RSGS Featured on the BBC's Newsnight Scotland and Good Morning Scotland

Volunteers and staff off the Royal Scottish Geographical Society featured on last night's edition of Newsnight Scotland and on this morning's Good Morning Scotland on BBC Radio Scotland.

CEO Mike Robinson, Collections & Information Convenor Margaret Wilkes and members of our volunteer collections team, Kenny Maclean and Dr Andrew Cook were interviewed about their favourite items from the collection.

Watch Newsnight Scotland here from around 10minutes in:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b02v6y4k/Newsnight_Scotland_06_06_2013/

Listen to Good Morning Scotland here from around 1hr 49mins:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01slsm5

The Cuthbert Room in the Fair Maid's House.

Collections Corner: Concerning German Town Plans, Black Forest Gateau and Good Conservation Practices.

Dogged work by one of our Collections Team members, who’s just completed the identification and listing of over 400 German Town Plans (produced and printed by the then British War Office between 1943-45) led to the Team celebrating this doughty event by working our way through two packets of suitably Geographical-sounding ‘Black Forest Gateau Cookies’, hunted down in a well-kent British chain-store close by. 

Our Team Member’s work involved checking the geographical location of the 400 towns and villages (some very small) and recording the latitude and longitude of these as a first stage towards eventual production of an electronic graphic index to these plans.  To build on this endeavour, a post-graduate student - on the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Geography MSc Course in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) - is presently doing his Project on electronic indexing in connection with our map collections.

A nice bottle of German-produced Gewürztraminer or Riesling might have been a finer geographical tribute but Curators of Collections know full well that maps and alcohol are not soul mates and – true to best Curatorial practice - must be kept far apart.  So a tea-break with our German-sounding cookies was taken in another room, leaving the Town Plans to rest in peace, free from the hazards of greasy fingers or biscuit crumbs.  As Curators the world over know, a cuppa and a ‘piece’ at one’s desk are ‘verboten’ if one has maps, books, manuscripts, artefacts or other collection items located in close range and curatorial fingers must be kept clean at all times.

Samples from the German Town Plans. Click to enlarge.

Our dogged Team Member was later released to cool off amongst our Polar Collections. (In 2008 we acquired two important collections, the Angus Erskine Polar Collection and the Scottish Arctic Club Collection and a full list of the books in these collections is available on our website).  A future blog will expand on another Polar theme to mark the bi-centenary of the Scottish (Orcadian-born) Arctic Explorer and surgeon, Dr John Rae (1813-1893), who spent a large part of his career working for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada and was also heavily involved in the search for the missing North-West Passage explorer, Sir John Franklin.  

The Society has extensive book, journal, map, and photographic collections which are available to members. These collections are continually updated, and RSGS welcomes donations of relevant material.  Please send any enquiries about the collection to collections@rsgs.org and we'll get back to you as soon as possible (please note that the Collections Team is voluntary and meets once a week).

For more information about the Collections, the Enquiry Service and Access see http://www.rsgs.org/collections/access.html

  
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Guest Post: Testing the Water - Planning an expedition with the RSGS collection.

Callum (the little blue dot amongst the swells!) Chuya River, Altai Mountains, Siberia, Russia.

The Society has a wealth of items in its collection, including maps and guide books which can be made available to anyone who wants to plan an adventure. Callum Strong is an avid Kayaker, a passion that has taken him across the world in search of challenging white waters. He visited the RSGS headquarters to use maps to help in the planning of his next trip.

I visited the RSGS archives with an interest in finding maps of Northern Pakistan for an exploratory whitewater kayaking expedition, the British Universities Kayak Expedition 2013, which myself and a team the best student whitewater paddlers selected from across the UK are undertaking this summer. Accurate topographic maps are of great use in planning which rivers will be possible and have quality whitewater, important as we hope to complete a number of first descents on such rivers in the Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountain ranges.

Callum Strong

The archive team at the RSGS were incredibly welcoming and helpful, buoyed by their obviously great enthusiasm for their work. With their expert guidance and knowledge of their incredible collection I managed to identify a number of maps which will be really useful and importantly, accessible to our expedition. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit and will have to get planning another adventure so I can visit them again soon!

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Callum decending the Falls of Falloch, River Falloch, Scotland.

Collections Corner: A map of "Scotland in Miniature" from 1913

The Isle of Arran as seen by the Ordnance Survey in 1913

It’s spring-cleaning time and despite hibernating somewhat during the recent freezing weather, our Collections Team’s busy selecting maps to put on public display now the Society’s re-opened the Fair Maid’s House for viewing.  Why not come and take a peek?

