Projects

[1028] Surgeons' Hall: A Museum Anthology

The collection of Surgeons' Hall Museum was one of the first in Scotland to be recognised by Scottish Government as of National Significance. It is Scotland's largest medical collection, one of the world's great pathology museums. This collection of images will explore some of the history of buildings, objects and key historical figures associated with the Surgeons' Hall.

Location of Project Material: All over Scotland

[1027] British India in the Early 20th Century: Part 1

These photographs come from a collection of glass plate negatives of British India taken in the early part of the 20th century and held by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. The photographs are thought to be largely of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) and other areas of Bengal and north-east India. They show Indian men, women and children at work and leisure as well as westerners. The photographer is unknown.

Keywords: India, Kolkata, Calcutta

Location of Project Material: Outside Scotland

[1026] Making Waves - Scotland's Swimming Pools

RCAHMS archive material to support an online exhibition, telling the story of Scotland's swimming pools. http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/

Keywords: Swimming Pool Lido Baths

Location of Project Material: All over Scotland

[1025] reserved for TARA

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[1024] Test Project JIX

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[1023] Galloway Kirks and Kirkyards

Old churches and graveyards form a rich historical resource in any community, there being few if any facets of our past that don't converge there. During centuries when so many aspects of life (and of course death) were parish kirk concerns – including embryo social services and education – meanwhile, for their part, dissenting churches frequently functioned as outlets for social, political and economic discontent. As regional church-rebuild programmes reflected epoch-defining changes in taste, from the late 18th century onwards a spate of site relocations reflected changing population needs amidst industrial and agricultural revolutions. Indications of all this, and much more, are recorded on graveyard stones greatly varying in size, shape and sophistication – including the impact of regional, national and world conflicts on homes and communities. Yet perhaps most poignant of all are accounts of everyday mortality – events testifying the timeless tragedies of infant mortality, accident, illness, and epidemic.

Even more than all this: rising above villages and towns throughout the land, as defining components of our historic landscape historic churches have no aesthetic equal. Meanwhile, if less prominent, even for the casual visitor there are few places to pass a more absorbing half-hour than an atmospheric old cemetery, recent increase in family-history research rendering their inscriptions all the more relevant. Nonetheless, like accompanying churches now closing doors at an ever-increasing rate, their future is far from secure from the wear-and-tear of time, from neglect, and saddest of all from vandalism.

In topographical terms Galloway is often described as 'Scotland in miniature'. Thus fittingly there is probably nowhere better to see a cross-section of the nation’s ‘religious’ – with the term of course encompassing so much more – history in stone, from the era of St Ninian, to the Covenanters, and beyond.

This project is primarily more concerned with the Early-Modern period onwards, with accordingly all parishes still in use by the early 1700s included. However, in a region known as Scotland's 'Cradle of Christianity' many visible church-churchyard groupings stand upon sites of a millennia-plus occupation, occasionally incorporating medieval fragments and sometimes still older stones.

What by contrast can seem historically, often physically, bland plus generally more recent dissenting churches have their own story to tell. Fortunately in Galloway almost all of these have survived, unlike those once dotting urban communities (a few in larger Galloway towns have been demolished). Sometimes overlooked owing to original simplicity and/or modification, varied modern-day re-use of dozens in Galloway forms an interesting theme itself. All known surviving examples feature in the project.

Location of Project Material: Dumfries and Galloway