6 10 61 http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/f98f9a485b4770de8c4597c43e26760b.jpg 89b4bd727607e20a3d6ed15cddff432a Exhibition Item Category Metal Wares Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Description This photograph shows three smiths working on the wrought iron gates designed by architect Robert Lorimer for the Thistle Chapel in Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral. The men are using hand tools and bench-fixed vices to shape the gate’s iron fretwork. The smith to the right is working on its interlocking lower section while the other two are using hammers and metal files to shape curved and lattice forms. Two finished sections of the gates can be seen leaning against the workshop walls. The chapel was designed as a commission from the Trustees of The Order of the Thistle who wanted to create a meeting place for the Knights of the Order of the Thistle in a building that embodied nationalist spirit. When the commission was awarded to Lorimer in 1909 the Trustees stipulated that Scottish craftsmen should carry out as much of the work as possible. Hadden provided the metal door furniture and gates, the firm of W & A Clow carved the ornate choir stalls; Phoebe Traquair and Whytock and Reid were other Edinburgh-based contributors.. The Chapel’s granite and marble floor was the work of James Allen & Sons of Piershill, and the coloured glass the work of Aberdeen glass-stainer Douglas Strachan. On its completion in 1911 the Thistle Chapel represented the very best in Scottish craftsmanship in stonework, metal work and woodcarving. Thomas Hadden (1871-1940) was born in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, to a metal working family from Haddington, East Lothian. He trained at Howgate near Edinburgh and worked for James Milne & Sons in Edinburgh before starting in business in partnership with his brother who was a wood carver. Hadden's reputation as a skilled art metal worker led to his involvement in numerous prestigious commissions, notably the garden ornaments and railings at Skirling House in Peebleshire. Architectural commissions were a key area of his business - he made gates and railings but also more whimsical features including weather vanes, shop signs and bootscrapers. Hadden was at the helm of his workshop for over 40 years, and many of his employees remained with the firm throughout their working lives, but the 1930s and 1940s saw a period of change including a move to Murrayfield on the outskirts of the city. Robert died in 1940 but the workshop continued to execute architectural ironwork, including the Glasgow University Quincentenary gates (1952) and the J Eversden Henderson-designed memorial gates at the George Heriot School (1959). Robert Lorimer (1864-1929) is perhaps Scotland’s best known Arts and Crafts architect, though prior to the Thistle Chapel he’d worked on only one previous ecclesiastical commission. Born in Edinburgh but raised in Fife, Lorimer trained as a furniture maker as well as an architect. He is notable for his employment of local craftsmen throughout his career. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Thomas Hadden’s workshop, Edinburgh, ca. 1910 architects Arts and Crafts Edinburgh Fife granite joiners Lorimer masons smiths stained glass stone carving wood wrought-iron http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/b0b0a9036971089b222e266475cca442.jpg abb5df24f65625e50911923357722330 Exhibition Item Category Textiles Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Description This photograph shows the tailors and apprentices in the workroom of John D. Findlay, Clothier and Gentlemen’s Outfitter, 26 Barn Street, Strathaven. Tailors and their assistants traditionally worked sitting crossed leg on large tables. A raised surface helped to support the weight of heavy woollen fabrics typical to men’s tailoring, and kept garments clean whilst they were being stitched by hand. In earlier centuries tailors sat in the windows of their shops to take advantage of the natural light, however the bare wall in this photograph suggests that Findlay’s men worked in a back room workshop. Despite the smiles of some of the younger men it is a rather bleak depiction of the working conditions of men working in the traditional needle trades. John Findlay, son of grocer and sometime silk handloom weaver William Findlay, was listed in the 1901 census as a tailor and employer living with his wife Elizabeth at 29 Jamesfield Cottage, Strathaven. Strathaven’s changing fortunes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century likely influenced John’s decision not to follow his father into the weaving trade. The introduction of silk weaving in 1788, followed by the building of a cotton mill in 1790 made Strathaven a textile town throughout the nineteenth century. In 1826, at the peak of production it had 900 working looms and weaving shops could be found in every street of this small South Lanarkshire town. Strathaven continued to thrive by producing