Author Archives: frasermacdonald

Engineering in the Highlands: Kishorn Yard

Written by

Here’s some interesting old footage on the development of the original Kishorn Yard, a debate that has recently been re-ignited by the bid to use the site for the construction of onshore wind turbines.

Skip to 8:00 if you want to see Brian Wilson sporting his prog-rocker wind-cossetted mane. Or, more likely, skip to 8:40 if you’d rather not.

You can watch the second part here.

I love Kishorn and think it’s one of the most beautiful places on the western seaboard. Looking back, I don’t think that the Howard Doris yard was the disaster that many felt it might be, however ungenerous the consortium were in their cavalier approach to the planning process.

 

After the the remediation of the site, you would hardly know that this was where Scotland built the largest object ever to float – Ninian platform – which, whatever we might think of oil and its legacies, was quite a feat of engineering.

The Gravity of Hugh Miller

Written by

There are certain places that prove quite irresistible. We can find ourselves under a compulsion to know or inhabit or encircle a particular site.

I am enlivened by one such place; I pass it daily and often feel its pull. It is an unlikely spot: the Istanbul kebab shop at 80 Portobello High Street.

Some time ago this building was known by a different address, by a different appearance and for the renown of its celebrated occupant, whose name is no longer met with universal recognition.

‘Shrub Mount’, as Istanbul was then called, was the Portobello home of the eminent Victorian geologist, editor and writer Hugh Miller.

It was to this building he escaped from the stresses of editing a national newspaper, The Witness – it then outsold The Scotsman – and where he retreated to study in the private museum he had built in the grounds of a once extensive garden.

The bounds of this property are now unwittingly marked by the daily ebb of parents discharging their children at the adjacent Towerbank Primary School. These ordinary residential streets give little indication of the histories that precede them.

Hugh Miller was one of the most important figures in nineteenth century science. A correspondent of the preeminent scientific figures of his day, from Louis Agassiz to Charles Darwin, he was also a leading proponent of the ecclesiastical Disruption that saw the formation of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843.

In his Edinburgh life, he was close to the other Disruption ‘worthies’ – Thomas Chalmers, William Cunningham and James Begg – at a time when the young Free Church was brimful of intellectuals.

Miller, however, never quite fitted in with either his scientific or ecclesiastical contemporaries. He didn’t look like them, nor did he sound like them. He eschewed urban fashions for the heavy woollen plaid, a knowing self-presentation as the outsider that was famously captured in the stills of David Octavius Hill.

Steeped in the folklore and superstitions of his native Cromarty, Miller had left school at 14 to become an itinerant stonemason and had educated himself through reading, corresponding and by closely observing ‘the testimony of the rocks’.

His rise from wayfaring workman to scientific luminary, brilliantly narrated in his bildungsroman memoir My Schools and Schoolmasters, is a canonical story of nineteenth century Scotland.

Miller’s modest origins in combination with his forthright politics meant he was often rejected by the scientific establishment. The University of Edinburgh, for instance, turned him down for the Chair in Natural History – a position for which he was more than qualified.

Hugh Miller was subject to depressive episodes and periodic ill health throughout his life. In the spring of 1839, his beloved daughter, Eliza, died aged two. For this firstborn child, he made his last work of masonry – a headstone for her grave in the kirk of St Regulus, Cromarty.

There is a page about Eliza’s death in My Schools and Schoolmasters where Miller does not give her name but writes only of ‘a little girl’. Thereafter, she becomes ‘it’: ‘it had left us for ever, and its fair face and silken hair lay in darkness amid the clods of the churchyard’.

In bereavement, even a pronoun can be too personal.  Still reeling from this loss, the family relocated to Edinburgh.

In time, the exchange of Marchmont and Jock’s Lodge for the seaside village of Portobello might have been something of a relief. In any case, Edinburgh’s east was already familiar to Miller from a spell of masonry work on Niddrie Marischal House twenty years earlier.

