SCAPE Trust Walks in Kintyre
This summer, CHARTS Project facilitator Muriel MacKaveney joined the SCAPE Trust’s archaeological coastal surveys of Kintyre; read about Muriel's experience below.
“Erosion threatens many archaeological sites around Scotland. The SCAPE Trust works with coastal communities across Scotland to help save and record some of Scotland’s precious coastal heritage before it's lost forever!” - SCAPE Trust.
Spending time in early July in Kintyre with the SCAPE Trust team from University of St Andrews (Dr Joanna Hambly, Dr Juliette Mithcell, and Dr Paul Murtagh) meant learning how to recognise and record stone fence lines, cleared slipways and piers and understanding how the SCAPE Trust app works. All of this turned out to be a brilliant experience on many levels.
I took part in two walks led by the St Andrews team. Prior to the walks, they had contacted landowners, farmers, and local heritage groups to check access routes, best-practice parking, local knowledge of the area, and, best of all, stories of people's lived experiences.
Throughout these walks, there were lots of heritage chats and just lots of chat in general. Our first walk was along the western Kintyre shore of West Loch Tarbert from below Whitehouse to Portachoillan ferry pier, a beautiful area of lightly farmed land, temperate rainforest, and some commercial forest. Over the course of the seven-hour walk, the team and I recorded some ten-plus sites, a causeway, slips, piers, and stone fence lines.
A couple of days later, we began recording sites between Dunaverty and Macharioch at Southend, covering ten miles of coastline with many caravans and intensively farmed. Fewer features were recorded, but many stories from the large walking group of interested locals were shared.
Check out their social media for all things coastal heritage, including for me a great Facebook post about historic “posts”, a subject lots of walkers in Scotland, including me, will have spent time deliberating over. I found learning about this attention to detail has changed my daily walking eyes!
In one recent local Facebook group, Everything Clachan, the SCAPE team asked about a stone bench they had come across on their Dunskeig to Portachoillan walk, which elicited several replies stating, that this feature is known locally as the “Skye men’s bench”. This group from Skye had apparently constructed many of the piers, fence lines, and walls locally. Interestingly one farmer from the West Loch Tarbert day had maintained the men who had come to build much of these coastal features were Irish! Most likely men from Skye in the 1850s would be Gaelic speakers, who often were referred to as Irish, a term quite usual at the time, though Antrim is only twelve miles from Southend across the North Channel. Kintyre is recorded as not having suffered as much as many areas in poor harvests around the time of the Great Hunger in Ireland and failed harvests in Scotland, and local people in Kintyre tried to find work for those in need, so perhaps the builders were both from Antrim and from Skye?
As well as being of obvious interest to local heritage, archaeological groups, local walkers, and those on the Kintyre Way, the SCAPE Trust work could interest artists, visitor experience providers, to realise the potential of the cultural coastal heritage of which Argyll and the Isles has many miles!
Download the Scape trust app, press home and start looking at your local area map, satellite view and historic 1900s map! You wont be disappointed!
- Muriel MacKaveney