textile designers and card cutters when Jacquard looms were introduced, but the mid-century introduction of power-looms undermined the handloom weaving industry. When the railway opened in 1863 younger men sought work outside the village, and by 1900, when John Findlay was 29, there were only 150 looms still at work in Strathaven. Findlay’s tailors shop was in Barn Street, a short connecting road between the weaver’s shops of Green Street and the agricultural engineers, corn mills and wood yards in the Commercial Road. Descriptions of the local shops and trades mark Strathaven as typical of a small Scottish town once prosperous on textiles but fallen on harder times. Local agriculture maintained the business of a saddler and harness maker but by 1911 more modern forms of transport were also in evidence in the form of the Sandsknow Motor and Cycle Works. In clothing and general drapery Findlay’s competed with several other local tailors as well as a General Warehousman stocking linens, shirts, pants, braces, caps and ties. The Scottish National Association of Tailors was formed in 1866 to maintain standards of training and represent the interests of journeyman tailors but the invention of the sewing machine undermined the need for traditional skills and by the end of the century the National Association also represented factory operatives and all aspects of the tailoring trades were threatened by sweated working conditions and the introduction of cheaper female labour. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Workshop of Tailor, John D. Findlay, Strathaven, ca. 1900 Lanark silk Strathaven tailors textiles trades organization unions weavers http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/a0a1347cf48b264037a9e95c3d194a7f.jpg 5edd986f19dbf08a0ca05ff4774fd0a4 Exhibition Item Category Textiles Image copyright The Royal Burgh of Lanark Museum Trust Item Location The Royal Burgh of Lanark Museum Description The small royal burgh of Lanark, with a population of c.5,000 in the mid-nineteenth century, was long associated with the handloom weaving industry, that most iconic of the skilled craft trades whose demise in the face of mechanisation and the rise of factory production is often used as a metaphor for the death of the craft economy. At its height, the skilled handloom weaver, processing mainly fine wool or wool and linen mixes, was well-paid, proud of his skill and creativity and independent minded. In Scotland as a whole they were the largest single craft group of the first half of the nineteenth century, with high concentrations in west-central Scotland in Glasgow and Paisley and in smaller towns like Lanark. They were celebrated for their rich cultural life, which extended into poetry and song, natural history and gardening. They were also famed for a sense of community and capacity to engage in collective organization to protect their rights and market position. The connection between handloom weaving and the Paisley shawl was famous, but most nineteenth-century weavers made other textiles including wool tartan in Perthshire and linens for home wares in Fife. This photograph shows one of the last handloom weavers still practising his trade in Lanark. Taken in 1900, it was reported that only five weavers remained in the town. Just twenty years before there were 140 weavers in Lanark. The last to survive, Mr Thomas Chalmers, died in 1938 aged 84. The passing of the age of the handloom weaver generated much commentary in the early twentieth century with frequent images such as this to represent the idea of simpler times when work and home occupied the same space. The photograph, showing an elderly man at his weaving frame in a cottage or small workshop, is artfully posed. To the left is a hearth and cooking range and in the right foreground is a spinning wheel to suggest the relationship between women’s work and men’s work in a domestic or family setting. The latter has been placed for its narrative effect as it is unlikely that the weaver here processed wool generated within his household. Another version of this photograph showing a second elderly man sat smoking by the fireside on the far left of the image, was published as a commercial postcard for tourists. Those few handloom weavers who did survive the coming of the factories made highly specialised textiles for the elite fashion industry, much as they do today. In the highlands and islands of Scotland they focused on fine tweeds, with marketing support from bodies like the Highland Home Industries Association. In the village of Stonehouse near Lanark, there were a few specialised silk scarf and handkerchief weavers working on jacquard looms into the 1930s. In numerous villages and small towns in Scotland there are streets of terraced weaver cottages to remind us of the once flourishing state of the craft and its communities. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Workshop of a Handloom Weaver, Lanark ca. 1900 Fife Glasgow Highlands Lanark linen Paisley postcard silk spinning wheel tourist industry weavers wool http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/89df88dcdc5aa058e17343f89e0ae737.jpg 3199707dbf7759f6a3bee6bc48f0f2d7 Exhibition Item Category Glass Image copyright CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections Item Location Maryhill Burgh Hall, Glasgow Description This stained glass panel is one of twenty depicting different trades created by Stephen Adam (1848-1910) for the Burgh Halls in Maryhill a western suburb of Glasgow. Adam was one of Scotland’s most prolific and renowned nineteenth-century stained glass designers. His Maryhill panels celebrate the artisan labour that defined the industries of Glasgow and Maryhill’s local trades. This panel depicts a typical joiner’s workshop. One man wears a traditional Scotch bonnet and carries a basket of tools that include a handsaw and piece of rope, while the other planes a piece of timber on a workbench. The tools and equipment seen here would have been familiar to most woodworker’s workshops in the 1870s. The Maryhill Burgh panels have been noted for their contemporary realism in contrast to Renaissance-style depictions of figures that were favoured for most late nineteenth-century ecclesiastical stained glass. Other Glasgow trades featured in Adam’s panels include zinc spelters, iron moulders and chemical workers. Adam’s own workshops at St Vincent Street, Glasgow, feature in an 1891 published account titled Glasgow and its Environs. The description gives a sense of the hierarchy of tasks and division of labour involved in making architectural stained glass, describing workshops for lead working, drawing and designing cartoons, for glass painting and staining, plus kilns for firing and supplementary departments for packing and for housing stocks of materials. At the height of his success in the 1890s Adam employed several assistants and apprentices. Stephen Adam was born in Edinburgh and received his training at the Trustee’s Academy in Edinburgh. He was apprenticed in 1861 to Edinburgh glass painter James Ballantine who authored A Treatise on Painted Glass in 1845. The Maryhill Burgh Halls panels were commissioned while Adam was in partnership with David Small, a former house-painter who retained his business as an ‘embosser and fancy decorator’ after his partnership with Adam ended in 1885. Adam’s other commissions include memorial windows for Paisley Abbey and contracts for public institutions, hotels, restaurants and banks. A report on his address to the Edinburgh Architectural Society in 1896 described his public work as ‘for the comfort and education of the masses in church and home, palace and hall’ (The Scotsman, December 3,1896). Stained glass was an art form traditionally associated with ecclesiastical buildings but a resurgence of interest in the second half of the nineteenth century led to commissions for decorative glass for public and domestic architecture. Increasing demand supported a number of workshops and designers. Adam was a key figure in Glasgow glass, as were other influential figures such as Oscar Paterson and John and William Guthrie. John Guthrie was a founder member of The Scottish Society of Art Workers, and the Guthries were an example of an established general glaziers and interior decorators that branched out into the lucrative fashion for painted and stained glass in the 1880s. They employed freelance designers from the Glasgow School of Art and produced glass for Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s interiors. Stephen Adam’s work was exhibited at Arts and Crafts exhibitions in London and Scotland, and he also published two books on his craft: Stained Glass its History and Development (1877), and The Truth in Decorative Art: Stained Glass, Medieval and Modern (ca.1896). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stained glass panel, 'The Joiners', Stephen Adam, 1878 Adam apprentices Arts and Crafts carpenters designers exhibitions Glasgow glass glass stainers tools http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/d37a1034b3fa6fdad6f3f12289306ee0.jpg a06f5fffe80ed7168c5aaacfcaf33f55 Exhibition Item Category Wood Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Description The workshop depicted in this black and white photograph contains the tools and equipment used by several generations of instrument makers at the J. and R. Glen Highland Bagpipe Makers, Edinburgh. Spoon bits, turning chisels, and reamers of various sizes can be seen mounted on the wall next to a mechanised table-top lathe which was used for boring hollows and shaping the pipes of the hand-crafted instruments made at the workshop until the business closed after over 150 years in Edinburgh. Thomas McBean Glen (1804-1873) founded the business in 1826 in the Cowgate in Edinburgh’s Old Town. The shop first opened as a dealer in second-hand instruments but by 1833 Glen is listed in the Edinburgh Post Office directory as a pipe and flute maker. Thomas’s brother Alexander brought the bagpipe making skills