Demolished by the council in the 1930s to re-house families of slum clearance, Niddrie Marischal House was the seat of the Wauchope family.  It is now one of the more deprived places in Scotland.

Here the young Hugh Miller fashioned stone mullions for the windows of the big house. In the shadow of this same house he had also witnessed at first hand the widespread poverty of the Scottish colliers, some of whom, upon birth, had become the private property of the Wauchopes.

At Niddrie Mill, he described a ‘wretched assemblage of dingy, low-roofed, tile-covered hovels’, the occupants of which were ‘a rude and ignorant race of men, that still bore about them the soil and stain of recent slavery’.

This is classic Miller. Though he could recognise well enough the brutality of the system that produced such misery, it rarely softened his judgement of those thus emmiserated.

When Hugh Miller returned to Edinburgh in 1840 as the archetypal self-made man he had no desire to proclaim his ascent into respectability. Shrub Mount was, to be sure, no Niddrie Marischal.

He sought a quiet life, at a distance from his peers in science and religion.

He worked. This meant writing, walking and reading the landscape.

I imagine that being in Portobello would have been a welcome reminder of his beloved Cromarty, both being situated on the south side of grand eastern Firths. Miller could take his four children down to the beach; or fossil-hunting among the rocks at Joppa; or guddling for invertebrates in the Figgate burn.

Guddling was always purposeful. By such means, Miller worked out that the red clays of the Figgie burn – famed for the production of Portobello bricks – ‘must have been slowly deposited in comparatively tranquil waters’.

At an exposure from a local brick works  – a site near the old Roman road of the Fishwives’ Causeway – Miller found a bed of ancient shells. Though a long way inland, these were identified as Scrobicularia piperata, a distinctly intertidal species.

There was no mistaking the force of such evidence: the coastline had retreated. This land was once sea.  Edinburgh itself had to be re-imagined:

We are first presented with a scene of islands – the hills which overlook the Scottish capital, or on which it is built – half sunk in a glacial sea. A powerful current from the west, occasionally charged with icebergs, sweeps past them … and in the sheltered tract of sea to the east of the islets, amid slowly revolving eddies, the sediment is cast slowly down, layer after layer, the brick clays are formed along the bottom.

One can only suppose that an unveiling of this magnitude, one not always welcomed by his co-religionists, might have proved exhausting. Miller’s life and death have all too often been interpreted as a simple tension between a commitment to Biblical inerrantism on the one hand, and empirical science on the other – with the vexed question of evolution in the middle.

This is why – so the popular version goes – that one Christmas Eve, in his upper room at Shrub Mount, Hugh Miller scribbled a note to wife, lifted his fisherman’s jersey and shot himself through the heart.

Miller’s suicide cannot be so readily explained. A fuller account might point to his failing health, overwork or domestic unhappiness. It’s complicated; and ultimately unknowable.

It is fair to say that at the end he was haunted by the apparent gap between the natural and the supernatural, between mystery and revelation.

‘Last night I felt as if I had been ridden by a witch for fifty miles’ he told his doctor, ‘and rose far more wearied in mind and body than when I lay down’.

So convinced that he had been involuntarily abroad in the night, that he would check his clothing for signs of the journey.

All of this was, for those left behind, a reassuring mark of insanity – such was needed to exonerate the sin of suicide.

And then there is his desperate suicide note:

Dearest Lydia

My brain burns. I must have walked; and a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought. God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me. Dearest Lydia, dear children, farewell. My brain burns as the recollection grows. My dear, dear wife, farewell.

Hugh Miller

All of this happened in a room above Istanbul. And I feel the gravitational pull of this site, this centre of geo-logic calculation: a modest retreat for thinking, for reading and writing, for arranging the long history of the Earth, for life and love and family.

It is his life, not his death, that moves me.

 

What’s wrong with the SNH map of ‘core wild land’

Written by

Following my Against Scottish Wildness essay, I’ve been interested to see the discussion both at Bella Caledonia and on twitter, including a lively and well-mannered exchange between myself and the John Muir Trust.

