In this next ’History at the Heart’ conversation, we will hear from journalist, writer and radio producer, Jen Stout. Jen has had an outstanding career to date which has taken her from Shetland to Germany, Russia and, most recently, wartime Ukraine, the latter being the subject of her new book, published by Birlinn in May 2024. These are all places where collective and cultural memory and history can merge or else collide. In this online conversation and audience Q&A, Jen will discuss her own perspective on these themes, in conversation with Professor David Worthington, head of UHI’s Centre for History. The event will be delivered from the UHI Centre for History offices in Dornoch, but in order to attend by video, ask questions and provide comments, you will need to do so online from home. It will take place from 1-2pm on Wednesday 11 September.

Initial bookings for the event can be made via EventBrite Once the event is ‘sold out’ there, you can book by emailing me: David.Worthington@uhi.ac.uk. We look forward to seeing you there!

Jen Stout is a Scottish freelance journalist who has covered the war in Ukraine for major outlets including BBC radio, London Review of Books, Prospect, and the Sunday Post. Previously she had jobs in TV and radio with the BBC, and was a local newspaper reporter. Jen specialises in long-form and investigative reporting, and is a regular public speaker and host of debates on topics around politics and journalism. She studied Russian and Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. 

Jen’s work in Ukraine has been shortlisted for prizes by Amnesty International, the Foreign Press Association and the Scottish Press Awards, among others. In 2023 she won a Travelling Scholarship from the Society of Authors, and a Rory Peck Trust bursary in 2022. 

Her debut book about covering the war in Ukraine, Night Train to Odesa, will be published on 2nd May 2024 with Polygon.

This is the latest ‘History at the Heart‘ event organised by me, Professor David Worthington, UHI Centre for History. It will take the form of an online conversation and audience Q&A. Acclaimed author Shona MacLean (S.G. MacLean) will discuss her perspectives on fact and fiction in the past, in conversation with Professor Worthington. The two speakers will deliver the event in person from the UHI Centre for History offices in Dornoch, but in order to attend, you will need to do so online. Bring some lunch or else pour a tea or coffee and log in! The event will take place from 1-2pm on Thursday 1 February 2024.

Shona MacLean was born in Inverness and educated at Dingwall Academy and at the University of Aberdeen. She has a PhD in History (Education in 16th and 17th Century Scotland). As S.G. MacLean she is the author of eleven historical novels. Her first novel was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award, she has won the CWA Historical Dagger twice, and her standalone Jacobite thriller, The Bookseller of Inverness, was chosen as Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2023. She is currently working on a novel set in 19th century Cromarty.

Please email me, Professor David Worthington, at David.Worthington@uhi.ac.uk and I will register you and send you details of how to log in on the day. Apologies if it takes a few days for you to receive the booking: it is now 22 December and I am on holiday for the festive season. However, I will make sure to catch up with all reservations early in the New Year. Thanks, David

Launching ‘History at the Heart’, an occasional series of informal discussions, conversations, talks and workshops. The aim is for historians to give a platform to creative artists working outside the university, to provide them with a chance, over a cup of tea or coffee, to reflect on their engagement (or lack of) with history and historical writers. 

Back in 2019, I had the privilege of chairing an evening of conversation at the National Museum of Scotland with Donnie Munro, former lead singer of hugely influential Highland rock group, Runrig, about how history, and even specific historians, had informed the band. I enjoyed the experience so much that it made me want to follow it up. What I wish to do is to foreground the work of numerous other inspiring, creative people with whom I, or my colleagues at the UHI Centre for History, have collaborated with or learned from over recent years, or with whom we would be keen to connect with further due to our fascination with, and appreciation of, the way they interpret historical events. 

This series is not being set up to compete with the Centre for History’s ongoing, wonderful #HistoryTalksLive series. Instead, it seeks to engage with and hear from creative minds beyond the university, to find out how they are informed by the past? What are the benefits of, and barriers for them to, working with academics on this? How do they blend facts and interpretation when considering history and what does that involve for them? Is accuracy and historical training vital, or are they focused much more on evoking an atmosphere? For us, as university-based historians too, there will be questions. Memory and emotions have long been subjects we have tackled, myths too, while our need or otherwise to have empathy with the people we study is a contested theme that comes up again and again.  

