A recent proposal to designate the Cevennes/Grand Causse region as a World Heritage Landscape shows only four ancient monuments in the Causse M’jean, an upland region slightly smaller than the Isle of Wight on the southern edge of the Massif Central. Such errors result from looking at isolated monuments instead of landscapes. By the end of the meeting on 22 January, Peter Fowler, FSA, and Charles Thomas, FSA, had shown that ‘ far from being a deserted plateau ‘ this is one of the great archaeological landscapes of Europe, shaped by 4,000 years of continuous and intensive arable and sheep farming, along with resin and iron production.
A full report of the meeting is available on the Fellows’ side of the Society’s website .
29 January: Ballot
5 February: ‘Antiquarian Gleanings in the North of England’, by William Bell Scott, c 1851, by Simon Jervis, Hon VPSA
12 February: Laurence Nowell, Cartographer, Linguist, Archivist and Spy, and his Anglo-Saxon Atlas of 1563, by David Hill, FSA
Follow up from last week’s Salon
New Year Honours: Salon has been informed of another Fellow who received an award in the New Year Honours list. Professor Philip Michael Stell, FSA, Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, was awarded an MBE for services to History.
Gulbenkian Prize: Dr J Patrick Greene, Chief Executive Officer, Museum Victoria, in Australia, wrote to say that it is ‘good to see the work of Fellows recognised in the shortlist for the Gulbenkian Museum of the Year Prize 2004. Also worth mentioning is another shortlisted project, at Norton Priory in Cheshire. I directed the excavation of the site from 1971 to 1983, by which time the Museum, which won one of the categories in the 1983 Museum of the Year Awards, had opened. Successive directors have continued to develop the Museum and Gardens as a particularly innovative archaeological project, with the herb garden as the latest addition (under Steve Miller’s directorship). I am pleased to report that the book based on the excavations and associated research ‘ Norton Priory ‘ the archaeology of a medieval religious house ‘ is about to be republished by Cambridge University Press, after several years out of print, this time as a paperback.’ Patrick adds that ‘after nineteen years developing the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, I took up this post in August 2002. Today (19 January) we start the celebrations of 150 years of collecting, research and presentation by Museum Victoria’.
Books by Fellows: Last week’s list of newly published books by Fellows did not make it clear that John Eisel, co-author with Ron Shoesmith of the Pubs of Bromyard, Ledbury and East Herefordshire, is also a Fellow ‘ making this the first book to be featured in Salon written by two Fellows.
Architecturally important Little Chef: John F H Smith, FSA, wrote to say: ‘I was interested in your note on Sam Scorer’s garage in the current Newsletter. There was an attempt to get this building listed about ten years, but English Heritage turned it down because it felt the conversion to a fast-food outlet had been too drastic. I am not sure I accept this argument as the restaurant is tucked in beneath the canopy leaving the original structure recoverable, and probably intact’. John says that he was more successful in getting Scorer’s church of St John Ermine, in Lincoln, listed Grade II* in 1994, a building that is much closer in spirit and time to the Markham Moor garage than the Brayford Pool County Library building.
He adds that the garage dates from 1960’1962 (and not the 1950s as stated in last week’s Salon) and he says that Sam Scorer always used to tell the story that when the garage was newly completed, a passing motorist was so startled he braked and swerved and caused a multiple pile-up. The garage owner claimed that the subsequent repairs to all the cars in the accident went a good way to paying for the cost of Sam’s roof!
More on Gift Aid: In parliament last week, John Healey, Economic Secretary at HM Treasury, explained why the Government was seeking to change the rules governing Gift Aid. He said that: ‘Since the change to Gift Aid in April 2000 an increasing number of heritage and conservation charities are granting free admission in return for a donation equal to the entrance fee. Charities are able to claim Gift Aid on such donations. This is an undesirable and unintended side effect of the Gift Aid legislation. It is unfair for some charities to be able to reclaim Gift Aid whilst others cannot.’
Museums and historic houses, churches and gardens using the scheme are costing the Government ’10 million a year, but the Treasury fears that this figure could increase substantially if they do not close off the ‘loophole’, because of the number of charities who were planning to make use of Gift Aid in the future. The Treasury has acknowledged that some museums will lose significant income: the Ironbridge Gorge Museum says that it could lose up to ‘100,000 a year under the new ruling. It has therefore promised to ‘consult with charities which might be affected, through their associations and representative bodies, on the detail of how the change may be best achieved’.
