Making living heritage felt in Mackay Country
By Anna Stacey
In Mackay Country, the team working on The Carrying Stream project have been busy planning a series of events to launch their community research into living heritage. Rachel Skene and Sophie Clark from NorthWest2045, Fiona Mackenzie from Strathnaver Museum and Mackay Country’s Traditional Bearer Ronnie Lansley hosted an initial online community gathering of tradition bearers on March 26th. This event traced the history and evolution of Mackay Country Community Trusts’ projects, which have worked with different local groups to maintain cultural heritage over the last 20 years. Covering topics from Gaelic language and arts to changing land use, these projects have facilitated learning and skills transfer for communities, resulting in many events and publications. The Carrying Stream project aims to continue this work by forging collaborations to share and celebrate living heritage with new audiences.
In recent weeks, I have been lucky enough to join the team as we embark on a new collaboration. I am Anna Stacey, a PhD student at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and my research partners with NatureScot to study the organisation’s visual storytelling of people’s relationships to changing landscapes. I will be working with Rachel, Fiona, Ronnie and Sophie to explore how visual materials in the local archives contribute to placemaking and connections to living heritage in the context of landscape change. Drawing on my background in filmmaking and my knowledge of the environmental humanities, I will help to bring archival photographs and videos into dialogue with discussions about land use and landscape change.
When meeting with the team, one question Rachel posed stood out to me as central to their work: how can living heritage make landscape change felt for local communities? Over the coming year, the team will be working to continue capturing and sharing people’s memories, experiences, stories and photos of the local area to understand how changes affecting people’s lives are felt and how they shape cultural identity and community cohesion. The Carrying Stream project will host several ceilidh events to explore these questions together with the community and create a space to celebrate Sutherland’s living heritage.
Neatly coinciding with the celebration of Strathnaver Museum’s 50th anniversary this year, the project aims to forge an ongoing partnership and create a legacy of documenting, sharing and keeping local living heritage alive.
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