Furthermore, in a manner that is unique within Scotland, the Centre for History, where I work, has a strategic commitment to public and community history, in other words, to collaborating with others beyond the university in researching and presenting the past. 

I believe that university-based historians and creative artists could enrich each other’s work further and support our collaborations more effectively. These informal conversations aim to assist with that. 

Led by me, Professor David Worthington of the Centre for History, our starting point will be the Scottish Highlands and Islands, but we will look well beyond too. The events will be held online, although with an option, for speakers, if they wish, of taking part alongside myself in Dornoch, where the Centre has its home and where I work. We can offer an historical tour of the building and a hot drink for creative visitors in our Dennis MacLeod Research Space at Burghfield House, Dornoch! 

We start with a session from 1-2pm on Thursday 16 November, entitled ‘History and the Imagination – The Blending of Both’ when writer Donald S. Murray will provide his own perspective on these themes, this followed by a Q&A chaired by me.

There are more details on the event, and on attending by Cisco Webex, on our EventBrite page here:

I will hope to see you there! 

While the Scottish Highlands has always been a culturally-rich and internationally-connected place, it has been frequently characterised, since the eighteenth century, as ‘peripheral’. My place of work, the Centre for History, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, has collaborated significantly in recent years with Dr Graham Watson, author of this guest blog. Until retiring in 2019, Graham was Head of Service at High Life Highland, an organisation providing cultural, leisure and learning services on behalf of the Highland Council. Graham’s engagement with history, as doctoral student and since, has involved bringing to light the vitality of the region’s communities, and, in his work for High Life Highland, has been focused on cultural practice in the council’s locality, which is the largest local government area in the United Kingdom. While the topic of his post is not specifically ‘coastal’ like most on this blog, Graham reflects below on how historical research on the collective agency of Highland communities, especially that of the Centre for History team, helped inspire him and thereby informed the concept of the ‘Spirit of the Highlands’. This concept now has a dramatically-expanded regional and national profile, illuminated via the multi-million pound ‘Inverness Castle Project’, the biggest single heritage project in the region of the last century. [David, June 2020]

High Life Highland (HLH) and the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) Centre for History have a long track record of working together, and from this has come a formal partnership agreement between UHI and HLH. But key to this has been UHI history and HLH heritage services, including libraries, archives, and museums. This partnership has included PhD students working in both organisations and action together on community projects. Thinking about the Centre for History when taking forward the Inverness Castle project was a natural development.

One of the early developments of the castle project was to adopt the phrase ‘Spirit of the Highlands‘ as a by-line when describing the process. As with all projects, the beginning involves gaining support for the idea and building up a network that will help during the inevitable difficult periods.  In this case the search was for a phrase that encapsulated the idea that the Castle was both a world class visitor centre with a role to push people out to visit the rest of the Highlands (the basis of the business case), but also that it would be a showcase of the Highlands to the world.

The Castle project benefitted from an officers group made up of representatives from many agencies involved in the Inverness and Highland City-Region deal. The phrase ‘spirit of the Highlands’ came from a specific discussion trying to capture the essence of the project. No one person deserves the credit, and its success shows the benefit of collaborative working. One of the reasons for the success of the phrase is that it can mean different things to different people, again an important thing in the early stages of a project. For me, its meaning was rooted in my understanding of history.

The Highlands owe a debt to Professor James Hunter for his writing on a new Highland history, beginning with The Last of the Free, published in 1999 to mark the millennium.[1] This was so different from the traditional histories of the Highlands where, throughout time, external forces created great change usually to the detriment of the people. Jim’s book presented to a general audience a world where the people of the Highlands had agency and made decisions, right and wrong, that affected their own futures, within the wider framework of external pressures. Although it did not duck the bad, it presented an uplifting and encouraging picture. It was this that I wanted to capture with the Castle project.

