Transcript: VFT 3: Kilmartin Glen - Interview with Steve
Farrar, Historic Scotland
Q1: What challenges does the Early Historic site at Dunadd present in terms
of interpreting and presenting archaeology to the public?
So what you’ve got at Dunadd is a particularly important early medieval site. This was essentially a royal
centre and hill fort in the Gaelic kingdom of Dalriada in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries and it’s a place where
kings were inaugurated and they placed their feet in a rock cut foot print that you can see still see today. So
it is a particularly important, a particularly satisfying, place to visit but given the importance of Dalriada in
Gaelic culture in later … of the King of Scotland it had a particularly important place within Scotland’s story.
So it’s a sensitive site, a stunning place, and the interpretation [is] difficult. At the moment you have a
cluster of interpretation panels in the car park at the foot of the hill fort [but] when you get up there,
there’s nothing. And it’s beautiful, views are stunning, and it’s very confusing. To understand the lumps and
bumps within the hill fort it’s had a very complex past and also to understand the carved stone where the
footprint is, there are other elements to that that most people will miss.
So we have a challenge there because Historic Scotland who look after Dunadd as a property in care (we
don’t own the site but it was put into the care of the State, I believe, in the 1930s) manage the site. Our
challenge there is to tell the story for visitors but also to protect and conserve the site. And so our main
challenge at Dunadd is balancing those different requirements upon us.
Because it’s an isolated place there’s no staff there, there’s no electricity, no little museum or anything like
that. Essentially you’ve got to interpret it by putting things onto the site. It would be wonderful if we could
have people telling us stories there when visitors turn up but it’s just not practical and cost-effective, not to
say cruel on members of staff having to stand in the rain there in Argyll for hours waiting for someone to
turn up.
So, what we are doing at the moment is looking to put in a number of interpretation panels. And these
bring with them a few problems. One is they can be a little intrusive – you want to be in the beautiful
windswept hill fort and there is a very modern looking panel; another is - to actually fix the panels in place
you are compromising some archaeology quite possibly. We have to bear those considerations in mind,
now there’s a bureaucratic element to this in that [at Historic Scotland] I work for the Interpretation Unit
but we also have Heritage Management officers, they’re a very different part of Historic Scotland and they
will guide the scheduled monument consent process. We have to gain scheduled monument consent to do
anything that impacts on the monument. That could be [alterations to] the fabric, fixing something to a
wall, or it could be digging into the ground which we have to do with a panel in this instance, because it will
impact on the archaeology. We have to satisfy them that what we’re doing has value and that we try and
mitigate any impact we have on the monument.
So, At Dunadd, if I go to the most controversial and interesting panel that we’re doing there, right at the
top of the site where you have your rock with the footprint in it and the stunning views over the Moine
Mhor bog below and Argyll around you. One consideration there is that visitors that go up there don’t
really want to see a panel. We want to enable them to still enjoy the site so we’ve had to position the panel
in such a way that it’s angled away from the stone. And you can see that site from plenty positions and not
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Transcript: VFT 3: Kilmartin Glen - Interview with Steve
Farrar, Historic Scotland
06/06/13
have to look at the panel. But we still want people to be able to look at the panel and look at the stone so
they can match up what they’re seeing in the monument with what’s there and some of the carvings are
very faint and very important. There’s possibly a Pictish boar – certainly a boar - carved there; there’s some
very early Ogham script which we believe is actually like a speech bubble coming out of the rock and what
it says is when the King is recognised when he puts his foot into the footprint.
And there are some other elements. There is a second footprint that most people are totally unaware of. So
we have laser-scanned images of the rock itself.
And just to make it a little bit more interesting, we took a decision some years ago to cover the actual rock,
to protect it because it’s of such importance. We cover it with a concrete facsimile that’s covered in lichen
and 99% of visitors assume it’s the rock. I want to be honest about it and say ‘well, you’re actually looking
at something [false] be we are doing this for good reason. There was graffiti on the rock before we capped
it in the 1970s, so we want to be able to tell them about that, we want them to be able to explore the
carvings that are in the concrete facsimile.
To put that panel in place we’re going to have to dig down, even though we’re only going to dig down as far
as removing turf, no deeper than that, we’re negotiating very much as to where we’re going to do it.
There’ll be an archaeologist present, just in case some archaeology comes up. So we go through quite a
rigorous process before we make the decision as to where and how we are going to interpret a site and I
suppose this particular panel at Dunadd is at the extreme end of this.
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