to the business which was taken over by Thomas’ sons John Glen (1833-1904) and Robert Glen (1835-1911) in 1866. The workshop moved to several addresses in the Old Town before settling in 1911 at 497 Lawnmarket, at which time Andrew McKay Ross, a relative of the Glens, joined the workshop as a bagpipe maker. In the early years of the century the brothers reputedly employed up to six men, including two French violin makers. As significant makers and collectors of historical instruments the Glen’s shop was a key destination for musicians and enthusiasts. It sold instruments that were made on the premises but also brought-in violins, band instruments, woodwind instruments and drums. The business’s account books survive to show that the Glens purchased their instruments from sellers in Edinburgh and London but sold mostly to customers in the New Town or from Edinburgh’s surrounding districts. Sales are noted to private customers but military and town bands were their best and most frequent customers. In 1848 The Falkland Band purchased 3 flutes, 4 clarinets, 2 french horns, a pair of triangles, a tenor trombone, a trombone, trumpet, ophiclide and a cornocopean, for a total of £21 10s. The Morningside Asylum made a more modest purchase paying 12s for a violin. During their lifetimes the brother’s accumulated a historically significant collection including several items which were shown at the 1872 International Exhibition in South Kensington. Their collection included the earliest known English clarinet, and an Edinburgh-marked key bugle. John Glen’s collection of traditional Scottish music is held at the National Library of Scotland, and Robert bequeathed several significant instruments to the National Museum of Antiquities (now the National Museum of Scotland). Examples of Robert’s collection are now on permanent loan to the University of Edinburgh. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Workshop of J. and R. Glen, Highland Bagpipe Makers, 1970s collectors Edinburgh exhibitions tools wood http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/763c535c233ca86370d19258428c8529.jpg f33226a1d1fb81978948173b21a78f8b Exhibition Item Category Wood Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Description This wheelwright’s workshop in the hamlet of Fala Dam in a rich agricultural area about twelve miles south of Edinburgh, is a stone-built, pan-tiled structure on two floors with a cottage at one end. It is part of a terrace of cottages, shops and workshops. The roof tiles suggest it was constructed in the later eighteenth century. The wide central entrance and opening above reveal the building’s specialist functions for storing the wood and components of carts and other related goods (such as wheel barrows), with the yard in front given over to the construction or repair, as here, of large wheeled vehicles. There would have been a forge nearby for making the iron components and tyres. Three men are visible in this image, which seems to have been taken in high summer. Another photograph of the same workshop a few years earlier has four men posing outside holding their wood working tools, with rolled-up sleeves and aprons. A great deal of the work undertaken was probably out-of-doors. Indeed, the dismantled cart that dominates this image is so large it could only have been built in a yard. The range of skills practiced in the Fala Dam workshop were the subject of one of the most famous accounts of the life of a late nineteenth-century rural artisan. This was George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop, published in 1923 but referring to the years from 1884-91 when George and his brother ran a wheelwright business in Farnham in Surrey that had been in family ownership since 1810. In an elegiac account, influenced by Ruskin’s ideas of the moral authority of craftwork, Sturt detailed the techniques employed in making wheels before mechanisation, from the curing of the wood to the selection of the right timbers for strength and durability, to sawing with hand tools and the making and fitting of iron tyres. This is one of several photographs of the workshop that was taken in the late nineteenth century, with variations in the extent of the foliage growing on the building and on the wooden railings suggesting a wide span of years. A photographic postcard from the 1930s also shows the same row of quaint cottages, with the workshop still visible, in a hamlet that was clearly attractive to tourists. Some of the contents of the joiner’s house were donated to the National Museums of Scotland in the 1960s. The buildings still exist today, though are now all converted into smart houses. Though only a small hamlet, the local Post Office directory records that Fala accommodated a range of craft workers in the 1890s, including a cobbler, joiner, builder, thatcher, blacksmith and wright, Walter Stoddart, who is probably one of the men depicted in this photograph. There was also a dressmaker, two grocers, a baker and a butcher, along with a photographer, Robert Lothian, who may have taken this image. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Wheelwright’s Workshop, Fala Dam, Midlothian, ca. 1890 blacksmiths Edinburgh iron joiners photographers postcard tools tourist industry Wheelwright wood http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/3057981274521fcc57d4d7fcbee74c83.jpg 95b2e0fca56040aa7bfd18aba746bf3b Exhibition Item Image copyright Tain and District Museum's Trust Item Location Tain and District Museum Description This photograph shows the Interior of Danny Thompson's cabinet makers workshop in Upper King Street, Tain in Ross-shire. It shows six men, a typical workshop size, all wearing white aprons, with the proprietor stood in the center. The figure in the background on the left appears to be a teenage apprentice. The workshop is a simple, single-story wooden building. Another view taken from outside about ten years later shows it adjoining a windowed building that acted as a showroom. The firm was founded by Danny Thompson, a local man, in the 1880s, but was sold to William Fraser, who appears on the left of the photograph, in the early twentieth century. Fraser retained the original name and D. Thompson & Co. continued in existence through several ownerships to 1994. A number of partly finished objects can be identified in the photograph, including picture and mirror frames, a carved chair back and hall-stand or mirror back. The local museum in Tain has a carved chair attributed to Danny Thompson that is very similar to the one displayed here. Upholstered cushions and textiles can be seen on the left. Danny Thompson, the master craftsman and proprietor, is stood behind a lady’s davenport writing desk, which was a complex and expensive piece of furniture made for elite customers. These items have been arranged in the image for narrative effect and to show the range of products made. It is unlikely that tasks like upholstery work were normally undertaken in such a dusty environment as is evident here. To the rear of the workshop, fixed to the roof, is a wheel with a mechanized belt-drive, for running a sawing or turning machine and there are numerous hand tools in racks on the wall. Wood is stored above in the rafters and prints and designs are pasted onto the walls and ceiling. In common with most local workshops of this type, Thompson also made coffins, though none are visible in this image and he fitted out house interiors with wood paneling and chimney pieces. One of his most notable commissions was Morangie House (now a hotel) on the outskirts of Tain, an eight-bedroom mansion designed by architect Andrew Maitland of Keith in Banffshire for the wealthy widow of a local farmer, on which he and his men worked extensively in 1902-3. The image here was the work of William Smith, a bookseller, newsagent and photographer with premises in Tain’s High Street from the early 1850s to his death in 1906. He took many photographs of local scenes and people including tradesmen in their places of work and servants connected with some of the great houses nearby such as Balnagown Castle, home of the Ross family. He also published a series of colour-tinted photographic postcards for tourists showing notable Tain buildings and street scenes. He erected a special glasshouse to the rear of his shop for his successful studio portrait business. As a thriving town in a prosperous north-east farming district Tain provided constant business for craftsmen like Danny Thompson, who made goods in the latest fashion according to demand and also furnished a steady stream of customers for William Smith. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Danny Thompson’s Cabinet Makers Workshop, Tain, ca. 1890 apprentices cabinet maker design furniture Highlands photographers portraits Tain textiles tools tourist industry wood http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/4572bd10af1b75a30fc400ddafde4d9c.jpg 0421fc4407e53941551a71796d75a048 Exhibition Item Category Metal Description This unattributed photograph of the interior of a type foundry, which is possibly in London but would have been much the same as those found in Edinburgh, including the firm of Miller & Richards in Chapel Street, shows men and women in the casting shop, with men casting the letters and women dressing the type of excess metal. The men, with their dirty aprons, are stood alongside hot and complex machines where the lead type is cast, whilst the women workers are seated for the less skilled work in a cooler position by the windows. Type founding – the process of making the individual letters that are put together by compositors to make a page of text - began in Scotland with the Glasgow works of Alexander Wilson, who in the 1770s was responsible for the types used by the Foulis Press in the production of beautiful editions of the classics under the patronage of Glasgow University. The punch cutters and engravers who first worked in Scotland were mostly trained in London, but by c.1800 Wilson also employed