I have now had a chance to address the ostensible object of this debate, namely the consultation over the Scottish Government’s National Planning Framework 3, Main Issues Report.

Riveting. I know.

But it is important. If the SNH designation of ‘core wild land’ is formally used to inform planning consent that could have significant repercussions for the ability of local people to use the natural resources at their disposal. It is a very imprecise tool to prevent the ‘wind-cities’ that so alarm the John Muir Trust. If you want to respond to this consultation you have to do so by Tuesday 23rd July.

Here is the SNH map and, further below, part of my formal response.

Scottish Planning Policy already safeguards areas of wild land character. Do you agree with the Scottish Government’s proposal that we use the SNH mapping work to identify more clearly those areas which need to be protected?

 

No.

Specifically, I want to take issue with sections 2.20 and 2.21: 

2.20 SNH has been updating its wild land mapping using modern GIS tools to provide a more objective approach to understanding wild land. Based on a number of attributes like naturalness of the land cover, ruggedness, remoteness from roads and the visible lack of modern man-made structures, SNH has published an updated map showing the ‘core’ areas of wild land in Scotland.

 

Most of what I want to say can be summed up thus: wildness is a human attribute that we ascribe to the landscape, not a quality that adheres in the landscape.

You cannot meaningfully objectify an element of human experience though SNH’s map seems to be the product of this misconception. All of this would be an arcane academic dispute were it not that such a map has the potential to limit the ways in which local people can use their own resources.

GIS is useful for many things but it would be an elementary error to say that because something is the outcome of GIS-based analysis it is then ‘objective’. My problem here is that claims to objectivity in this context are apt to conceal what is inevitably a political exercise. To designate land as ‘wild’, as this SNH mapping exercise does, is to privilege some attributes (ruggedness, remoteness etc) over others. In this way, the designation ‘wild’ brings into focus some elements of the landscape (for example scenery that conforms to a sublime aesthetic) at the expense of others (its toponymy or storyable properties; its productive potential). Unavoidably, this is a judgment about what we value and what we like; it couldn’t be otherwise. My concern is less that such judgments are made than that they are being concealed behind a veil of apparent objectivity. Any claim to objectivity in this regard is simply unfounded.

To comment on the methodology (pdf here) risks obscuring my more fundamental critique of the research design and framing. But let me draw attention to some other difficulties.

    1. For such a politically sensitive task – categorising which land can have development and which not – it is surprising that the methodology does not appear to have been subject to peer review. Claims to rigour would be more credible if it had been scrutinised by academic referees for a journal like Landscape Research or Scottish Geographical Journal.
    2. I can find no explanation or justification as to why these four attributes (perceived naturalness; ruggedness; remoteness; lack of visible development), and not others, were selected. What counts as ‘wild’ – and thus what can be used a proxy indicator of ‘wildness’ – is inherently subjective, though this sort nuance is lost amid much bluster about the ‘robust approach’. Imagine if SNH had used evidence of placenames from the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps from the 19th century, newly digitized by the National Library of Scotland. A very different picture of Scotland would emerge of an intimately known, named and storied landscape that runs quite against the grain of its apparent ‘wildness’.
    3. Plainly any model or analysis is only as good as the judgements that go into it. GIS itself confers no rigour or authority; it simply calculates whatever variables are set. Much of the important evidence for human-environment relations – the oral tradition, for example – does not come in any form that is commensurate with GIS analysis. If you exclude many traces of human engagement from the outset, as is mostly the case here, then, yes, you will find the ‘wildness’ you seek. The problem then however is that wildness then becomes a product of SNH’s own epistemology.
    4. The use by SNH of the ‘perceived naturalness’ of land made me wonder ‘perceived by whom’? The answer of course is by an ecologist via satellite-derived LCM2000 data. It would be hard to find a more apt metaphor for this attempt to define wild land than the claim that from Lower Earth Orbit it looks pretty natural. None of the many stakeholders here are in genuine doubt about the extent of human intervention in our uplands, or that much of this land, even that classified 5, is overgrazed.
    5. I have a particular concern about the criteria ‘Lack of Built Human Artefacts’. I need not dwell on the inevitable anomalies of categorization in this quantitative approach (like the fact that forestry plantations don’t count as a human artefact). But the idea of privileging the visible in the search for the wild is itself part of the long history of Romantic conceptions of wilderness. Indeed, this is the crux of the problem: the evaluation of landscape based strictly on a narrow set of aesethetic criteria will always obscure the many ways in which people have inhabited and shaped these landscapes.

