Argyll and Cowal lose the Bruces

Two key assets in Argyll’s and Cowal’s cultural tourism industry have quietly slid away south, back to the Scottish Borders.

Russell and Dorothy Bruce, founders and annual engines for seven years of Cowalfest, Argyll’s unique festival fusion of walking and the arts, have gone to seek new challenges elsewhere.

The one certain thing is that, with their ideas, their skills, their organisational ability, their contacts and their willingness to roll up their sleeves and do anything and everything necessary to make the event of the day work, they will find plenty of new challenges to defeat.

Any society finds its majority in the band of the well disposed, largely positive, rather cautious, spectator genre.

Alongside them is -  inevitably – a much smaller but pernicious group of nay-sayers and tooth-suckers. For these, the negatives will always outweigh the positives, producing a sour paralysis that is profoundly disabling and dictates the stasis that is, in fact, decline and fall.

Dashing in and out through these skeins are a very few of a different kind. In weaving terms they would be the shuttles, carrying the thread to weave useful and attractive fabric around the separated warps of their society.

In sporting terms they might be the wing forwards in a rugby team, flying through to score for their team before someone (Welsh? Sorry – that was mischievous.) brings them down with a vicious tackle.

These are the people who make things happen, who drive initiatives forwards, who explore the new, who invent, who never take their eyes off the prize of opportunity and who seize it, moulding it to their will.

They are a rare species, always in danger of being hunted to extinction. Even sightings are rare.

And now Cowal – and Argyll at large – has lost two at a single stroke.

This departure has barely been announced, mentioned only in a prefatory letter to the just published Cowalfest Review 2009.

Simply titled: ‘And so goodbye’, it tells of their decision to move on, to retrieve personal challenges long set aside in the seven year commitment to Cowalfest – and a great deal more, as instanced below.

The Bruces’ footprints in 2009

Even a glance through the Review (read it here: Cowalfest Review 2009) paints a picture of incessant activity, no chances missed, nothing left undone in the interests of Cowal.

Let’s look at a selection of Russell and Dorothy Bruce’s spectrum of activities in 2009, finishing with the major Cowalfest event itself, they:

• pitched Cowalfest, by invitation, to Scotland’s International Marketing Department’s first international trade workshop;
• tapped into VisitScotland’s ancestralscotland,com genealogical website, linking it to Cowalfest and using its information resources to support the pitch to the international trade workshop;
• rounded up and scrutinised websites relating to the Cowal area, identified those with out of date and inaccurate material (including VisitScotland’s site) and contacted them to have it amended;
• saw the Robin Jenkins Literary Award, the UK’s first environmental book award and which is managed by Cowalfest, through a competition finishing with the award going to Mandy Haggith’s The Last Bear (published by Two Ravens Press);
• stepped in to save for Cowal the £10,000 funding awarded to Dunoon and Cowal Marketing Group for a Homecoming 2009 event they eventually admitted they could not deliver. Out of the ashes came Gathering Around, run in association with and complementing The Cowal Gathering. This was a series of events whose highlight was a concert with the Peatbog Faeries;
• ran a major tourism forum for Cowal at Ardkinglas House – Tourism is Everybody’s Business, with a range of first class presenters from across Scotland’s spectrum of tourism development and the industry itself;
• curated, within Cowalfest, an exhibition, Alexander Reid and the Japanese influence: Art, Ships and Plants, with a research brochure arising from Dorothy Bruce’s long work on this astonishingly influential  Scottish artist and polymath who was part of the inner circle of cultural pioneers at the end of the 19th century and into the first part of the 20th;
• delivered a ‘taster weekend of 14 summer walks at the end of July;
• ran the 10 day Cowalfest programme with a local economic impact estimated at £140,175; a 6.65% increase in participation to 11,732; 87 walks including all six stages of the Cowal Way, one of Argyll’s great long distance walking trails; 6 mountain bike rides; 4 horse rides; 6 grand house visits; 7 performance events with The Walking Theatre Company – all among many other and varied events.

The Cowalfest Review’s Analysis of Cowal’s tourism industry

From significant experience in research, practical immersion in the tourism industry and consultation with Scotland’s lead agencies, the Bruce’s are in a position to take a step back and look objectively at Cowal’s performance to date; and at what it needs to do.

The Review confronts the situation quote forensically, identifying key issues at the heart of the matter. It:

• cites international research as showing that ‘successful tourism businesses and areas are those which demonstrate … a strong ethos of collaborating with each other, a shared understanding of what visitors need, plus lots of innovation and excellent service quality’;
• points out that ‘while other areas have seen increasing collaboration and a shared vision of the way forwards that takes advantage of VisitScotland’s research and marketing, leading to the formation of groups which have been able to access significant amounts of funding to develop and promote their distinctive tourism offering, Cowal has, as yet, been unable to make this transition’;
• nails the issue, that ‘the lack of buy-in to a widely agreed strategy and distinctive vision is further disadvantaging the area and the tourism businesses within it’.

This could not be a more accurate analysis.

And in goodbye…

In saying goodbye at the start of the Review, on behalf of them both, Dorothy Bruce thanks the agencies and individuals that helped to make possible all that they have done in these seven years. She notes that the success of the events run in 2009 leaves Cowalfest with the healthiest bank balance it has ever had.

In theatrical parlance they have done one hell of a strike.

And now they’ve gone.