Dualchas Agus Duthchas
The sense of belonging to a place; its culture and traditions : connecting the people, their activities and the land.
Brigadier John MaFarlane inspired the title in his presentation to the Scottish Place-Names Conference May 2012
even he described it as difficult to translate but to convey its meaning he suggested it incorporates the following ideas -
- sense of culture and tradition
- sense of belonging to area of land
- rooted by ancient lineage
- expressed in rich oral tradtion and place names
- connects the people, their activities and the land
The Heritage Lottery Fund offered modern communities the opportunity of funding to research and share stories of their local heritage. In Ardchattan we have a lot of information that has been collected in various locations, and in families. We do not have an easy way to share it, nor is it organised in a way it can be accessed easily.
So a small group of people got together to create a project to provide the foundations of a local history archive.. and were successful in being awarded one of the All Our Stories grants.
The Ardchattan Parish Archive is a collection of records, images, maps, books, memories.
A bulk of these are unsorted, just as have been harvested from many sources over the past 10 years.
Another bulk remain in the community, as family records, folk and family lore, and as structures raised over the millenia.
A third untapped resource remain the various repositories of public archives.
Ardchattan has been inhabited since the land recovered after the last Ice Age. It has a remarkably diverse and numerous prehistoric landscape and from then on, in each era there is something of significant note to be explored and shared : Ossianic connections; Scotia tribes; several powerful clan families; social and political events that are of national importance, as well as the rich tapestry of local life.
The idea of this project is to have to set up a local team of expertise to work through the existing available collections creating an organised and accessible archive in its new home. The skills learned through this process can be then used to deal with new material in a professional manner.
In parallel there will be a series of events and activities to engage and inspire the community, local and the wider diaspora, to learn more about managing an Archive and about Ardchattan itself.
It is hoped that this would provide the foundation for more activities and events in the future for our local communities, and to encourage more people who are descendants of Ardchattan to come home. For those who cannot, we want to share what we learn in various means online.
