On 8th July, A senior Scottish Government Minister is visiting Scotland’s unique heritage asset, Auchindrain Township open air museum in Argyll, a few miles south of Inveraray on Loch Fyne.

What exactly will Cabinet Secretary for Education and Life Long Learning, Michael Russell, find there and, as a photographer with exhibitions to his credit, will he bring his camera?

A signed shot of his choosing -  a short series even (we’re terribly greedy on behalf of good causes) – could become postcards for sale in the increasingly innovative museum shop and could be framed and sold on ebay.

This fantastic resource needs all the funding and promotion it can get – for endemic reasons that will become clear below.

Regardless of this opportunistic suggestion, Mr Russell will certainly find rich food for educational potential – already established and with plans for development – and this is a place one can return to endlessly, always understanding and learning something new.

Auchindrain has recently, as we reported, played host to a visiting party of high level academic researchers from the University of Kentucky. And among the events planned for the museum’s 2010 season are some with a pronounced  – and invigorating – educational focus.

There is a tide…

You can’t predict them and you can’t engineer them but you recognise them when they arrive: moments in time when the rhythms come together to move something forwards strongly.

It’s hard not to feel that this is what is happening just now to Auchindrain, Township Museum, internationally recognised as the last complete traditional Scottish highland township.  Yes – the last one. This is the nation’s only touchstone to its traditional, unimproved rural past.

The story

Auchindrain (pronounced Aach-an-dryan – field of the thorntree) was a common tenancy, an arrangement where a group of families held a tenancy jointly. They worked largely as a collective in the common grazings – the ‘out-bye’ lands. They farmed part of their land – the ‘in-bye’ lands, as a runrig, drawing lots each year for the use of the sets of rigs (five and a half metres wide strips of land, some more fertile than others).

They lived in ‘long houses’, with family accommodation at one end and over-wintering livestock in the other. Each long house had its own kailyard, a small plot or kitchen garden where food (vegetables and fruit) was grown for the table of that house.

As soil in Argyll is generally clay – sodden in the prevailing weather and relatively unproductive, we’re talking about a life of unremitting hard labour to achieve subsistence living.

The land is so poor that the grazing ratio for the outbye lands of 4,000 acres, stretching away to  the north-west all the way to Loch Awe – is 80 cows. If you want some sheep, that works out at 3 sheep per cow; and if a horse is necessary, which in a traditional agricultural community it always is, that’s the equivalent of 2 1/2 cows.

Since the population of Auchindrain, at its highest, was 80, we’re looking at a community where one cow, whatever happens to it and whatever it is worth,  is the life support for one individual.

The Colt House

The last two families standing at Auchindrain were the McCallums and the Munros. By 1954 only the McCallums were left and the 11th Duke of Argyll, whose tenants included those holding the Auchindrain tenancy, rehoused that last family in more sanitary conditions in the centre of the township itself – in the Colt house (built by WH Colt in 1954).

This explains the standout incongruity of the timber cottage on the high point in the centre of the traditional stone-built township.

We admit to having assumed for years that this was down to an outburst of misplaced enthusiasm on the part of those who first turned the abandoned township into an open air museum. It looked like a pragmatic and fairly recent residence provided for a curator. It did not look as if it had been built in 1954 – which says a lot for its build standard. It is, in fact, a very interesting piece of good quality early timber frame housing, and a listed heritage asset in its own right.

It has its own Colt number and the company have found its original plans for the building, giving them to the Museum along with an original plaque, identifying it as a Colt House. Auchindrain’s own Colt House’s plaque had long gone but when Colt were clearing out a store they found one from the same period and have recently donated it.

In 1962 the McCallums gave up the tenancy and the township reverted to the Argyll Estates. The McCallums moved down the road to Furnace when they gave up the tenancy in 1962; and the family still live there.