We’ve put out this old Ordnance Survey 1 inch to 1 mile (1:63,360) map of the island of Arran, printed exactly a 100 years ago, to remind people of the island’s complex topography and the bad time its inhabitants suffered recently with very heavy snow drifts and electricity power lines and pylons brought down by the bitter winds – all giving rise to huge coverage in the media.

The East Coast of the Island. Click to Enlarge.

The unusual way the relief’s shown on this map highlights brilliantly the dramatic and varied landscapes on Arran, not least round the island’s highest point, Goat Fell.  Arran is often described as "Scotland in miniature" All will soon feature in the Arran Mountain Festival from 17-20 May, where there’s a chance to take part in guided ridge and coastal walks in this beautiful corner of Scotland.  But we suggest you don’t take this map with you on your walk as it’s a little bit out of date and we wouldn’t wish you to get lost (!) – though it’s very interesting indeed to compare its content with a modern map of Arran.

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Collections Corner: Remembering Professor James B Caird

Our Collections Corner post this month is about Professor James B Caird, Emeritus Professor of Geography in the University of Dundee, long-term RSGS Council Member, Trustee, and Chairman of RSGS Dundee Centre, who died on 30 December 2012 at the age of eighty four.  

A Memorial Service in Broughty Ferry, on 19 January 2013, brought back vivid memories of this most kindly and hospitable of men and of a remarkable RSGS Field Trip to the Outer Hebrides which he led a quarter of a century ago, in August 1988. As a historical geographer, Jimmy Caird spent many research hours tracking down missing early maps of these islands - and involving others in the fascinating hunt. His Gaelic-speaking wife, Isa, who accompanied us on the trip, came from the islands - from the crofting settlement of Sollas on North Uist - and it is on this island that Jimmy's remains are laid to rest.

A detail from RSGS’s copy of Sheet 89 of the Third Edition of the Ordnance Survey’s One-Inch to the Mile map, published just over a hundred years ago in 1911, towards the end of a period of large-scale changes in land tenure and settlement – the study of which was the greater part of Jimmy Caird’s academic research - shows that part of North Uist with which he was most familiar.  He would have waxed eloquent over both the map and its content.

North Uist 1911. Detail from Sheet 89 of the Third Edition of the Ordnance Survey's One-Inch to the Mile map.

With the title, ‘From Barra to the Butt of Lewis’, the Field Trip began with the ferry ride from Oban to Castlebay - the main settlement on the island of Barra - and ended on another ferry as it left Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis for the Scottish mainland port of Ullapool at the unseasonal hour of 05.00.  Waving us off from its berth with his usual beaming smile was Jimmy Caird.

In between, we were treated to a geographically-packed traverse from south to north of the main inhabited islands of the Outer Hebrides.  Nothing was left out in the way of geographical exposition, visits to all kinds of geographical phenomena in the landscape, evening discourses by local speakers as well as diversions down narrow minor roads or tracks to places Jimmy thought we should see. 

This blog is a tribute to a great Scottish geographical teacher and map user.

Collections Corner - Tales from the Collections Team

Our collections are still emerging from endless cardboard cartons, large white elephant-like containers and from map chests, all previously hidden away in enforced off-site storage. This storage was imposed on us when we moved our Headquarters in 2008 from Glasgow to Perth and then during the time our new accommodation in the Fair Maid’s House was being made ready for us.

Each week some, if not all, of our enthusiastic 10-strong Collections Team gathers for the day and exciting things suddenly resurface.  Watch this space to see what emerges over the next weeks and months! 

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ON 

In November a 1925 map of Arctic Lands, published in America by the National Geographic Society emerged from the depths of our ‘Arctic’ map drawer.  One of our keen-eyed Team was examining this and spotted in the right-hand corner a tiny line of print. This revealed that on that particular spot the world’s largest passenger ship - the Titanic - on its maiden voyage, sank on 15 April 1912.

One hundred years and 7 months later, our RSGS Team stopped work to look.  Here, shown lying to the south of the Newfoundland coast – at the small scale of map used by the cartographer it looked very close to the coast, though in fact was some 600km off - was where so many lost their lives.

One tiny line on a map, yet a poignant reminder of a geographical location where something happened which shocked the world, and continues to do so.

 

A Section of the National Geographical Society's Arctic Map.

 

A close up of the marking  "Titanic Sank".

The Society has extensive book, journal, map, and photographic collections which are available to members. These collections are continually updated, and RSGS welcomes donations of relevant material.  Please send any enquiries about the collection to collections@rsgs.org and we'll get back to you as soon as possible (please note that the Collections Team is voluntary and meets once a week).

For more information about the Collections, the Enquiry Service and Access see http://www.rsgs.org/collections/access.html