The Centre for History at UHI has come a long way from its foundation with Jim Hunter at its head. It is now a highly professional university History department, well recognised in the league tables of academic research. But it retains that spirit of engagement with its community, encapsulated, for example, in Jim MacPherson’s work with the Badenoch Heritage Festival, and Maureen Shaw’s doctoral research on Badenoch textiles, using the collections at the Highland Folk Museum.

The excitement I got from the Inverness Castle Project was the opportunity to research, display and showcase the best stories from the Highlands of how our people have responded to the pressures and opportunities around them. History is about people, their actions, and their responses: their ‘agency’ if you like, this being a term that Centre for History researchers have used in showing the vitality of Highland communities in the past. And in the Highlands, this is a magnificent and uplifting story that also has a present and a future. For me, this is what the ‘Spirit of the Highlands’ encapsulates. If the Castle project succeeds in showcasing just part of this, it will have been worth it.

 

[1] See also James Hunter, ‘History: its Key Place in the Future of the Highlands and Islands’, Northern Scotland, 27 (First Series)(1), pp. 1–14  https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/nor.2007.0003

As announced last week on the Port Towns & Urban Cultures site, on Wednesday 22 July, 14.00 (UK time), our emerging coastal history and coastal studies online group will host its inaugural event, a roundtable on ‘Fractured Coasts’.

Our four speakers will be:

• Elsa Devienne (Northumbria University)
• Gerry Bigelow (Bates College, USA)
• Bathsheba Demuth (Brown University (USA)
• David Gange (University of Birmingham)

I will be fascinated to hear how the idea of ‘fracture’ connects with these four leading scholars and their work on the coast. Whether identifying multiple levels of coastal ‘fraying’ in the past, viewed from a kayak or an ever fluctuating ice sheet, or considering the destructive power of sand, both in environmental and social terms, in fragmenting communities, ‘fracture’ seems to have value as a term to reflect on. It is one that I’ve puzzled over for many years in relation to the pasts of places here in the ‘firthlands’ of the Scottish Highlands, where I live and work. To what extent has life around the coast been a troubled one – identifiable by political, cultural and environmental fragmentation, rupture and disturbance – as well as one associated with social unity and solidarity or, in a completely different way, liminality?

The format will be short presentations from each of our speakers, in turn, followed by audience comments and questions. We plan to record the event.

All participants must register via the link below in order to attend.

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: Jul 22, 2020 01:30 PM London
https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEqc-ygrTgiE92eq_6-SQF70bg_LjPdBSS1

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

For Twitter users, you’ll see further updates by searching and tweeting via the #FracturedCoasts, #CoastalHistory and #CoastalStudies hashtags.

Thanks for your interest!

Best wishes,

David

Twitter: @WorthingtonD

 

Dr David Worthington,

Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland

Ionad Eachdraidh, Oilthigh na Gàidhealtachd agus nan Eilean, Alba

www.history.uhi.ac.uk

Brian Parker is a student at the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands, enrolled on our MLitt Coastal and Maritime Societies and Cultures. A one-time nuclear physicist and later environmental scientist, on retirement he took an academic interest in history and obtained qualifications in local history and military history. The attractions of the current course, for him, are the Norse and Gaelic history of the Highlands and Islands, together with the archaeology of the Neolithic and, not least, the nature of ‘Islandness’, having lived on Anglesey for some years [David].

Those who walk coastal paths cannot help but be aware of geomorphological processes at the land-sea interface, particularly those of cliff and beach erosion, which tend to be both episodic and spectacular. Every winter some part of England’s South West Coast Path, for instance, has to be fenced off because of a cliff fall and a diversionary new route found. This is especially so on the Jurassic coast near Lyme Regis which has relatively frequent landslips after heavy rain. In this case, any instinct regretting the loss of land to the sea is more than offset by the cliff material being fossiliferous and each landslip is scoured by expert and amateur fossil hunters searching for the ultimate prize, a complete ichthyosaur.