Leading figures from the heritage, development and regeneration sectors sat down together in Liverpool last week at a conference organised by the Heritage Lottery Fund to consider the contribution that archaeology and buildings conservation make to major regeneration schemes. Among panel members debating the issues was Taryn Nixon, FSA, who, when asked whether planning constraints should be eased, said that: ‘questions like this were often found in the mouths of developers who wanted to sweep heritage away and work with a sanitised building site. That was lazy, simplistic and unrealistic thinking. They need to stop thinking of heritage as a constraint and recognise it as an opportunity’.
Making the keynote speech of the conference, Yvette Cooper, MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), said that the Government did not want to make a choice between heritage and redevelopment ‘ it wanted both. She stressed that the aim of the ODPM is to build sustainable communities for the future, and heritage plays an important part, because no matter how much you spend on economic regeneration, people will not stay in an area that lacks character.
Liz Forgan, Chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, said that the biggest test of whether the Government really did mean what it said would be Thames Gateway, the biggest regeneration scheme ever proposed. ‘We have heard this described as an area with ‘little or no heritage”, she said. ‘So what about all the archaeology, the defences and dockyards, the wildlife, and the histories of the people who live there and who will move there? We need to fight this complacency and ask the question ‘will we do it properly or not?’.’
Summing up the conference, Chris Morley of the British Property Federation said that there had been a wind of change over the last ten years ‘ developers are no longer reluctant to work with heritage agencies. John Rouse of CABE (the Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment) said there had been a perceptible shift, but it perhaps affected only 10 or 15 per cent of the development sector. But the architectural and heritage sectors were getting much better at demonstrating how they add value, and developers were beginning to realise the benefits of working with the sector.
An HLF report entitled New Life for Old Places was published to coincide with the Liverpool conference. This reveals through scores of case studies the unique role that the heritage can play in the revitalisation of communities across the UK. Copies can be ordered by calling the HLF Information line, tel: 020 7591 6041.
Human remains: objects to study or ancestors to bury?
A recent Home Office proposal to create more space in overcrowded cemeteries (by digging up graves and re-interring the bodies at greater depth) has aroused concern amongst archaeologists and revived the debate about the treatment of human remains.
The debate began last year with the publication of the report of the Human Remains Working Group. This has divided the scientific community by proposing very strict limits on the use of human remains for research and the setting up of a ‘panel of experts’ to oversee the treatment of remains. Tiffany Jenkins, director of the arts and society programme at the Institute of Ideas, wrote a paper condemning the proposals which ‘suggest that science should be put second to mystical belief’. She pointed out that the expert panel will include those versed in belief systems but not any scientist or researcher who actually works with remains. There is a risk, she concludes that ‘in the contemporary search for meaning we are destroying evidence that tells us about humanity. Human remains could contribute to humanity and knowledge in the twenty-first century. We should ask them to speak to future generations’.
A contrary view has been put by Ken Worpole, associate editor of openDemocracy, and the author of Last Landscapes: the architecture of the cemetery in the west. He argues that ‘respect for the interred human body is shared across human cultures from prehistoric time. It involves … responsibility across generations … contemporary surveys of British attitudes towards grave-keeping and grave visiting show that even non-religious people still attach a great deal of symbolic importance to the grave as a place where the personality of the occupant continues even after death. A belief that the ‘final resting place’ is precisely that remains a powerful consolation in many contemporary belief-systems’.
Martin Henig, FSA, wrote to The Times on 7 January proposing a compromise: that human remains ‘should be returned to the ground to rest in peace after due study’. Not everyone would be happy though with his further suggestion, that we should ‘leave what belongs to the dead with the dead’. There are probably not many archaeologists who would happily see the Sutton Hoo grave goods returned to the ground (providing a field day for modern grave robbers, no doubt).
Fellow John Blair, writing in The Independent on 19 January, pointed out that a belief in the grave as a ‘final resting place’ was a very recent notion: ‘there is nothing very radical’, he wrote, ‘about the idea of reusing grave-plots. Reburial after an appropriate interval was almost universal practice in England between the ninth century and the nineteenth … the bones of the honoured dead ‘ the saints ‘ were the most regularly interfered with … those who feel moral scruples about disturbing the dead might be reassured by the altogether more robust attitude of our Christian ancestors’.