 

In the end, all these methodological criticisms are rather beside the point. It is not that I think that SNH could just refine this methodology and produce a better map of ‘core wild land’. The undertaking is itself flawed.

The map of ‘core wild land’ assumed from the outset an a priori ‘wildness’ that is separate from the social world. In so doing, it shoulders a great deal of cultural and philosophical baggage that might still have currency in John Muir’s America, but is no longer helpful in thinking about the future of a Scottish landscape that is, and always will be, resolutely cultural.

In writing this, I should point out that I am not some libertarian advocate of development; I am also broadly supportive of a national planning strategy.

But the Scottish Government should be aware that for many communities as well as those in environmental activism and academia, the term ‘wild’ is no longer sufficient. This is not just about how we manage the landscape. It is about how we conceive of the landscape. Our conservation charities and NGOs, hunkered down in their traditional defence of an apparently ‘wild’ Scotland, have missed an opportunity to re-think what the Scottish landscape could yet become.

The Cartesian provenance of ‘wild’ will always pit people against the environment. Our planning needs a new vocabulary that is not ashamed that our nature and our culture are, and always have been, so thoroughly intertwined.

Against Scottish Wildness

Written by

I have a written an essay over at Bella Caledonia against the idea of wild land in Scotland. It is an unlikely argument to to make but I am troubled at how little critical attention has been given to the idea of designating much of Scotland as ‘core wild land‘.

To categorise some places in this way seems to me highly political. It is a way of privileging one culturally specific way of seeing the Highlands, with its roots in the picturesque and the sublime, over other ways of knowing, working and experiencing the landscape.

Here is the video that inspired the essay. Pure landscape eye-candy – very nicely made – but not as benign as it seems.

 

National Collective’s #TradYES

Written by

This isn’t much of a political blog but my curiousity has been piqued by a new post over at National Collective which has just launched their #TradYES campaign – a means by which traditional artists can explore the correspondence between their craft and support for a YES in the indyref.

Anyone with a knowledge of Scotland’s oral traditions might expect this to be a vehicle for an all too familiar brand of cultural nationalism. The carrying stream of Scottish ‘folk’, epitomised by the School of Scottish Studies, has long had something of a nationalist undercurrent. Two of their most renowned collectors, Hamish Henderson and Calum Iain Maclean, were not shy about making their sympathies known.

For Maclean, there were two approaches to the oral tradition: what he called ‘the scientific’ and ‘the nationalist’ (I’ll let you guess which one he thought more important). The whole task of collecting was of the utmost urgency as Maclean felt that the oral traditions, particularly in the Gaidhealtachd, were passing away before his eyes. ‘I’m really afraid’ he wrote to Henderson in 1957, ‘that the old Highland spirit is as dead as could be’. To another audience he cautioned that ‘we may very soon learn to our cost that we cannot at the one and same time serve the God of Gaelic culture and the Mammon of English imperialism’. You get the picture.

So I was interested to note that National Collective #TradYES campaign was launched by my Edinburgh University colleague Mairi McFadyen whose PhD is from the School of Scottish Studies. The stall she lays out, however, is significantly different from these earlier movements.

For one thing, it sees aspects of Scottish tradition within a much wider cultural frame. It also displaces ‘the national’ for ‘the local’ – an interesting move. What strikes me as most important is that #TradYES is both generative and future-orientated. For all the ‘trad’ in ‘#TradYES’, National Collective’s campaign represents more a bringing-to-life than a saving-the-past. That distinction may prove significant.