The opposite of erosion, accretion, is usually less obvious to the viewer when it is year-on-year overall addition to the beach material. With beach accretion tending to be Darwinian in its change with time, it is often difficult for the casual observer to judge the extent and rate of that change without reference to old maps unless there are one or more markers to indicate where the tide line was at a particular time in the past.

Tentsmuir Forest at the north-eastern part of the Kingdom of Fife has beaches which are strongly accreting and there are also time markers in the form of WW2 concrete defences. The area was formerly sand dunes and moorland, acquired by the Forestry Commission in the 1920s as part of the urgent replanting programme following the exhaustion of timber supplies during WW1. The current owners are Forestry Commission Scotland. The north eastern tip of the area, outside the forestry plantations, is a National Nature Reserve, administered by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH).

The concrete defences of anti-tank blocks, with pill boxes at intervals, were installed in 1941 to deter possible German invasion from Norway. The SNH statement on the Reserve offers the view that the ‘line of anti-tank blocks has fortuitously provided a convenient reference marker for measuring coastal change’.[1] This is certainly so off the northern edge of the forest, at the mouth of the Firth of Tay, where the concrete blocks, sometimes referred to as ‘dragon’s teeth’, are exposed on the foreshore. Along the eastern side of the forest most of the blocks have disappeared under accreting sand, only occasionally visible where dune hollows have developed. An example can be seen in the first photograph, which shows an exposed pill box and concrete block. The pill box slit is facing seawards but well below the crest of the dune which continues to the right of the picture. About 10m from the pill box, the dune crest offers a prospect of the developing shore, as shown in the second photograph.  The vegetated series of dunes in the middle distance form a newly developing ridge above high tide. The current shoreline on the far side of the ridge is 200m from the pillbox, which was at the shore line in 1941, representing about 2½ m accretion per year. In the nature reserve, even faster accretion rates are observed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These anti-invasion defences are of interest to military historians. They were built by the Podhalan Brigade of the Polish Army, who, according to Lech Muszynski, the son of the Medical Officer in the Brigade, had arrived at Tentsmuir by the circuitous route of escape from Poland in 1939, being part of the expeditionary force at Narvik in 1940, transferred to France and being evacuated at Dunkirk.[2]  This second hand oral reminiscence may not be entirely accurate, the time-table being extremely tight to include Dunkirk, but the survival of the unit to eventually arrive at Tentsmuir is indeed remarkable.

The Poles left traces of their time in the forest. On the track to a farm just before the entry gate to the forest is a bridge with sandstone walls. Wartime graffiti is evident in scratches on the stone, mostly too faint to interpret but one is more deeply inscribed and is legible, as shown in the photograph. It reads: ‘GDANSK/POLAND/S.V.1941’. This inscription is enigmatic; it is written in English and the letter ‘v’ is not part of the Polish alphabet.

 

Not far from the inscribed bridge, deep in thick scrub of the forest, are remains of the Polish camp. Some of the brick walls of the central cookhouse building still stand, plus those of a covered well. The walls of the well are cement rendered and are inset with a finer coloured render in the form of a ‘heraldic’ shield. The markings on the shield are much decayed and not easy to interpret but the general features are discernible. The left panel of the shield has the crowned Polish eagle, facing outwards; the wing feathers are evident as also is the fearsome hooked beak. The right panel has the Scottish lion facing inwards. A feature of this, just visible in the photograph, are the long-extended claws. The lower panel shows the Scottish thistle. The artist who impressed these designs into the render clearly had talent. Further details about the camp and a marginally better photograph of the shield are available at Canmore.[3]

 

The Poles remained at Tentsmuir throughout the war, manning the defences they had put in place and carrying out other construction. One such was an observation tower facing into a bombing range at sea. It is possible to imagine nervousness on the part of the observers when an approaching aircraft delayed in dropping its bombs.  The observation tower is now a holiday cottage.

 

 

[1]  Scottish Natural Heritage on-line at:  http://www.snh.org.uk/pdfs/publications/nnr/Tentsmuir_NNR_The_Reserve_Story.pdf.