In reality, archaeologists rarely choose to excavate and study human remains: it is developers who sweep cemeteries away and most excavated burials come from building sites: a case in point is the current excavation at St Marylebone School in Westminster, where the school playground is being developed: This sits on the site of the cemetery attached to the medieval church of St Mary le Bourne. Some 500 people were buried there, including the architect James Gibbs, the Methodist pioneer Charles Wesley, and the artist George Stubbs. If Stubbs grave is identified, Liverpool City Council have offered a new grave: Stubbs’s native city wants to bury him with a memorial plaque at the centre of Moorfield, one of the city’s main squares, which would be renamed in his honour.
Should we give back the Elgin Marbles?
Almost as much space has been devoted to the question of the Elgin marbles in the last three weeks as to the controversial question of university top-up fees. Very few new points have emerged that have not already been made a hundred times before, but the British Museum is getting better at facing its critics and explaining the rationale for its continued existence. And it is the existence of the BM that is at stake here, not just the Elgin marbles ‘ for the simple reason that giving the marbles back would open the floodgates to other repatriation demands and leave the BM empty.
Neil MacGregor, the BM’s Director, thus speaks for all the great museums of the world ‘ the BM, the Louvre, the Vatican, the Met, Berlin, Munich, Copenhagen and the Hermitage ‘ when he says that such museums are ‘an organic accumulation of objects interaction with each other … the marbles play a part precisely because they can be seen and assessed against other cultures and other works of art … only in the British Museum can the visitor see how the achievement of fifth-century BC Athens could not have been created without the civilisations of Egypt and Assyria and, indeed, the great enemy, Persia … and how the Greek reinvention of the human form changed sculpture from Turkey to India, as well as providing the visual vocabulary for the entire Roman world.’
Another thought-provoking contribution to the debate comes from Salvatore Settis, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Pisa. He argues that the Greek government’s determination to return the Acropolis to its classically Greek form is to eliminate its Christian and Ottoman past, and that to return the marbles would be to ‘sanction the idea that of all the history that has flowed through the Acropolis (in fact, the history of Europe) only one moment matters, and all others must be suppressed’. He believes that history ‘with all its stratifications’ is preferable to the ‘return to origin’ idea implicit in repatriation demands.
British Museum acquires Roman fluorspar cup
A ‘50,000 grant from the Art Fund has helped the British Museum to acquire an extremely rare 1st -century AD fluorspar cup. This was thought to have been discovered in a Roman tomb on the Turco-Syrian frontier by a Croatian solider during the First World War and until recently was in a private collection in Belgium. It is very likely that the Crawford Cup, the only other known fluorspar vessel, which was presented as a gift to the British Museum by the Art Fund in 1971, came from the same tomb.
Pliny the Elder records that the taste for fluorspar drinking vessels was introduced to Rome by Pompey the Great after his victories in the East in 62 BC. He also says that Nero paid 1 million sisterces for such a cup, made from fluorspar mined in ancient Parthia (Iran). The price paid by Nero reflects the rarity of blocks of fluorspar large enough to carve, the fragility of the material, which meant that many vessels broke before completion, and the beauty of the delicately banded colours.
The BM’s vessel has rich purple and green horizontal veining, which is strikingly highlighted when the light shines through it. Below the rim is a low relief frieze of vine leaves, grapes and tendrils and the bearded head of Dionysus. The cup is thought to have been conceived as a two-handled vessel but the second handle gave way during carving.
The cup will be on view at the British Museum from the end of January. Meanwhile a picture can be seen on the Art Fund’s website.
Goodison does not go far enough
Writing in The Guardian last week, Albert Scardino, a member of the advisory council of the Institute for Philanthropy, welcomed the Goodison report’s recommendations on income tax reliefs for gifts of art but he argued that Britain had a long way to go to match US levels of giving.
Charitable donations in the US amount to 1.75 per cent of GDP, or US$183 billion a year. The equivalent here would be ’17 billion, or about two and half times what we give to charity now. Two measures have encouraged generosity in the US: taxpayers can donate shares in publicly traded companies and gain income and capital gains tax reliefs; and they can transfer ownership of art or property to a charity while retaining use of the gift for their lifetime. A gift of a painting valued at ‘100,000 shelters ‘100,000 of income from tax at the time of the donation, saving the donor ‘40,000 that would have gone to the Treasury.