And the bid to foster an ‘evolving sense of self’ may resonate with a greater diversity of voices than could have been foreseen by Henderson and Maclean.

Interestingly, #TradYES has articulated something from which their Unionist opponents have long shied away. For those in the No camp it may seem a peripheral problem that National Collective are stirring conversations and ideas about a cultural future. But it comes across as another instance where in saying nothing Better Together have nothing very much to say.

 

 

Blackbird and the oral tradition

Written by

Any film which stars Margaret Bennett and Norman Maclean is, in my opinion, off to a great start. They are among Scotland’s most notable tradition-bearers and have spent their lives shuttling between Highland fireside and lowland media.

Bennett appeared in Timothy Neat’s wonderful if eccentric Play Me Something (1989) about fog-bound travellers at Barra airport, also featuring John Berger, Hamish Henderson and Tilda Swinton. Maclean too was cast by Neat in Walk Me Home (1993), though not as The Guardian had it Play Me Something.

It seems as if Tim Neat has bequeathed another cinematic legacy by introducing Norman Maclean to debut director Jamie Chambers, whose film Blackbird premiered last week at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Chambers has given us a fine film, a worthy showcase for the manifold talents of Maclean, Bennett and as well as another superb traditional singer, Sheila Stewart.

The film is focused on the character of Ruadhan, played by Andrew Rothney, a young man determined to save the songs of the village elders before they are lost amid economic change, signalled in this case by the decline of fishing and the arrival of the bistro.

Blackbird is an accomplished film. Beyond the memorable performances and some skillful cinematography, Chambers has created a plausible town that is irreducibly Scottish but avoids being tethered to a specific place. This is essential if the film is to stand in for the oral tradition in the widest sense, from Gaels to Travellers.

It is not a perfect film (perfect films don’t get made) but it is, I think, an important moment in Scottish cinema. I say this in part because its primary theme – the mechanics of cultural transmission – has to date received scant attention.

The oral tradition has long provided a little background colour for filmmakers (think of the faux puirt a beul drinking song in Whisky Galore), but rarely does it constitute the action.

Even in Play Me Something, one of my favourite films, the oral tradition played second fiddle to John Berger’s grand trans-cultural humanism.

Blackbird is significant because the plot centres on the anxieties about who is culturally eligible to listen, learn and sing. The song is here portrayed as a gift of high value and, as with all gift economies, the burden placed on the recipient – in this case young Ruadhan – is sometimes more than he can bear, particularly if the gift is withheld.

Ruadhan’s desire to save the songs is set against the wariness of the tradition bearers to pass them on to a generation whose way of life is so different from their own.

There is a clever ambivalence in Blackbird about the premise that the oral tradition is dying and must be saved.

In one scene, old Alex, played by Maclean, resists his liberation from a nursing home by young Ruadhan shouting: “You? Are rescuing me?!”

It raises a welcome question about the familiar imperative of the ‘salvage paradigm’.

The film is plainly informed by the work of twentieth century folklorists and ethnologists – epitomised by the School of Scottish Studies – who patiently recorded stories and songs. The paradox of this work, however, is that in wanting to preserve the oral tradition, ethnologists sometimes felt that wax cylinders and magnetic tape were more reliable repositories of culture than the people to whom it belonged.

The collectors, believing that the mechanics of cultural transmission had broken down, came bearing the salvific recording machine – useful but not uncomplicated. In Blackbird, this tension is expressed in Amy’s iPod.

But a culture that frames itself as perpetually on the edge of extinction may arguably be better equipped to survive. Stories and music which were once passed from one generation to another at the fank or in the berryfields, in the kitchen or around the fire, are now more often transmitted through different means.