Between 1963 and 1967, the Colt House was lived in by Willie and Anne Weir and their baby son David – it was their first family home after they got marrried.  Willie was – still is, at nearly 70 and living in Kilmartin – a shepherd.  He had worked for old Eddie MacCallum and when McCallum gave up the tenancy, Weir was taken on by the Argyll Estates and given what had been the MacCallum’s house.

At the end of 1967, with the site due to open to the public in 1968, the Weirs were re-housed in Inveraray.  So they were the last residents of Auchindrain.

In the township’s  incarnation as a folk museum, the Colt House was largely used as a higgledy-piggledy storage facility. It has now been cleared out and rehabilitated by the Museum’s hyperactive new curator, Bob Clark, providing office, meeting and hospitality space. It is living usefully still.

The heritage value

At the point of the McCallums’ departure, Marion Campbell of Kilberry enters the picture, keenly aware of the folk history embedded in the unpretentious township and of its historical value as the last representative of an ancient way of life in the remote Scottish Highlands.

Written records attesting to the existence of this township go back as far as the late middle ages.

Its neighbouring townships of Auchintiobairt to the south and Achnagoul and Killean to the north were already gone and beyond recall. Of the last two working townships, Achnagoul was ‘improved’ – late – before its demise.

Auchindrain was and remains the only unimproved, traditional rural township in Scotland.

Marion Campbell campaigned energetically to have Auchindrain preserved, convinced that it could earn enough money from visitors to be a sustainable initiative.

She was absolutely right in her judgment that the township was a uniquely valuable asset. And she was just as absolutely wrong that it could ever wash its face in revenue generated at the gate.

It’s not in a place where sufficient numbers of visitors congregate to make this happen. And if it was – and if they visited in those numbers, the pressure of their physical presence would erode the fragile nature of the little township.

Auchindrain, as Scotland’s last township, was considered ‘primitive’ even in the days when Queen Victoria paid it a visit while weekending with the Duke of Argyll at nearby Inveraray Castle in 1875. As relatively recently as this, the living, working township of Auchindrain was considered a quaint curiosity in its unevolved nature and way of life.

The township is an irreplaceable direct connection to Scotland’s rural past. It alone puts us back in physical touch with a communal and survivalist way of life that would otherwise be beyond imagining. Thanks to the existence of Auchindrain, the imagining is easy but the images conjured are of what today we would regard as a largely comfortless life – except for days as idyllic as our own recent visit, when we took the photographs accompanying this article.

In the prevailing conditions, these little buildings would have been neither wind nor waterproof. While cool on the odd hot summer’s day, they would normally have been cold and draughty. The walls would have run with condensation and the place would have stunk of damp – the evocative smell of the past and of poverty.

The heritage status

Auchindrain’s status as part of the National Collections of Scotland began when Joanne Howdle, its last curator, formally secured Recognised Collection status for the township’s buildings. That status copper-fastens the imperative for its conservation – a more active commitment than preservation.

Most of the funding that has come in to Auchindrain over the past year has been from Museums Galleries Scotland. While MGS is allocating money from their government budget within the broad policy spectrum obtaining, it has consistently supported approaches from Auchindrain where it might not have done so. This backing has been vital in fuelling the focused development now in train.

Since MGS has no role in the provision of core funding, providing support only for worthwhile short-term projects, this testifies to the strength of the cases made by Auchindrain – and, critically, to MGS’s own evaluation of the heritage significance of the last township to the nation.

Argyll and Bute Council deserves praise for its recognition of this fact. It has now established a partnership between Kilmartin Museum and Auchindrain, funding them for joint responsibility for the local museum at Campbeltown in Kintyre; and for acting in an advisory capacity for the fleet of local museums and heritage centres that naturally populate Argyll,  a place so very rich in history and its remains.

This commitment has secured, for the time being, two of Argyll’s key and very different museums and retained their considerable joint expertise for the benefit of heritage services across this extensive, dispersed territory.

