Inter-disciplinary Fieldwork at Scalan Mills, Moray

This fieldwork took place at Scalan Mill, Moray, Scotland, in June 2018. The mill is located on the north edge of the Cairngorm massive, in a post industrial and rural landscape. The fieldwork primarily links to ‘Reading Landscape’ research themes of people and place; landscape, history and transformation. The research collaboration has arisen through a dialogue with Alex Hale, Archaeologist based with Historic Environment Scotland because he is interested in what archaeologists might learn from artists in relation to alternative methods they use to examine the nature of site and place. This fieldwork is proposed as an experiment to test the possibilities for knowledge exchange, and new methods to emerge as a result. Why Scalan Mill? It is an Historic Environment site, and is on the Buildings at Risk register and is ‘A’ listed. Historically it was once a seminary 1717-1760, where the ‘Heather Priests’ trained, hidden from Jacobites and English. In a more recent social history, the building, in particular the sack room, became inscribed over by time by workers, away from sight of the management. The building now forms an intense visual surface from this graffiti, a ‘data dump’ with drawings of wild and domestic animals, weather, and written texts, the earliest from 1784. One in 1927 reads: ‘The disasterous harvest of 1927 will not be forgotten in the memory of any of us’. The primary objective is to undertake a field trip to gather information and respond to the site using interdisciplinary methods. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, the project aims to respond to the following questions: What are the benefits to creative practice of situating Scalan Mills within the expanded field of writing? How might our understanding of landscape be enriched by reading this place as a site of inscription which correlates with the archaeological concept of palimpsest? How might this rendering of place respond to an interdisciplinary methodology which deploys archaeological fieldwork, site writing and practice-as-writing (photography, performance, spatial practice) to engage with the landscape as archive? The research questions are interrogated by an interdisciplinary methodology which includes: • Visual and data mining of the existing archaeological documentation of ‘field graffiti’ • Archaeological and creative field research including drawing, photography, video and audio recordings • Reflexive research methods including participatory group work, spoken word and performance • Active response to the site – ‘reflection-in-action’ • ‘Reflection-on-action’ methods, following the field trip