Education Secretary visits Auchindrain Township Museum

Cabinet Secretary for Education, Michael Russell MSP visited Auchindrain Township Museum this morning (8th July) to appraise the ways in which the unique museum supports education and life long learning.

In a well organised and briskly moving piece of information gathering, the Minister saw the museum alive with costumed people engaged in the activities of the heyday of this last preserved unimproved rural township.

He, his wife Cathleen Russell and two civil servants for the skills department, Steven MacManus and Hugh McAloon, toured the site with the Curator, Bob Clark and Councillor Alison Hay, the committed Chair of the museum’s Trustees.

The media journalists there, the Press & Journal, the Argyllshire Advertiser and ourselves, got plenty of exercise chasing after them as they walked the old pats around the township and dashed in and out of specific buildings – all this under the  supercilious scrutiny of the township’s resident population of hens and the rather more forgiving highland cattle.

One find inside a long house was the Inverclyde Gaelic Waulkers, working on tweed with the traditional song of this work – an activity which the Minister neatly pointed out would have been a lot less sanitised at the time, since tweed was steeped in urine. At this the noses of the two  civil servants present twitched in metropolitan horror – and who could blame them. The stench must have been awful.

Today the smell was the culturally evocative one of peat, with the Gaelic Waulkers warmed by a fire in the grate at their backs.

In the most picturesque of the buildings – the little thatched cottar’s cottage known as Belle Pol’s house (pronounced Bell Fol in the Gaelic and translated as ‘dirty Belle’) – there was the museum’s resident volunteer spinner from Kilmartin.

In the Colt House, the timber frame bungalow in the centre of the site, built in 1954 by the Duke of Argyll for the last real tenants of Auchindrain, the McCallums, was Alastair MacKellar from Furnace, the Lochfyneside village just down the road. Alastair is hugely well informed on Auchindrain historically and personally. His mother, as a young girl, used to visit friends in Auchindrain when it was a living township and told Alastair much of what she saw there.

The Colt House is a listed building in tis own right.

Moving around the site, Bob Clark maintained a running commentary on the way life was lived at Auchindrain during its lifetime. There were stops for confabulations frm time to time and there were fleeting glimpses of two of the museum staff in costume, Sheila who can be found regularly manning the reception desk and Billy who looks after the maintenance of the site.

When the Minister spoke to us journalists at the end, he talked passionately of the Crofting Connections initiative which is part of the schools’ Curriculum for Excellence. When Mr Russell was Environment Minister – his first Ministerial responsibility in the Scottish Government – he had launched the Crofting Connections programme in Benbecula, out on Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.

Asked what, if he could name one thing he feels children do and would gain from being in this unique historic township, he thought quickly and said ‘connectedness’. Any answer would have been interesting but this one was a bullseye.

Being in a place like Auchindrain locates us in a specific network of time, place and evolution of which it makes us presently aware. ‘Connectedness’ is it.

Don’t be surprised if this word starts figuring in grant applications written by hyperactive curator, Bob Clark. He’s not a man to waste a good idea.

The Minister may not have brought his camera as we opportunistically suggested he might do – although who knows what happened when the media eyes had gone and Mr Russell stayed on for meetings – but he has left a word that may yet earn money for Auchndrain.

The photographs accompanying this artice are copyrighted to For Argyll and show, from the top:

• Michael Russell, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, at one of the ruins in Auchindrain (to be rebuilt to wall plate height) with museum curator, Bob Clark and John Gleeson from Kenmore, Auchindrain’s conservation surveyor.
• In costume, Billy, who is responsible for maintenance at the museum.
• Mr Russell and Mrs Russell (at the far end of the table) with the Inverclyde Gaelic Waulkers – and the peat fire.
• Further proof of the peat fire.
• Waking towards the Munro complex.
• They bred them smaller in those days.
• The Minister in discussion with Curator, Bob Clark and, listening in, civil servants Hugh McAloon and, almost out of picture, Steven MacManus.