We were delighted to hear this week that the Drumderg Fund has awarded £10,000 to the project for the early stage development of three projects. They join Creative Scotland, Perth & Kinross Council and Mission Models Money as the first wave of financial supporters of the project.

What will become The Story Box

The Story Box

The Story Box is a community audio artwork and aural history project which aims to capture the sounds of the town of Alyth and its people as a historical record of a rural community. Sound artists will work with local people to record stories, memories, anecdotes and other sounds from the present; oral histories, music and songs from within living memory and re-create stories and sounds from the distant past. The artists will also work with young people to envision the stories, songs and sounds from the Alyth of the future.

The stories and sounds will be available to the public by lifting the receiver within the phone box in Alyth town square. In a similar way to Dr Who’s tardis, the iconic red phone box will allow listeners to travel through time to access recordings from the present, the past and the future. Stories will be accompanied by different sounds from the town and local songs and music. Artists will work with community groups such as Alyth Youth Partnership, Alyth Literary Society, Senior Citizen Lunch Club and Alyth Primary School, to research and record the stories and sounds. The project will work with the existing local history organisation the Alyth Family History Project to enhance the scope, depth and relevance of the recordings, linking them with family history records and photographs.

We will also work in close collaboration with Perth and Kinross Cultural Services Staff at Alyth Museum in order make link the aural history recordings with the collections there and also to make the stories available at the museum. Initially the project will be run in Alyth but could be extended locally to other locations on the Cateran Trail.

The Silver Ball of Rattray

The Story of The Cateran Trail on 100 Objects

Inspired by Neil McGregor’s seminal masterpiece this project would invite the people who live and work around the Trail to propose objects that they believe tell the story of the Trail across history – possibly not from as great a time span as the British Museum version which is 2 million years, but as long a period as we think will work for this project.

People would be invited to upload an image of the object they would like included onto the Cateran’s Common Wealth website, together with text explaining why the object is of value to them and how it is relevant to the history of the Trail .

The final set of 100 objects would chosen by a panel of local people. They would then be documented and further interpreted through a range of media including 3D printing. This process could offer a variety of routes to sharing and promulgating the history of the area including digital documentation and explanation of historical relevance through the website and/or a special ‘digital app’ app; replicas of some of the objects created through 3D printing technology which could be sited around the Trail; limited editions of key objects created through 3D printing technology which could be sold in aid of the upkeep of the Trail; a series of curated talks by local and national historians and archaeologists which used the objects to explored certain periods and events in history in more dept; a series of lesson plans for school children; a hard back book.

Bee Keeping at Heather Hills Farm

Invitation to An Alternative Future

In these early decades of the twenty-first century, the ‘master story’ is an economic one; Markets and market values are shaping how we feel, think, and act, governing our lives as never before.

The belief that our success should be measured by how much money we earn, how much stuff we own and how fast our GDP is growing has become such a dominant single perspective that we are failing to see the destructive side of this ‘master narrative’ – the climate change, resource scarcity and social injustice this world view is driving and the enormous dangers to our future that are being created as a result. We are forgetting other stories of how we can live well by other measures of success and how we should be living well if we are to recognise the limits of our finite planet and enable all life to flourish.

Things have to change and we need to act fast if we are to invent the new economic and social paradigms that recognise biosphere and planetary limits and enable us to live more harmoniously with the natural world.

Around the Cateran Trail there are growing numbers of people who are successfully stewarding our ‘common wealth’ and living what is described as ‘sustainable livelihoods’, the definition of which is a means of living where the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required are sustainable. This project will tell their stories, how they live, what they value and why and what their hopes and dreams are for the future.

Working with Alyth Youth Partnership and other youth groups around the Trail, a documentary film maker, a story teller and a photographer will help a group of young people to develop the skills and capacities to interview, film and photograph a selected group of people around the Trail who are living sustainable livelihoods. Their work will produce a film, a set of stories, an exhibition and a set of photographs which will be shown in venues around the Trail and beyond and through the Cateran’s Common Wealth website.