a number of Scottish craftsmen including William Miller, his foreman, who set up his own business in Edinburgh in 1808. Miller joined with his son-in-law, Walter Richard, in 1842 and the firm of Miller & Richard of 65 Nicholson Street close to the University of Edinburgh, became the largest in Scotland employing over 500 ‘men and boys’ by the 1860s. Metal type was made from a mix of lead, tin and antimony. Before type could be made, however, the first operation was to cut a set of punches in fine steel, which was the most skilled element of the type making process. Many punch cutters were self-employed craftsmen who worked for a number of firms and some of those responsible for the finest typefaces produced in Scotland were London based. In addition to the punchers and type founders, a typical type foundry in the mid nineteenth century would also employ skilled craftsmen to make the wooden and brass frame-work or ‘furniture’ for setting the types. Skilled women were long associated with the book and paper trades, though they were never as well paid as men. Type dressing, sorting and packing was one area of work and also book sewing and cloth binding. Leather binding was normally viewed as a male skill. In a city famed for its publishing and printing houses, women were employed as compositors in Edinburgh from the later nineteenth century, having a higher ratio of women to men in the industry (c.1:10) than in any other city in Britain. A heavily unionised industry, the Scottish Typographical Society formed in 1853 had c.6,500 members at its height. Yet the history of the book trades, with its type foundries, printers, publishers and ancillary trades such as engravers, illustrators and binders, was one of slowly diminishing craft identity, as new technologies undermined old skills. Though it was for many years one of the key employment sectors in Edinburgh the letter press industry largely ended in the 1960s following the wide adoption of offset lithography. The firm of Miller & Richards ceased trading in 1951 and the premises were demolished – a fate that befell most of the workshop premises that once accommodated Edinburgh’s large craft economy in this part of the city. The site that was once occupied by the type foundry is now the location for the Central Edinburgh Mosque. Image copyright Napier University Item Location Napier University Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Workers in a Type Foundry, ca. 1910 Brass Edinburgh engravers Glasgow lead leather London unions women’s industries wood http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/8b104d62540518b24afe462f60f38916.jpg d4a7ba05020cf96010fb1882e13aa7a2 Exhibition Item Category Jewellery and Silverware Description At the peak of the Kildonan Gold Rush in March 1869 over 600 men travelled to the Highland districts of Suisgill and the Kildonan Burns in the hope of making their fortunes. The three men in this hazy photograph, which was probably taken by photographer, Alexander Johnston, from Wick in Caithness, are standing in front of the huts and tents that formed temporary living quarters in the landscape beneath the Sutherland estate hills at Helmsdale. This make-do, shanty town known in Gaelic as Bal an Or (Town of Gold) was home to a transient workforce of hopeful gold prospectors between January and December and 1869. The history of Sutherland gold began when a nugget of gold was found in the River Helmsdale early in the 19th century. Fifty years later, native Kildonan, Robert Nelson Gilchrist, recently returned from his successful gold-mining venture in Australia, was given permission by the duke of Sutherland to survey the river’s burns and tributaries. Gilchrist’s efforts revealed enough gold to trigger a wave of newspaper reports and a short-lived escalation of mining activity. The Kildonan waterways yielded relatively little saleable gold, yet stories of fortunes made in recent gold rushes in Australia and California fuelled the public’s imagination and their enthusiasm for stories of Scottish gold. The activities at Helmsdale were reported widely in Scotland and London most notably in an extensive article published in the Illustrated London News (May 29, 1869). Mining for gold wasn’t a skilled or artisanal activity; on the contrary characteristic of the Scottish gold rush was that it attracted both seasoned miners returned from the fields of California or Australia and hopeful adventurers armed only with a pick and a sieve or rudimentary kitchen equipment. Gold on the Sutherland land was extracted from the banks of the burn through a process of mining and then sifting in the Helmsdale waters, and much of it found its way to jewellers in Inverness and Glasgow who used it to make jewellery favoured for its novelty and its resonance of the Scottish landscape. The Inverness Courier reported that Mr Wilson, jeweller from Inverness, bought £30, 5s 8d worth of gold early in March and a further £193 worth at the end of the month. D.C Rait of Glasgow was another good