They are performed at school or the Mod or at fèisean and the like, events which in turn draw their funding from Bord na Gaidhlig, Creative Scotland, LEADER and The National Lottery. They have their own designated quasi-public spaces – community halls and heritage centres. (Blackbird’s bistro feels a bit 1990s – modernity’s current guise is more likely to come in the form of a third sector wifi-enabled community arts portal).

It should not surprise us that oral life is allied to the world of work. And that for young people, work in rural Scotland – if it exists at all – it is often as part of a service-orientated precariat in which cultural distinctiveness is pressed into the service of local development. This is not always comfortable and, by definition, change involves a loss of sorts.

But perhaps Blackbird gives a glimpse into the disavowed truth about Scotland’s oral traditions: it is less that they are all dying than that some survive under cultural conditions that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.

 

St Kilda’s other stories

Written by

I have a bit of past form for being churlish about all the attention devoted to St Kilda.  Last week my persistent grumpiness was put to the test by visiting the archipelago for the first time, accompanied by students on our annual Edinburgh University human geography field class.

It is hard not to be moved by the grandeur. Such vertiginous heights – ‘steep frowning glories’ as Lord Byron might have called them – which are all the more impressive when given occasional perspective given by the tiny spec of an old fowling bothy. No photograph can really convey this scale and it is fair to say that I haven’t seen anything quite like it.

The built environment might have been equally striking had countless images of this abandoned village not already been intimately known to me since childhood.

 

 

When I was eight years old, my brother bought an LP by Scottish folk pioneers Ossian. Entitled ‘St Kilda Wedding’, the cover showed a landscape rendered in pen and wax crayon. This evocative image, and the lovely reel from which the album draws its title, had me hooked – though it took me another twenty years to make my own contribution (pdf 0.5mb) to the story.

Maybe it was this longstanding familiarity that left me relatively unmoved by Village Bay. The curation in the village museum didn’t help matters. I think its emphasis on the difference of St Kilda compared to other Hebridean outliers is relentless and misplaced.

For instance, the charge of the islanders’ ‘extremism’ in religious matters is largely unwarranted, at least in comparison with other islands. It comes in part from the gawping ignorance of Glasgow Herald journalist Robert Connell in the 1880s and, subsequently, via uncritical accounts by Tom Steel and Charles Maclean.

I was further irked that the story of St Kilda basically stops with the evacuation in 1930, as if the later occupation by the military doesn’t quite count as a legitimate part of island history. A throwaway line about the Ministry of Defence being a partner in current management glosses over the remarkable Cold War history of the island.

 

Maybe the fact that this was the tracking station for the world’s first nuclear missile unsettles the wilderness ideal? How can such strategic centrality be reconciled with the island-on-the-edge-of-the-world framing?

My interests are admittedly rather niche but I found the signs of military occupation by far the most interesting aspect of St Kilda. Operation Hardrock, which saw the development of the radar tracking station in 1957, more than made its mark. And those involved in its construction left their own inscriptions.

All archaeologists love the discovery of a coin as a dating device. And doubtless this was in the mind of whichever workman placed a newly minted half penny in the wet concrete road – date side up, naturally. (Thanks to Kevin Grant, NTS archaeologist for pointing it out).

Other traces are less explicit but no less interesting: whose quiff was tamed by this black comb, found half way up Mullach Mòr?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A cement patch provides an enduring memorial.

And then there are inscriptions on a landscape scale: the origin of the materials for Operation Hardrock will not likely be forgotten any time soon. A quarry this size is hard to overlook.

All of this is fascinating but it is not the St Kilda we know.  That story is fixated with a tragedy in which innocent pre-moderns are taken in by villainous missionaries.  As with many founding myths of nationhood, it is a colourful lament for a golden age that is poorly anchored in the available evidence.

Meanwhile, the evidence for other lives and other landscapes remains carefully cropped out of our photos of Village Bay.

 

 

 

New archives: Erskine Beveridge and North Uist

Written by

I came across a small haul of gold yesterday. One of my hawk-eyed PhD students, Ben Garlick, spotted some material in the archives of the Scottish Ornithologists Club belonging to Frederick S. Beveridge – a son of the Fife archaeologist and industrialist Erskine Beveridge.