However, Auchindrain’s survival is threatened by the cost of proper conservation, of which its current funding falls significantly short; and by the limits its nature and location set upon anything it can be expected to earn.

Good conservation is the key to Auchindrain’s competent survival. Given its national importance, there is no question that stable funding must be secured for it. The Council cannot be expected to contribute much more in this time of serious savings to be made to help to bail out the heavily indebted nation. It should though agree a scale of contribution and a date – or a phased series of dates, when it will accept the local part of financial responsibility for this one-off historic resource.

The rest will have to – and unarguably should – come from national resources, which we discuss below.

The engine

Part of what has brought new and energetic life to Auchindrain has been the arrival of a curator so perfect for the job as to be way outside the most optimistic wish list. Bob Clark is a senior curator with experience at every level of the museums sector from the municipal to the national and from management to private sector consultant.

At one point, in what can only be described as a passionate and driven career, he was commissioned to write a report on a region’s museum management that was so unequivocally damning that they hired him to put things right.

His period as a consultant was rewarding but he hungered increasingly for the unparalleled hard-wired connection a curator has with his or her own museum. The Auchindrain job came up and, short term as it is at the moment, he took it.

Bob Clark has committed himself to the place with a generative ferocity that has seen him:

• write 46 funding applications in his first 9 months, many successfully and a total already out of date
• appoint, for the first time, a member of staff responsible for maintenance
• appoint a volunteer, paid on expenses only, who has high level IT and information handling expertise
• appoint a second qualified curator working on a voluntary basis as the Trust’s Collections Manager, sorting and classifying the historical information held – and absent
• institute a development programme which will shortly see the creation of a kitchen at the Muesum, supporting the introduction of a good cafe there
• bring into administrative service the timber house built for the McCallum family in 1954 (the Colt House)
• recruit a very rare bird indeed – a conservation surveyor who has come to live locally, to prepare a conservation maintenance plan for the township
• focus and brief a now highly active and motivated Board, under Councillor Alison Hay as Chair
• establish a partnership with Renfrewshire Council, who are sending their Duke Of Edinburgh Award Conservation Volunteers to work on the township in the summer of 2010
• establish a partnership with the West of Scotland branch of the Dry Stone Walling Association who have nominated their 2010 members’ project as rebuilding, to wall plate height, one of the buildings of the former township recently recovered from the undergrowth
• establish a partnership with three local schools – Inveraray, Furnace and Minard – which will see their pupils learn about the way of life of a Scottish township from first hand contact with Auchindrain
• develop an events programme for Auchindrain to host (2010 details at the foot of this article and in the Events Listings).

What is necessary now is that this uniquely qualified man should be freed to focus on his area of expertise – curating the museum and developing its network of mutually supportive and strategic partnerships.

Clark himself sees the current drive for new directions and consolidation at Auchindrain as the result of the efforts of an effective, committed and focused team. Of course he is right in this – but it remains true that good teams are well motivated teams and that is a leadership function he seems signally capable of delivering.

The rise in number of those volunteering to help at Auchindrain is evidence for a raised public awareness of the place and of the buzz it is creating – which their contributions then help to accelerate. Two such volunteers can be found every Wednesday at Belle Pol’s cottage (the picturesque little thatched one), spinning, cooking, cleaning or working in the kailyard.

Funding and national responsibility

Scotland (let alone Argyll) is chock full of deserving causes, all of which want and would benefit from national and local government funding.

In general the position is that the money isn’t there and they have to survive alone – or fail.  So why is Auchindrain different?

Bob Clark’s argument is that Auchindrain is, in essence, a national treasure: ‘…  a site of such over-arching cultural importance that it MUST be preserved, and preserved in a way that enables visitors to appreciate properly what it represents’.

He sees this imperative as transcending short-term issues and ‘other priorities’. He feels that such embedded avoidance routines create a situation where it might be suggested that an ongoing refusal on the part of national and local government to fund adequately, might be construed as  unreasonableness (at best) or even negligence in relation to the history and culture of the common people.