customer of the Kildonan miners. Who the men in this photograph are isn’t recorded but twenty-two tents and wooden houses were in place at Bal an Or by the height of the rush, so these men could be seasoned miners or hopeful beginners. The imposition of licenses at the end of the month checked the expansion of the settlement and dissuaded those without experience or equipment from persevering with the difficulties of washing gold and combating the hostile weather. Alexander Johnston (1839-1896), son of plumber, whose mother was the daughter of a local cabinetmaker, set-up as a professional photographer in Wick in 1863, later occupying premises in Parliament Square. Johnston specialised in local harbour scenes and was equipped to take photographs in exposed landscapes. Taking a portable camera and mobile darkroom Johnston travelled for four days to capture images of the Kildonan miners. His photographs of Bal an Or were produced as both single and stereoscopic images. Image copyright Tain and District Museum Trust Item Location Tain and District Museum Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gold Mining in Kildonan, Sutherland, 1869 Glasgow gold Highlands Inverness jewellers photographers http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/5be759118e2f4db1444666e938b5d8d1.png 36d2ed69eb670a2d480752c62f3549f5 Exhibition Item Category Jewellery and Silverware Description This view of St Giles’ Cathedral by London engravers James Sargant Storer (1771-1853) and Henry Sargant Storer (1796-1837) was published in Views in Edinburgh and its Vicinity, (Volume 2) shortly after the parade of small shops in the foreground were demolished to widen the streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town. The shops known as Luckenbooths, or ‘locked booths’ were associated with various small-scale trades, particularly the cheaper end of Edinburgh’s jewellery trade. The booths were a fixture in and around Edinburgh’s Parliament Square from at least the seventeenth century. An aerial plan of the cathedral, found in the sketchbook of nineteenth-century antiquarian Daniel Wilson, depicts St Giles’ Close in the years 1806-18, it includes reference to ‘Luckenbooth Street’ to the north and small shops belonging to ‘Green the Watchmaker’ and ‘Gordon McKenzie Jeweller’ situated on the south side of the church from which direction this engraving is taken. Luckenbooth Street was demolished in 1802 but the Parliament Square booths remained until 1817. Excavations on the walls of St Giles in preparation for the building of Lorimer’s Thistle Chapel in 1909, revealed the remains of fireplaces and containers for smelting glass in the old Luckenbooth cellars, suggesting that some may have contained small workshops. Despite their simplicity, Edinburgh’s nineteenth-century Luckenbooths embodied something of the lively buying and selling street culture in the Old Town at a time when luxury trades were migrating to the bridges that joined old Edinburgh with the new retailing centre of Princes Street in James Craig’s New Town. The booths were immortalised in painted depictions and writings, notably in Walter Scott’s, The Heart of Midlothian, in which Scott describes: ‘a huge pile of buildings called Luckenbooths, which for some inconceivable reason, our ancestors jammed into the midst of the principal street of the town (…) the hosiers, the glovers, the hatters, the mercers, the milliners, and all who dealt in the miscellaneous wares now termed haberdasher’s goods were to be found in the narrow alley’ (Chapter 5). In jewellery too, small goods made to appeal to a passing trade are thought to have been the stock-in trade of Luckenbooth sellers. Scottish love tokens, known from the end of the nineteenth century as ‘Luckenbooth brooches’, are particularly associated with the booths’ small-scale style of retailing. Typically heart-shaped and featuring the symbolic motif of a crown or two entwined hearts, the brooches were made in silver and gold, with more expensive versions incorporating jewels and precious stones. Like the booths themselves they found resonance with a particular strand of nineteenth-century romanticism, legend associates their simple heart-shaped forms with love gifts exchanged between Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley. Father and son team, James and Henry Storer, were talented engravers and publishers of specialised works on topography and architecture producing many similar works to this one. James’s other works include, Views in North Britain Illustrative of the Works of Burns (1805) and The Cathedrals of Great Britain (1814–19). The latter was produced in collaboration with his son, and was credited by the architect Augustus Pugin as including the most accurate existing views of the buildings . Image copyright RCAHMS Item Location Historic Environment Scotland Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Engraving of Luckenbooths at St. Giles's Church, 1819 Edinburgh engravers fashionable consumption gold jewellers silver