& Oransay Heritage Trust July '15 newsletter

We held our AGM in June. Here's our Chair's report

Directors – David Binnie continues as Chair, David Hobhouse as Vice Chair, Carol MacNeill as Secretary and Keith continues as Treasurer. Donald MacNeilł was elected as a director, joining Esme Marshall and Katie Joll to bring our numbers to seven in total, with Chris Nisbet's resignation.

Members Our membership stands at almost 60 - demonstrating enormous support from the local community, for which the Trust is very grateful.

Associate membership continues to grow slowly and we are acquiring more friends on Facebook.

Progress in the past year: another exciting year with lots of activities. There has been a shift in the emphasis of what we are undertaking. We have moved slightly away from concentrating on our long term goal of building a dedicated centre. It has become apparent from the feasibility study in 2013 that a centre estimated to cost around £800,000 was ambitious, and the projected income was over-optimistic. It is now also apparent that heritage lottery will not fund capital costs of buildings and that any organisation has to have some track record of robust management and achievement in projects to stand any likelihood of a bid being successful. Instead of focussing purely on a building, we have involved ourselves with several projects, and we have engaged the help of Hazel Smith in generating funding submissions and strengthening the governance of the Trust through training with Voluntary Action support.

So what have we been doing since our last AGM in April '14

Intern: Last summer we took on Stephanie Kirby who many of you will have met. She is a first class honours history graduate from St Andrews and worked with the Trust for 8 weeks over the summer to help archive our collection, improve the website, introduce a facebook page and start collating the photographic collection. She carried out a great job for the Trust.

MacKinnon Conference: We were involved in the Islands Book Trust MacKinnon Conference held on the island last June to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the death of Professor Donald MacKinnon the first Chair of Celtic Studies at Edinburgh University who originally came from Colonsay.

Archaeology Project: We are continuing our link with the University of Ulster archaeology team who have carried out excavations on the island and we are now in the process of applying for an £80,000 grant towards further archaeological work on the island. We hope to employ a person to support this project. This is a Heritage Lottery Fund bid and, if successful, will strengthen future HLF bids. We enjoy the support of Historic in this application too.

Stevenson Light: As many of you no doubt will have noticed in the Glebe, we completed the restoration of the old Stevenson light, with the support of a grant from the Association for Industrial Archaeology and a small grant from the Northern Heritage Trust. We had a very successful visit from the Lighthouse Commissioners in early June. They had been very supportive of the project and were delighted with the results. After toasting the Stevenson light in its new position they carried on to Colonsay House Gardens to view the original Rhuvaal optic and meet with Lord Strathcona.

We thank Bill Lawson, past lighthouse keeper, who donated various artefacts relating to the light including a ledger from the 1950s, and thanks to Kevin for his help in the project. Since this has been such a successful and high profile project we have produced an information leaflet showing the restoration process. (attached separately) We hope soon to create a lighthouse trail which will include information on our neighbouring : Rhuvaal on , Dubh Artach off the west coast of the island and , a further twenty miles away.

Oransay Priory leaflet: Successful funding bids to Strathmartine Trust and Historic Scotland have allowed us to produce a leaflet and information panel about Oransay Priory...... We are very grateful to Andrew McMorrine for his help with this and to Frannie Colburn for her support. (A preview of the leaflet is attached separately. The information panel is a work in progress.)

Fundraising: We have employed Hazel over the winter to help with funding applications and development and have been successful in receiving a grant towards our Curios project. In conjunction with Aberdeen University we plan to implement a comprehensive website and archive resource: colonsaycaptured.com will be launched soon and we hope this will develop into a comprehensive digital archive of Colonsay's history. (We'll keep you up to date with developments....) We have also had a grant towards governance training which we are currently undergoing; other groups on the island (CCDC, Marketing Group and the Medical Fund) are participating. The board are grateful to Hazel for all her hard work.

The Old Generator Shed: Colonsay Estate continues to support the Trust letting use the Old Generator Shed at Port Mor and we continue to add to the various exhibits there.

Arandora Star Exhibition: Alan Davis has produced another extensively researched display, this time about the SS Arandora Star and there have been many poignant comments in his remembrance book. To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the torpedoing and sinking of the ship, Kevin led representatives from the community for a short ceremony at the original burial site of Giuseppe Delgrosso whose body was found at Pigs' Paradise. A wreath was laid beside the plaque and Lewis Nisbet played a lament on the pipes.

Other events over the year include Heritage Walks over both the autumn and spring festivals, led by Dave; a couple of popular evenings of songs and slides from Pedie and Seumas with proceeds towards COHT and the very successful cheese and wine social event in the autumn.

Annual General Meeting: our AGM in June was followed by a well attended slideshow of a selection of photographs from our archives, presented by Dave and Pedie, which encouraged much audience participation and reminiscing - a format much appreciated by the audience and well worth repeating, especially over the long winter months.

Loder Day: Our most recent event at the end of June was our celebration of the publication, 75 years ago, of John de Vere Loder's book 'Colonsay and Oransay in the Isles of Argyll.' Despite its age it is still considered the most comprehensive work covering Colonsay's past. We are grateful to Richard Hill and Tanis Hinchcliff who organised the day. We were treated to very interesting and informative presentations by a number of learned contributors covering a wide range of topics. Due to the vagaries of Calmac the programme underwent a number of alterations to accommodate the comings and goings of our contributors.

Richard opened the day telling us as much as he'd been able to discover on John de Vere Loder before Tanis presented James Petre's contribution on the Lords of the Isles. Unfortunately, James himself was unable to reach Colonsay until an hour after the event ended, due to the seamens' strike. However we were lucky to have John Raven from Historic Scotland to answer some of the questions raised. The morning session finished with Dr Colin Breen from Ulster University captivating the audience with his presentation which covered so much more than the title 'Uncertain times: recent archaeological research on Colonsay's medieval past'.

By the end of lunch our next speaker had arrived. Professor Steven Mithen, Pro Vice- Chancellor and Professor in Archaeology at Reading University, led archaeological excavations based at Staosnaig here on Colonsay in 1994. He investigated the earliest human settlements on Colonsay and Oransay and reported on his findings from that time. Tanis had researched the McNeills (previous owners of Colonsay and Oransay) and gave an interesting talk on this subject before David Jardine, a long-time friend of Colonsay and author of 'The Birds of Colonsay and Oransay' brought Loder's bird list up to date and made some interesting connections with Steven's research. The day finished with another very interesting presentation on Loder's debt to Murdoch McNeill, with particular reference to Gaelic, from Alastair Scouller whose relationship with Colonsay goes back generations.

That seems to be all for this time, except to thank you all for your continuing support to keep the momentum of the Trust going. Don't forget you can contact us at [email protected] or colonsayoransayheritagetrust on Facebook. We'll keep our old website http://www.spanglefish.com/ColonsayandOransayHeritageTrust going until our new one is ready to be unveiled. Thank you, too, to all who have contributed to our photographic collection and to our artefacts throughout the year.