As we’ve pointed out above, it was never realistic to expect Auchindrain to be self-sustaining, because of the scale of the ongoing cost that should be involved in properly caring for and interpreting over 20 acres of historic landscape containing 24 Category A listed buildings or ruins of buildings, set in a Conservation Area.

The sums of money involved are simply very far beyond what the site can possibly generate from earned income.

But could one say that the case for Auchindrain is being put by a group of well-meaning people but with no business sense, no idea how to make money and no notion how to market the place?

Bob Clark’s response to this challenge? ‘Well, we say no: maybe at times in the past, but not now.  We’re on the ball, we’re doing everything we can, and we’re happy to submit to any external scrutiny because we’re confident that there isn’t anything that would make a significant difference that we’ve missed.

‘You can throw us into the Dragons’ Den if you want, because we’re confident that in the situation we face, with the resources available and the statutory and other constraints that surround the site, even Sir Alan Sugar couldn’t do more or better’.

The trouble with the Dragons’ Den idea is that such investments are calibrated on potential financial return. Clark’s passionate and well found argument for investment in Auchindrain is based on a return in a different currency – one whose value carries a greater natural stability.

Yet Clark counters with: ‘Auchindrain is part of a heritage attractions sector in Argyll that’s a million-pounds-a-year business and which in 2008 drew in over 200,000 visitors, employed over 40 people and is supported by over 300 volunteers – not that the sector gets much recognition for this.

He makes a peripheral but important point which could easily – and must – be quickly rectified: ‘Out in the middle of nowhere, 6 miles on the wrong side of Inveraray for the main tourist traffic, we’re forbidden by highways and planning legislation to put up directional signs any further out than 400 metres from our gate – and on a fast A-road’.

There is a simple imperative here for the bureaucrats – get this sorted and gain some respect for a regulatory system capable of intelligent discrimination.

Interestingly, Clark has a theory for why Auchindrain is in its present pickle, with all the elements in place for hard working major development – and no ticket to ride. He feels that Auchindrain has been coincidentally held back by its original preserving body’s far sightedness.

‘So how did this all come about?  Well, in many ways its an accident of history – like our location, like the fact that Auchindrain survived at all.

‘By the standards of these things, Auchindrain was preserved very early on, in 1964.  No-one knew better, so no-one in government (national or local) seriously questioned the long-term validity of the hopes and aspirations of those who set the place up.

‘Even a decade later, it is very likely that Auchindrain would have been preserved by the Council, the National Trust for Scotland, or Historic Scotland – not by an independent, community-based Trust.’

Enlivening as this is, in terms of an ability to think in unconventional ways, it has a dangerous capacity to ricochet, in offering a permanent excuse for blinkered complacency and inactivity.

Is there a solution?

There are options.  One possibility would be for the Council or Historic Scotland to take the site over – the problem there is that it would almost certainly cost them as much, if not more, to do this than to provide the Trust with the financial support it needs to thrive.

While, at the moment and through Bob Clark’s unsleeping work on preparing endless grant applications, the Trust is relatively successful but this situation is no permanent solution. One man cannot keep up this manic work rate for long. The Trust needs stability rather than this frenetic struggle for survival. It is a waste of a gifted curator to stand by and allow – by default – his translation into an administrative fundraiser.

If all else fails, what does the Trust do with its property? Is it conceivable that we might see a planning application for permission to convert the site into holiday cottages – the ultimate sin of gentrification of such a resolutely ungentrified  – and unimproved, township.

Can’t you imagine the outraged comments on For Argyll, the stream of letters to the press, the facebook petitions, the sudden alertness of the national media when a row is in the offing, unable to truffle out the positive stories of major assets for themselves?

The Government’s role

The Scottish Government could accept the obvious wisdom of viring the funding of around £135,000 per annum it currently awards on a project basis to become a revenue grant secured for a given period.