I am slowly trying to piece together the life and work of this family from various archival fragments and from the ruins of their Hebridean residence on the island of Vallay, off North Uist.

For such a notable family – both wealthy and connected – it is amazing how few traces have survived. All of this makes the collection of bird notes by the young Fred particularly interesting.

Fred was inducted by his father in to the rituals of fieldwork: careful observation, recording, collection and analysis. Where Erskine Beveridge applied these techniques to the vestiges of antiquity, Fred and his brothers – George and David – put them to work in the service of ornithology.

None of them had an easy life. David died of dysentery at Gallipoli. George, forbidden to marry the love of his life, descended into alcoholism and eventually drowned while crossing the ford back to Vallay.

Fred steered the family linen business into liquidation, married unhappily and died on the birthday of his only daughter.

His birding notes in the SOC archive date to the time when the family fortunes were more buoyant; the game was certainly plentiful, at least on this evidence from Vallay.

Fred’s early observations on the birds of North Uist were eventually collected together for a scholarly paper in The Scottish Naturalist, a paragraph of which I quoted in my doctoral thesis:

The inhabitants of North Uist, when you know them, are a most agreeable people who have helped me in every possible way by observing new arrivals or rarities. I find but one fault of any magnitude, and that is a great passion for collecting birds’ eggs during the nesting season. During the early summer their women folk scour the foreshore in veritable hosts – they seem countless; […] they wander further and further afield, to return at dusk laden, not with cockles but with hundreds of wild birds’ eggs. No wonder that this trait does not appeal to one, but rather kindles in the onlooker the same spirit as that shown by our bovine friend at the sight of the proverbial red rag.

The local context to Fred’s complaint – though he might have felt it inappropriate for the pages of The Scottish Naturalist – was that land was in short supply and such eggs were a basic part of human nutrition. Within two years, impoverished islanders would threaten a land raid on the Beveridge estate.

Amongst the papers in the SOC, I found a letter from Fred to his father enclosing offprints of this article. It seems as if Erskine Beveridge might have been thinking about updating his own monograph North Uist: its archaeology and topography, with notes about the early history of the Outer Hebrides. Perhaps Fred’s paper could have been included in this as an addendum? In any case, Fred asks that should his bird article be reproduced then the above paragraph should be omitted – ‘more of a safety valve than anything else’. Interesting.

Also included in Fred’s notes are some curious little doodles and sketches. Take this one from 4th September 1915. Is this a sketch of his father? If it is a self-portrait, that is an impressive beard for a 19 year-old.

Or how about this sketch entitled “If” with the line ‘some dreams of a far-off land’?

The profile of hills looks like Eaval from Grimsay. The boat is called the Plover. Does anyone know any more detail about this vessel?

Fully funded AHRC PhD studentship: Memory practices and the national inventory of Scotland

Written by

Memory practices and the national inventory of Scotland 

FULLY-FUNDED AHRC PhD STUDENTSHIP

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

(Geography, School of GeoSciences) 

Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded PhD, a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA), supervised jointly by the University of Edinburgh (Geography, School of GeoSciences) and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS). The CDA Studentship is one of four made within the Scottish Cultural Heritage Consortium, which will provide an enhanced programme of student training.

The studentship is for a PhD on the theme of ‘Memory practices and the national inventory of Scotland’ which will examine the origins, personnel and activities behind the foundation of RCAHMS. The project will be supervised by Dr. Fraser MacDonald and Professor Charles W J Withers (University of Edinburgh) and Lesley Ferguson (Head of Collections at RCAHMS). The studentship is funded for three years full time equivalent and will begin in September 2013.

