Transcript: VFT 3: Kilmartin Glen - Interview with Sharon
Webb, Curator & Director, Kilmartin House Museum
Q2: There are a number of gravel quarries within Kilmartin Glen. What
impact has this industry had on the archaeology in the area?
The quarries in Kilmartin Glen have had quite an impact on the archaeology. I would say not just gravel
quarries, there are stone quarries too and some of the monuments themselves have reputedly been used,
as quarries, to create material to build roads. And that’s apparently what happened in the nineteenth
century to one of the cairns in the linear cemetery, although we’re not absolutely sure about that. But in
terms of gravel quarries; in the 1960s there was a quarry opened up in the glen to provide material for the
Loch Glashan dam and that’s a site called Bruach An Druimein and archaeology was found, and it was
actually graves that were found. So archaeologies from Glasgow came up and did a very hasty rescue
excavation and they were allowed to basically get in there and rescue what they could, by the landowner
and the people taking the gravel.. But obviously there was no legal compunction on anybody to let that
happen.
Of course now, planning legislation ensures that archaeological evaluation is done in advance of quarrying
and there was a planning permission given in the 1970s for quite a large gravel quarry just to the north of
the Kilmartin Museum on one of the glacial dumps of gravel and the excavation there revealed an
extraordinary complex of prehistory monuments including Scotland’s larges timber circle and various other
really important ritual and burial associated features.
Now at the time the Kilmartin Museum protested that actually this gravel quarry should be stopped
because the archaeology was of such importance and actually there was nothing in legislation to allow that
sort of process to happen. So once the planning permission had been granted and a rescue excavation
would take place, or a dev3eloper funded excavation as it is probably more commonly termed nowadays
would take place, and the archaeology would essentially be removed. But actually I think what the then
director of the museum argued was that it was also the setting of those monuments, i.e. a timber circle was
a negative feature, it was basically the post holes of where the timber had been would remain but actually
by excavating it through gravel extraction they were actually removing the context of that monument as
well.
Now the community as a whole was actually quite divided in terms of what should happen at this quarry
once this archaeology had been revealed; and I think a lot of people in the community thought that the
gravel quarry ought to go ahead because the archaeology was actually getting in the way, always impeding
economic development, whereas other people thought that actually the archaeology in Kilmartin Glen is so
significant that the quarry should have been stopped. But of course there was no law to allow that to
happen, and who, for example, would have paid compensation to the developer who had obviously
invested quite a lot in the landscape, or in the quarry itself.
Now the fact that this planning permission has been granted and the gravel quarry is still in operation
possibly means that might weaken any case for Kilmartin applying for World Heritage status because some
of the conditions for World Heritage status talk about how planners have valued a landscape, i.e. in terms
of limiting development or whatever. So there are a number of issues that this raises in terms of heritage
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Transcript: VFT 3: Kilmartin Glen - Interview with Sharon
Webb, Curator & Director, Kilmartin House Museum
05/03/133
management and of course what a lot of local people thought was that the gravel quarry would help the
economic development. But you could argue that actually it’s only provided one job and we have had in
economic impact assessment done at the museum that the archaeology in this glen provides an economic
impact of up to 3 million pounds a year. So you can weigh up those two economic arguments either way
but I think it raises the whole set of interesting questions about heritage management and how
communities value their heritage as a result of that one particular case study.
But in terms of actually what the actual impact that the gravel quarrying has had on the actual archaeology.
Well of course it has t=removed the gravel terrace that these monuments were sitting on, but the
developers actually paid for an excavation that would not have probably happened if the gravel quarry
hadn’t have gone ahead, and a lot of the features were actually not upstanding stone features, as is
common for a lot of archaeology in this area, and so we have gained a huge amount more information
about the, particularly the Bronze Age period, as a result of this quarrying happening, because obviously
there was quite a well-funded developer funded excavation happened. And from the museum’s point of
view we have just recently received through the Scottish Treasure Trove, Scottish Finds Allocation Panel,
the assemblage of artefacts that was found during this excavation and it includes one of the earliest
beakers in Britain and lots of other associated material, other pottery and also some human remains, so
that’s material that we will be able to allow visitors to see and enjoy. But as ever with these situations
there are up sides and there are down sides to it so I think again, a very, very interesting case study for
people to consider.
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