A celebration of heritage with a Feast in Summerhill
We are planning an event to celebrate harvest, build community, and help people enter into their heritage in the company of the saints, living and departed! Thos interested in exploring heritage through cooking, eating, making, and immersive character building needed!
Since 2020 Wordsmith Crafts has been working as part of “Creative Caerlaverock“. This H.E.S.and Stove Network programme was designed to boost engagement of unrepresented groups with Caerlaverock castle and their historical heritage. Young people are one of these groups. This activity built on previous work with “Hidden Histories of Dumfries and Galloway” and general networking and relationship building through chaplaincy work in the area. Simon has used his craft and historical interpretation skills to bring history to life using a variety of historical characters and hands on opportunities to get a feel for heritage.
Together with other Quartz members he has also contributed events (August 2023) using characters and activities which drew attention to links with the Cistercian Abbey of Holme Cultram, and the Spiritual Heritage of the place.
This summer as the Cluaran Wordsmith Crafts project, we worked with the youth group at summerhill community centre again to help them prepare and set up a stall at the Bruce 750 medieval market celebrations in Dumfries. They used this to sell craft items they had learned to make, a medieval style cottage industry! This marked a movement from simply receiving help accessing their heritage, to them being supported to participate in communicating aspects of it to the public. Their voluntary action also raised funds which will be used to hold a community harvest feast as a celebration.
More recently they also took time out on the last day of the school holidays to welcome the Ukrainian young people and show them what they had learned about the castle. They chose flavours of Scotland for the group to try out, guided them round the estate, and led activities.
But returning to the start of this post! We hope that the feast will be another opportunity for the young people to explore their interest which has been awakened and “Own” their heritage. There many ways in which this might happen. This might be simply being aware that a visit to Caerlaverock is something they can do with friends and visitors to the area. Some of them may decide to try re-enactment as a hobby, or perhaps look for employment in traditional heritage industries like HES or create new enterprises like those behind Solway tours, Mostly Ghostly, and History Matters.
As Quartz we especially hope that this will include increased opportunities for the young people to become aware of and inherit their full heritage from our brothers and sisters in faith, living and departed. It will, after all, be close to Halloween.
If you would like to be involved in the feast, or this sort of thing in general, please get in touch. The feast will be held on the 4th of November, starting at 6pm.