The Studentship

The project will use the archives and collections of RCAHMS to consider how our knowledge of Scotland’s material past has been developed through the work of ‘amateur’ scholars such as Henry Dryden (1818-1899) and Erskine Beveridge (1851-1920). It will explore how our knowledge of Scotland’s antiquities became professionalised and institutionalised in the early twentieth century. An important context to the project is the founding of RCAHMS in 1908 as part of a wider bid to create an inventory of surviving material heritage in Scotland, an aim that is set to continue with the creation a new body soon to succeed RCAHMS and Historic Scotland. Against this background, the studentship will examine the ‘memory practices’ – the activities, technologies and forms that scholars have used to record the past. The PhD will examine how it is that we have come to our present knowledge of the historic environment. It will do so drawing on literatures in historical geography, history of science (particularly archaeology) and architectural history.

How to Apply: Intending applicants should have a good undergraduate degree, or Masters, in geography, archaeology, history, architectural history or history of science and will need to satisfy AHRC eligibility requirements. Ideally, you will have experience of relevant research methods (advanced research training is a required element of the studentship). Applicants should submit: a two-page curriculum vitae, with a brief letter outlining your qualification for the studentship; a sample of scholarly writing such as a coursework essay or thesis chapter; and the names and contact details of two academic referees.

These should be sent to: Fraser MacDonald, Institute of Geography, Drummond Street, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9XP (fraser.macdonald@ed.ac.uk) no later than 12 June 2013.

Interviews, which will be held in Edinburgh, are scheduled to take place on the afternoon of 27 June 2013. For further information regarding the studentship, please contact Fraser MacDonald (fraser.macdonald@ed.ac.uk ) / 0131 650 2293.

At Dun Torcuill, North Uist

Written by

This is one of the most distinctive ancient monuments in Scotland: Dun Torcuill, a fine Hebridean broch or, if you want to be picky, a ‘galleried dun’.

 

And this is the path to Dun Torcuill.

When I say path, there really isn’t one. There are, instead, a series of formidable obstacles.

In one sense that is the point of a Dun: built on water, it was to be accessible only by a narrow and sometimes submerged causeway. It was never welcoming to strangers.

But these ditches and deer fences are not part of the original fortification. Rather, visitors are just not really expected here. You can tell that from the broken Historic Scotland sign which I moved to reveal a benighted patch of chlorotic grass.

Dun Torcuill does not feature in the ordinary tourist itinerary and you will be hard pressed to find it on a postcard. This is perhaps a good thing in that the site, a scheduled ancient monument, still exists in a state of primitive grandeur.

The partly collapsed broch is now covered in lichens giving it a peculiar bearded appearance, though this is plainly not new.


It was more lightly encrusted when the antiquarian Erskine Beveridge (1851-1920) visited in the early twentieth century. This is his photo of the site.

Of the many photographs in his classic book North Uist, there is only one – here at Dun Torcuill – to feature a family member. This person is ostensibly included for scale but there is a sentiment at work here too. In all likelihood, it is either his only daughter, Mary Beveridge, or else his young second wife Meg Inglis.

I am struck by the fact that not much in this scene has changed since Beveridge took his photo. This is noteworthy because in the same period North Uist has been utterly transformed, not least its economic orientation which has seen ‘heritage’ become an axis of local development.

North Uist is one of the most remarkable prehistoric landscapes in Britain – that’s what attracted Erskine Beveridge in the first place. But the islanders are now competing with their neighbours in Harris and Lewis for the ultimate tourist drawcard: the chance to present the St Kilda story. I don’t blame them. Economically, it makes total sense.

But it is an odd circumstance when local and charismatic prehistoric structures are virtually unknown while the small, largely modern, dwellings of the St Kildans are iconic. It is hard to understand why the story of this one abandoned island has metastasised across the entire Hebridean archipelago.

Yes, I can see that St Kilda is storyable in ways that Dun Torcuill isn’t. But it troubles me that part of our collective interest in St Kilda still draws on discredited Victorian ideas of difference: a kind of freakshow historiography that has made a fetish of thick ankles and prehensile toes.

It is important to remember that there are other Hebridean stories that matter; they are often closer to hand and – perhaps as a consequence – rather more remote.