Encouraging new ideas

Scotland has a rich heritage of invention and creative achievement, writes Michael Russell, MSP for Argyll and Bute

2016 is Scotland’s Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design. Events and celebrations over the 12 months will draw attention to our country’s rich heritage of invention and creative achievement whilst encouraging new ideas. Of course Argyll and Bute also has some remarkable buildings, ranging from private houses to grand castles and amazing churches. Yet amongst my favourites are the very ordinary group of old traditional highland cottages that make up the Auchindrain Township Museum near Furnace. Auchindrain is a unique attraction because it is the last remaining pre-Clearances village in Scotland. By a series of lucky accidents the land around Auchindrain was not given over to improvers who wanted to make money from sheep farming or deer stalking during the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead it remained in the same layout, and subject to the same use, as it had for hundreds of years. It was a place that progress forgot. As a result the village was never rebuilt. The two-room ‘butt and bens’ in which families lived close to their animals, for warmth as much as for reasons of poverty, were preserved and their relationship to one and other – looking random but actually the product of time and history – was kept intact. Some of the artefacts at Auchindrain – the old ploughs and implements that are used to illustrate the story of the place – came from the farm in Glendaruel where I now live. Its house was a slightly more modern version of the Auchindrain ones, no doubt regarded as very up market by those who moved from the older settlement nearby 250 years ago. However it still owes its form to its function (the secret of good architecture ) for it was built to ensure that generations of farmers could work and live on their own land. My favourite architecture in Argyll is, therefore, not that of stately homes such as Inveraray Castle or wonderful mansions like Mount Stuart on Bute, though my favourite individual space would have to be the remarkable white marble chapel there. And whilst I love the grandeur of McCaig’s Tower in Oban (which some people want to roof), the sacred shadows of the Abbey on Iona and shape of, and view from, the ultra-modern ferry shelter on Tiree, it is a traditional, stone built, tiny Argyllshire cottage that I would nominate as my local architectural gem.