Studies in the US show that donors actually relish the feeling that they are cheating the government out of tax revenue. In reality, Scardino says, the effect is tax neutral because a healthy arts and heritage sector increases employment, attracts tourism, stimulates retail sales and raises the visibility and influence of the nation’s arts and cultural community.
Major Bronze Age discovery in Croatia
Archaeologists at the University of Birmingham, supported by the British and Slovene Academies, have discovered what they are calling one of the most important archaeological sites of the last 50 years, in a riverbed in Croatia. The site is in the Cetina Valley, described by Dr Vincent Gaffney, Director of Birmingham’s Institute for Archaeology and Antiquity and Cetina Project Leader, as ‘of major importance both strategically and geographically. The gorge with its mountains provided a natural barrier, forming a border between the Venetian and Turkish empires, and between the Roman Empire and the Slavic kingdoms. It thus holds the key to unlocking over 8,000 years of Balkan history’. He added that: ‘the majority of the Cetina Valley site is waterlogged and the level of preservation is quite exceptional. I believe this to be one of the most important archaeological wetlands in Europe.’
An initial survey of the site has uncovered finds dating from 6,000 BC onwards. Timbers 3 metres in length are clearly visible through the clear water from the riverbank, showing evidence of late Neolithic/early Bronze Age wooden settlements that are comparable to lake settlements known from Switzerland. A large number of metal and stone objects have also been retrieved that appear to have been thrown into the river deliberately, including over 90 swords, a Roman legionary dagger complete with sheath, over 30 Greco-Illyrian helmets, plus numerous items of jewellery, axes and spearheads.
Another element of the project is the potential for environmental archaeology. Dr David Smith, Environmental Archaeologist from the University of Birmingham said: ‘The valley sediments provide an environmental record covering around 10,000 years and hold the key to our understanding of the environment of Dalmatia and much of the Central Balkans’.
Further information is available on the Birmingham University website.
Fishbourne’s Million Pound Mosaic Appeal
Sussex Archaeological Society is launching a public campaign aimed at raising match funding of ‘1 million to renovate the building over the famous mosaics at Fishbourne Roman Palace, which have been seen by more than 4 million visitors since Fishbourne opened to the public in 1968. The Society hopes that a further ‘2.5 million will come from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other sources. The redevelopment scheme will also redisplay the museum, improve physical and intellectual access and build a new Collections Discovery Centre.
Contributors to the campaign are being offered the chance to ‘Buy a Brick’ in the new Collections Discovery Centre. Bricks cost ‘5 and each donor will receive a certificate. For more information or to buy bricks please email Betina or visit the Sussex Past website.
The heritage of the recent past
The Independent reported on 19 January that a coalition of Cornish museums and councils was planning to rescue the pottery studio of Bernard Leach from ruin and to mount a permanent display of his work. Business plans are being prepared to bid for EU grants and Heritage Lottery funding so as to raise the ‘1 million it will cost to restore the St Ives pottery. Leach’s third wife, Janet, lived at the pottery until 1997 when the site went on the market as two lots. Local enthusiasts bought the site to prevent its being broken up, but it now needs large sums to restore the buildings and Leach’s specially designed three-chambered kilns, modelled on Japanese prototypes.
The same day’s paper reported that the survival of a Nazi party barracks deep in the forest close to the German/Belgian border was presenting conservationists with an ethical dilemma: should the building complex be left to rot, demolished, opened to the public or converted to a new use? The complex, called Vogelsang (Birdsong), was used to indoctrinate senior Nazi party members in subjects such as ‘race theory’ and ‘the need for total obedience’. Murals survive depicting muscular Aryan supermen and pliant home-loving women of the type idealised by the party, along with a cinema, swimming pool, beer and wine cellars and bowling alley.
Access to the complex was forbidden for more than fifty years because the area was used as a Nato training facility, but the army is now withdrawing and the area has been designated as a national park. The state government of North Rhine Westphalia wants to use the buildings as a tourist centre and youth hostel, but Germany’s Central Council of Jews argues that it would be immoral to public money on its restoration and that the site would become neo-Nazi shrine. They want the complex demolished. Local historians object to this and say a new plan should be devised to conserve and present the complex in an appropriate way, perhaps using the Nuremberg Rally Centre and Museum as a model.
