MANAGING DECAY: DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS
Professor Richard Oram, History Scotland patron, wrote recently of the need for us think about the threatened heritage in our own area, reflecting on a ‘managed decay’ strategy
Richard writes: How do we avoid a ‘balloon game’ of what would we let go of most easily in a future where we are managing decay across much of our historic environment and investing strategically in other parts? We all have places or particular artefacts that we would dearly love to see preserved – mine is this 15th-century sacrament house at Cortachy kirk in Angus, where a combination of crappy Angus sandstone, climate change and a 19thcentury decision to put an object intended for an interior not only onto an exterior wall but one that faces north, has led to bad flaking in recent years (God lost most of his nose after the hard winter of 2010-11).
It’s not quite unique (there’s one probably by the same sculptor at Fowlis Easter) but it is one of a handful or pre-Reformation church fixtures to survive almost unmutilated into the 21st century. Movement back inside comes at a cost (conservation as well as the physical relocation) and there’s then a question of access. Move elsewhere? And then it becomes another object to display, store and maintain. All recording methods come at a cost and there is then the cost of updating and maintaining any digital record. And that’s just one piece of late medieval sculpture.
Join the conversation What historic sites or monuments would you like to see preserved? E-mail Rachel Bellerby (rachelb@warnersgroup.co.uk) and we’ll publish a selection of responses in a future issue.