[2] Lech Muszynski, The Polish Army Camp at Tentsmuir Forest, transcript of an oral history recording by Forest Heritage Scotland, available on-line at http://scotland.forestry.gov.uk/activities/heritage/world-war-two/world-war-tw-sites/tentsmuir-ww2-defences

[3] For further research on wartime Tentsmuir, see https://canmore.org.uk/site/141482/tentsmuir-forest

The photographs were taken by the author, who may be contacted at brianhenryparker@gmail.com.

.

Our latest guest blog post is by Charlotte Slater. Charlotte was brought up and schooled in Orkney before heading to the mainland to study a BA (Hons) Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art. Having a keen interest in the marine environment, she transferred the skills and knowledge gained at university and became a Marine Spatial Planning Officer, based at the NAFC Marine Centre, Shetland.

The Shetland Coastal Character Assessment began in 2014 as ongoing work of the Shetland Islands’ Marine Spatial Plan. Survey work was completed in 2016 and the final edition is due to be published this summer (2017). A coastal character assessment is a method of assessment similar to the landscape character assessments that were done across the UK in the 1990s and early 2000s. The purpose is to look at the variety of components which make up the coast, including the geology, industrial uses, character types, aesthetics and the historical elements so as to obtain a comprehensive overview. The document can be used by planners and developers to get a more in depth view of a given area.

When I saw the call for the ‘Firths and Fjords’ conference, I was immediately interested. I have always enjoyed history and having lived on islands, Orkney and now Shetland, for most of my life, coastal history is embedded in daily life. Although I had this personal interest in the subject area, I had also been awarded a small grant from the Carnegie Trust at the end of 2014 to create a number of art pieces that could be used to engage the public in the coastal character assessment project. So the art exhibition that was running alongside the conference fitted perfectly. The main piece I brought was a 3D contour map at 1:50,000 scale of the Shetland Islands which stands at over two metres tall and instantly grabs people’s attention. I got some great responses from folk at the conference and many were interested in the ongoing work of the coastal character assessment as well.

I really enjoyed taking part in the conference. I found the papers, including John Gillis’s keynote speech in Dornoch Cathedral, gave me much to reflect on in my own research. Joanna Hambly’s paper on the Zulu fleet found in Findhorn Bay was also interesting, showing that there is much about the coast that is hidden right beneath our noses. Over the course of the conference, I began to consider the possibility that coastal history could have far more significance within marine spatial planning than it currently does.

There was a real sense of community throughout the conference, with local interest groups and businesses taking part in the exhibition, the local school serving lunches and selling their products to raise money and members of the public attending too. It was great to see such a positive reaction from the community, driving home that public engagement is so important, which was also reflected in a number of the papers presented involving research conducted using volunteers. Overall, I think it increased the whole success of the conference and was a great example for other events of how a local input can enhance the whole experience.

The ‘Firth and Fjords’ conference has inspired me to consider coastal history more in my own research. Although I am part of the marine spatial planning team at NAFC Marine Centre, the maritime heritage of Shetland has greatly influenced the islands today and looking back, I believe, can really help understand and plan for the future, which is a large component for marine spatial planning. I have also begun an Island Studies masters since attending the conference. Considering the past of the islands I have looked at has become an important part of understanding the cultural, economic and environmental impacts of the islands today.

Since taking part in the conference, the exhibition pieces have been on show in Shetland and at the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney, with a couple of new items added which look at the Shetland dialect in relation to the sea and land. There is also a funding bid which has been submitted, to carry out a small maritime heritage project on a number of the outer islands in Shetland over the next year which, if successful, will be an exciting opportunity for learning more about Shetland’s past. By considering past uses of the coast around Shetland, it will be easier to see the influences this has had on the islands’ culture and industries that are prominent today and which feed into the next marine plan for Shetland.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Centre for History for allowing me to take part in such a fantastic conference and for inspiring my continued research, offering me a new perspective to consider in relation to marine spatial planning.