National Trust abandons its fight with eroding seas
Rob Jarman, head of sustainability and environmental practices at the National Trust, was reported in The Times in early January as saying that the Trust will no longer take expensive measures to hold back coastal erosion, which is particularly acute at Studland Bay and Brownsea Island in Dorset, Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland, Porth Dinllaen in North Wales, and some fifty other sites around the UK. Sea levels, he said, were predicted to rise by 30 cm (11.8in) by 2075. Atlantic waves have also got bigger, increasing 10 per cent in size over the last decade. With the land mass sinking and ice caps melting, erosion will get worse. Rather than waste billions of pounds fighting the inevitable, the Trust has started buying thousands of acres of inland areas that it believes will form the coast of the future with a view to creating habitats lost to the sea’s encroachment.
Poll to find the ‘greatest Welsh person of all time’
Culturenet Cymru ‘ a new body that is working to promote Welsh heritage and culture online ‘ has announced a national poll to find the ‘greatest Welsh person of all time’. Top of the poll so far is Aneurin Bevin, closely followed by Owain Glyndwr.
The site records that a similar poll was conducted in 1913 when Viscount Rhondda, the coal magnate, offered to pay for ten statues of eminent Welshmen to be placed in the recently built City Hall at Cardiff. Each statue was to be entrusted to a gifted sculptor, with the intention that the collection should not only commemorate the most famous Welshmen of all time, but also provide examples of the work of leading contemporary British artists. The winners on that occasion were Owain Glyndwr, Hywel Dda, St David, Bishop William Morgan, Llewelyn the Great, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Williams Pantycelyn, Llywelyn the Last, Griffith Jones and Giraldus Cambrensis ‘ in the interests of sexual equality a sculptured memorial to Boadicea was also added to the list of original ten males!
The National Archives for 1973
One of the many signs of incipient old age is that events that you remember vividly become part of history. Now that the National Archives releases state documents after thirty years, rather than fifty or one hundred years as in the past, many more of us will have experienced that feeling this January, with the release of secret government files from 1973.
That was the year in which Mark Bolan and T Rex dominated the pop music scene, and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’ was at Number One in the charts for weeks on end. It was the year that The Exorcist was released, while Ted Heath’s government wrestled with a failing economy, strikes, pay and price freezes, fuel shortages and civil war in Northern Ireland.
1973 was also the year in which Value Added Tax (VAT) was introduced and two government ministers (Antony Lambton, Parliamentary Under Secretary for Defence: RAF, and Earl Jellicoe, the Lord Privy Seal and Tory leader in the House of Lords) were forced to resign over a sex scandal. The Cod War in the North Atlantic continued as Iceland sought to impose a fishing limit around its waters and the Yom Kippur War in October resulted in massive oil price increases. Miners imposed an overtime ban and power shortages led to the announcement of a three-day week.
Reviewing this year of misery on the National Archives website at least one is not tempted to say ‘things were better when I was young’. Indeed, the National Archives simply says of the fashion scene in 1973: ‘probably best forgotten’.
2004 Seminar for Arabian Studies: call for papers
The 2004 Seminar for Arabian Studies will be held at the British Museum on 22 to 24 July 2004. Those who wish to give a paper should send a 200-word abstract to the conference secretary, Dr Ardle MacMahon, before 15 February 2004. The abstract should set out what the paper intends to cover, the approach it will take and indicate the significance of the topic. Abstracts will be considered by the Steering Committee in early March and a programme for the seminar will be posted in April on the conference website.
Although not officially published until the end of January, a new book on The Holy Grail by Fellow Richard Barber has already received rave reviews from Nicholas Shakespeare in The Daily Telegraph and Dr Juliette Wood in The Times.
Richard’s book traces the route by which the Grail ‘ first mentioned in Chr’tien de Troyes’ unfinished Perceval romance of 1180 ‘ becomes endowed with mystery and meaning. The fragmentary poem describes a naive knight who is entertained at a castle where a girl enters, in radiant light, ‘holding a grail [a shallow serving dish for meat derived from the French word “gradale”] between her hands’. It was made of ‘fine, pure gold; and in it were set precious stones of many kinds’.
