Borders Heritage Tourism - the next big thing?

by DOUGLAS SHEPHERD

History buffs from all over the world may soon be able to participate in archaeological digs at Iron Age and Roman sites in the South of Scotland as the region promotes its unrivalled but under investigated heritage assets in a bid to boost visitor numbers.

Some twelve national and local agencies are considering the potential of heritage tourism in the territories covered by Scottish Borders Council and Dumfries & Galloway Council. Between them, the two local authority areas have more than 1,750 scheduled monuments, many of them dating from the Iron Age (1200 BC - 550BC).

A paper prepared for a recent meeting of the Convention of the South of Scotland (CoSS) covered five themes which are at the heart of the area's latest tourism strategy. The list also includes cycling and food and drink.

According to the discussion paper: "The South of Scotland has a developing vision to enable the rich Iron Age and Roman heritage of the area to reach its full cultural and economic potential. The South of Scotland has one of the most vibrant Iron Age landscapes in Europe, with a superabundance of upstanding monuments, most of which are little known, little visited and little explored." 

And delegates to the CoSS session, including two Scottish Government Cabinet ministers - Mairi McAllan, Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Net Zero and Energy, and Mairi Gougeon, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs -  were told: "Superimposed on this mix of indigenous sites is the intense conflict landscape of the period of the Roman invasion (AD 40 -AD410), with its attendant rich repository of Roman monuments.

"The area is neatly sandwiched between two World Heritage corridors of Roman remains. To the north, the Antonine Wall - essentially traversing the isthmus of Scotland from Glasgow to Edinburgh - and to the south Hadrian’s Wall which cuts across the isthmus from Carlisle to Newcastle. The South of Scotland is criss-crossed with the remains of conquest: Roman roads and studded with Roman forts and campaign camps."

The paper's authors claimed that in many ways this ancient landscape has parallels in Europe with the Berlin Wall, the Maginot line and the Normandy beaches of more modern conflicts. 

"In economic and cultural terms, the area’s story is seriously under investigated, under told and undersold. Most of the region’s sites are not even sign-posted or interpreted in any way."

Co-ordinated by South of Scotland Enterprise, the partners are developing activity around the Iron Age and Roman heritage potential through existing visitor attractions such as Trimontium Museum, Melrose and the early medieval monastic site at Whithorn. The partnership members are Archaeology Scotland, Dumfries & Galloway Council, Historic Environment Scotland, Museums Galleries Scotland, National Museums Scotland, Scottish Borders Council, South of Scotland Destination Alliance, South of Scotland Enterprise, Trimontium Trust, Whithorn Trust, and VisitScotland.

The members of CoSS were asked to supports and assist the partnership to develop plans for a participatory archaeological dig in the South of Scotland to act as a potential catalyst to open the Iron and Roman Heritage offer up to visitors.

The meeting heard from Mark Rowley, Tourism Strategy Manager at South of Scotland Enterprise that the area had literally thousands of cairns and hillforts, ditches and ramparts, a lot of them never examined before. 

He said: "The Roman stuff, some of it has been examined but not to the level of places like Vindolanda and Hadrian's Wall just a few miles to the south. Of course, we're linked with that, because we have Dere Street running straight through the two. We think there's a huge opportunity to look at these two civilizations, to get involved in some participatory archaeology."

There had already been pilots on that, he explained. Projects like the Twelve Towers of Rule that had literally thousands of children and enthusiasts getting involved. 

"We have a real opportunity to use that culture and heritage and those stories to entertain and interact with people when they're here but also to bring people here. If you can bring four Roman emperors here into the cold and wet to see what's happening, I'm sure we can bring an awful lot more Italians, Americans, French and Germans to come and hear our stories but also to see some of that heritage in its situation."

Jane Morrison-Ross, chief executive of the enterprise agency said they were examining the potential for a Whithorn masterplan to look at the future of the museum there, how that could be expanded and how the unique archive at Whithorn could have a home that encouraged not just tourism - which was really important - but academic tourism as well, because the Whithorn archive, like the Trimontium collection, was unique. 

"They have artefacts that are unrivalled anywhere else in the world, 50,000 of them that are coming back to Whithorn that had been dispersed across a number of universities. More are being found all the time actually that they didn't know they had."