns in Victorian Scotland' in a collection of essays on Scottish Urban History is still the most comprehensive thing of its kind. More recently he has contributed several essays on transport themes to the European Ethnological Research Centre's Compendium of Scottish Ethnological Life and Society. He was for many years a member of the Inland Waterways Amenity Advisory Council and a founder of the Scottish Inland Waterways Association. He is the Scottish trustee of The Waterways Trust, and chairman of both the Trust's Scottish advisory board, and of the Lowland Canals User Group of British Waterways. From 1984 to 1999 he was an Inspector with what is now Historic Scotland, and in that capacity worked closely with the railway industry, especially with disused viaducts.

He is currently Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, and a member of the Academic Advisory Panel for the new Glasgow Transport Museum.

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Taking its title from the words of Queen Victoria on viewing the countryside around Blair Atholl, this paper draws upon paintings from the author's exhibitions entitled 'O!Caledonia: Sir Walter Scott and the Creation of Scotland' and 'Our Highland Home: Victoria and Albert in Scotland', as well as more recent photographic material. It explores themes such as how the countryside acts as a primary conveyor of both information and meaning; is a physical expression of cultural ideas; and embodies relationships, helps construct identity on many different levels and is thus sometimes a site of contestation.

More generally ideas about the differences between 'space' and 'place' will be examined while the need to research local practice and experience will be emphasized. Finally, suggestions on collections and sources for such research and some of the pitfalls and pleasures of using visual materials as both illustration and evidence will be addressed.

Biography

Dr Jeanne Cannizzo teaches anthropology at the University of Edinburgh where she teaches about material culture, the anthropology of art and ethnographic photograpy. She has curated three exhibitions for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, all of which have, to various degrees and in different ways, addressed the great affective powers of the 'countryside'.

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This paper outlines some of the issues and research questions relating to the management of the historic environment in Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, which lies on the Highland Boundary Fault and has a diverse cultural landscape with a range of historic landscapes, features, traditions and associations.

The paper briefly considers the purpose and aims of National Parks and its management priorities developed in partnership with local communities, agencies and other partners. These priorities generate research questions and survey requirements. The results of these inform future conservation work, plans and strategies, and underpin planning and management decisions. They also enhance public understanding and enjoyment of the Park's heritage. A prime example of such efforts is the Historic Land Use Assessment recently completed by RCAHMS and Historic Scotland. Additional research has been carried out by commercial operators in response to development and forestry proposals such as at Midross on the west shore of Loch Lomond and the native woodland restoration project at Loch Katrine.

This paper provides an opportunity to discuss the main drivers for change in the Park, management priorities for the next five to ten years, and the research questions these raise.

Biography

For the last four years, Sarah Parkinson has worked as Cultural Heritage Policy Officer at Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park Authority. Her main areas of work have been development of the cultural heritage and landscape aspects of the National Park Plan, including a study which worked with partners to evaluate the special qualities of the National Park, plus implementation of heritage projects and development of the Local Plan. Sarah Parkinson has a Geography degree from Glasgow University, and a postgraduate diploma in Town Planning. A member of the RTPI, she recently completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Architectural Conservation at Edinburgh College of Art. Previously, she worked for a range of organisations, principally in planning, project delivery including town centre enhancement schemes and urban conservation. This included three National Parks: Snowdonia National Park Authority, Exmoor National Park Authority and Loch Lomond and The Trossachs and local authorities: Watford Council, Ryedale Council and Gwynedd County Council. She has just returned from a secondment as Curator of Vernacular Buildings and Landscapes for the National Trust in the Lake District.

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"This is the way museums should be done, embedding the present in the past, and the past in the present, locally. Thank you."

Dunbeath Preservation Trust Visitor Book 26/07/07

Founded in 1986, by the late Ray Stanton Avery, The Trust researches and records pre- and historical Dunbeath, its development as a place and its people, setting Dunbeath in its wider Caithness, Scottish and international context. It disseminates the results through the Internet, and through activities such as talks and schools projects as well as exhibitions and displays in its Heritage Centre. This was first registered as a museum in December 2001 and is currently working towards Accreditation in June 2008.

This paper discusses the current strong archaeological focus on Caithness archaeology and in particular the Keiss Broch study and its embeddedment in the local school and community. This demonstrates the early and crucial role that DPT played in the setting up of the Caithness Archaeological Trust. In addition, Chapel Hill, an early Monastic site will be discussed, and how a program of archaeological and historical research involves the Trust, schools, volunteers, archaeologists and supportive funders.

Biography

Anne M. Bethune was born and educated in Wick before training and working as a teacher in Edinburgh. She changed tack in 1990, fulfilling a childhood ambition by graduating from University of Edinburgh with a Joint Honours degree in Archaeology and Scottish Ethnology. She now lives in Dunbeath where she is a registered crofter (and, yes, she does have sheep!). After graduating, she became an advisor to, then chairman of, Dunbeath Preservation Trust.

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