Over the next 50 years Chr’tien’s poem was completed or adapted by at least half a dozen poets, some of them German, who added their own material and emphasis. The result, writes Barber, was the medieval equivalent of an ‘urban legend’ in which Chr’tien’s gold dish becomes variously the dish off which Jesus ate the Last Supper; the chalice that stored his blood after he was wounded (Robert de Boron); a stone with youth-enhancing inscriptions (Wolfram von Eschenbach); a divine bottle (Rabelais); an ashtray in a Cairo club (Mary Betts); the casket that contains the Turin Shroud (Noel Currer-Briggs); and a flying-saucer (John Michell).
Hijacked first for its religious potential, the secular and chivalric grail swiftly takes on an impossible attraction for alchemists, conspiracy theorists, esoterics, Nazis, Rosicrucians, and New Agers. Barber’s purpose, Nicholas Shakespeare says, is to hack a path through the muddled, corrupted and conflicting versions of the grail story. His achievement is to rescue the original grail from 800 years of garbled and improbable misreadings.
The Holy Grail is published by Allen Lane on January 28, and by Harvard University Press in March (464 pages, with 8 pages of colour and 23 black-and-white plates, and a full bibliography, price ’25). Full details can be found on the Boydell & Brewer website.
Dr Johnson’s House has a display case for sale (‘1237.28 new; offers based on ‘650) bought new in September 2003 from Click Systems and used for a temporary exhibition. The case measures 400mm wide by 600mm deep by 450mm high, has a white metal frame and laminated glass lid, with grey cloth on the floor of the case. Further details from the Curator, Natasha McEnroe.
AHRB Fellowships in Impact Assessment
The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), jointly with Arts Council England, have announced that they will provide up to three grants of around ‘40,000 to ‘45,000 per year for three years to support projects that aim to make innovative and practical advances in the area of impact evaluation in the arts, heritage and cultural sectors. This should include the development of robust theoretical and conceptual frameworks, models, and actual data for the chosen area of study.
Fellowships will be hosted by a higher education institution directly funded by one of the UK funding councils. Fellows should either hold a postgraduate qualification in an area of the arts and humanities or in a social science discipline relevant to the field of impact evaluation and assessment. Alternatively, they should have significant professional experience in the creative, heritage or cultural sectors.
The closing date for this scheme is 9 February 2004. Application packs can be downloaded from the AHRB website.
National Maritime Museum, Curator, History of Timekeeping
Salary ‘20,000 to ‘30,000, closing date 2 February 2004
The museum is looking for someone to champion the study of the history of timekeeping within the broader disciplines of science and maritime history. That person need not be an horologist, but he/she does need a proven track record within the history of science and the ability to place the museum’s collections into a broader historical and maritime context. For a full job description, see the museum’s website (reference G/CHT).
The Churches Conservation Trust, Director of Development
Salary ‘35,000, closing date 3 February 2004
This new senior post involves identifying and developing new and extended uses for historic churches, working with funders in central and regional government. An application pack can be downloaded from www.cfappointments.com.
Museum in Docklands, Managing Director
Closing date 11 February 2004
The Museum in Docklands, which opened last summer, needs a creative Managing Director to work with staff and trustees in delivering the vision of a twenty-first century museum. For further details see the website at www.saxbam.com/arc (ref G/CHT).
RCAHMS, Secretary (Chief Executive)
Salary: not less than ‘55,000, with bonuses for exceptional performance and relocation expenses if judged to be appropriate; closing date 1 March 2004
Scotland is seeking to fill three senior heritage management posts at the moment ‘ at the CBA, the Society of Antiquaries, and at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Of the three, this is by far the biggest job: RCAHMS is an executive body funded directly by the Scottish Executive with an annual budget of over ‘3 million and almost 100 permanent and temporary staff, all based in Edinburgh. The main activities of the Commission are to identify, record and interpret the sites, landscapes, monuments and buildings of Scotland’s past, promote a greater appreciation of their value through the maintenance of a national archive and to present them by means of publications and exhibitions. The Secretary is responsible for advising Commissioners on policy matters and is the executive head of the Commission, with responsibility for the good management of the Commission’s performance, staff and budgets, ensuring that targets set for the Commission are delivered and that it works effectively with diverse partner organisations.
Further details and an application form are available from Mrs D D Burton.