Such an action would cost the government no more than it spends at the moment (a necessity at this time) but would offer a period of security to Auchindrain which the talented and energetic Bob Clark will clearly turn to the advantage of a museum whose utter individuality and irreplaceability has already won his heart, as it does those of its visitors.

This place can educate, entertain, enchant, amaze, reinvigorate a connection with a lost culture unique to Scotland. The simple action of Government virement of money already allocation to a different budget heading is no price at all to secure for Scotland the enduring value of its last township.

Auchindrain is a corruption of the Gaelic, Achadh an Droighinn – Field of the Thorntree and, in the gaelic culture, the thorn has a mystical power. If it is cut down, it brings disaster. If it is respected and allowed to remain in its chosen place, it conveys good fortune.

What government would test so ancient a wisdom? Education Secretary, Michael Russel will be able to see for himself on 8th July.

Note 1: Auchindrain Township Museum‘s 2010 events programme:

• Saturday 31st July and Sunday 1st August: Dry Stone Walling Course. Class size is limited and there are only a very few places left. This is a two-day beginners’ course led by members of the West of Scotland branch of the Dry Stone Walling Association. Participants will be involved in rebuilding a length of wall that kept grazing animals away from the townships’s buildings, near the McCallum house. Course Fee: £50. For further details, contact Rebecca Martin on 01499 320 274.
• Saturday 31st July from 6.30pm-10.30pm: Performance Ceilidh: In an evening of music, dance and a buffet of home-made Scottish foods, a major draw is the presence of the Inverclyde Gaelic Waulking Group, singing traditional Gaelic songs. Local musicians are invited to bring pipes, fiddles, accordions, voices and do their virtuoso bit.
• Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th August: Rebuilding the Munro Barn: Come, watch and help with the first stages of the rebuilding of the Munro Barn, in ruins since  storm damage in 1968. Te building work itself will be done by members of the West of Scotland branch of the Dry Stone Walling Association but there will be plenty of other ways ot being involved. (There’s a lot of stone to be moved close to the job.)
• Sunday 15th August: Heritage and Home Life: This is a day of traditional music and craft demonstrations, celebrating the heritage of the area through the domestic lives of the people who lived at Auchindrain. The day is designed to support the school curriculum and in particular the Crofting Connections project, a partnership between Argyll and Bute Council and the Auchindrain Museum Trust, on which schools in Furnace, Inveraray and Minard have been working with education staff at the township. This is the day that the Duke of Argyll and the Provost of Argyll and Bute Council will do the ‘lotting’ of the rigs for local schools to use for the three year duration of the Crofting Connections project.Visitors are promised a chance to try their hand (and leg?) at using a pole lathe, to make baskets the traditional way, to enjoy the traditional art of storytelling. Local musicians are invited to bring fiddles, pipes, accordions and voices to the entertainment. Highlights will be the presence of the Inverclyde Gaelic Waulking Group, singing Gaelic songs associated with work; and the Walking Theatre Company leading an interactive walk around the township’s history. This is one occasion when everyone can waulk the walk.
  

Note 2: During the Minister’s visit to Auchindrain Township open air museum, representatives of the media, like ourselves, will be present with cameras and questions. We understand from the museum that Mr Russell will take a few questions relevant to his education brief – which is what brings him there – but not on any extraneous matters.

Note 3: The photographs accompanying this article have been taken, not as documentary shots or portraying a sequential route through the township, but to try, through glimpses, to catch the sense of the experience of living in the township and of moving through it on one’s daily business. – or on a visit today. They are copyrighted to Lynda Henderson at For Argyll.

Note 4: Over a period of time, For Argyll will be publishing a series of articles on Auchindrain – on the way of life of the township; on the families who lived and worked there; on the idiosyncratic Colt House at its centre; on the recent physical recoveries at the site; on the team now driving the museum to new communal and cultural ownership; and on the plans for its future.

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