Question 1: The Ring of Brodgar is a popular visitor attraction in Orkney. What conservation issues does this present for Historic Scotland’s management of the site?
My name is Lucy Vaughan. I’m Head of Conservation for Historic Scotland. I’m based in Fort George near inverness but we cover the Orkney Islands…the Orkney Islands are included in our region.
The Ring of Brodgar is a fascinating site and it does exude a lot of conservation issues for Historic Scotland. We have over one hundred monuments up in the North region and for each of the monuments we would prepare a condition report, which obviously looks at the condition survey and the condition strategy for each of our monuments and as part of that assessment we’d look at any conservation issues that are needed to look after the monument. The last survey for the Ring of Brodgar was carried out in 2008 and it includes background information including recording works undertaken at the site, archaeological investigation, specialist reports and also records the condition of the monument and then summarises the actions required in a conservation strategy.
The strategy for Ring of Brodgar includes a number of points, items such as footfall, erosion - obviously in the Ring of Brodgar we have probably about 100,000 visitors, although because it’s not a site that manned we reply on things like people counters which by mechanical means record numbers of people so we can’t be absolutely sure - but obviously if we have that number of visitors (and they tend to condensed over the summer months so maybe three or four months of the year) there’s a big problem with the number of visitors that we have and the things that can come from that are maybe: compaction of the soil, and obviously people are walking on top of archaeology often, so there’s wear and tear; we have to manage that erosion.
The stones themselves would also be the subject of a number of things happening. As part of the condition survey we would have a conservator’s report which would look at things like preferential weathering of the stones. The Orkney stones are in a very obvious bedding pattern and there can be weathering there. There can be weathering where the beds of the stone come apart, the kid of cleavage planes between that, there’s weathering there. And we would also have wind scour. That can cause erosion. Then there would also be maybe biological growth: lichens and moss and we would tend to treat these very carefully. The lichens don’t tend to cause too much damage but the moss, we would tend to remove the moss but not the lichens as they don’t cause very much damage.
There might be human graffiti, human damage caused by graffiti, which – even as early as 1850 there was graffiti happening – and so we would look at that. And although some of the historic stuff [the graffiti] is interesting we obviously don’t want to encourage people or let people copy that at all so, again it needs to be handled carefully.
We might have accidental damage as well, just the number of people we’ve got and the likelihood of them touching and walking and brushing against the stones; and particularly at low levels where we’ve got some stumps of the stones sticking up. Again, they can cause erosion – not meaning but just accidentally brush against things.
We might have storm damage. Some of the stones have been damaged by lightening. And also, maybe increasingly, rainfall might have a damaging effect on ground compaction and the standing water there. And also, previously maybe, in times gone by people might have tried to repair things but not quite realised the implications of what they were doing so sometimes we have to reverse repairs that we done a long time ago and try and remedy things there.
We also have to work quite closely with our partners in Orkney. So, we’ve got the RSPB. They are our close neighbours and are one of our partners. We work with the council very closely as well and SNH (Scottish Natural Heritage), so we have rangers on site and they’ll talk to people about our conservation work but they’lso talk about how we’re trying to manage the site sustainably. So, for instance, we have quite well developed grounds maintenance regimes and cutting regimes for the grass. We try and cultivate the grass and include maybe wild flower growth by reducing the number of cuts from what we used to do so we just have a couple of cuts or maybe one cut a year and we don’t manage things to intensively, we try to develop a natural habitat but part of the work in the way we cut the path tries to take the pressure off the Ring of Brodgar and keep people walking round footpaths away from the site and try and attract people in other directions. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. Other times we have to be a bit more forceful and use rope barriers to keep people on certain routes at certain times of the year and then we keep changing the routes so the ground doesn’t become too compacted.
So we also have our stone masons based up in Orkney and they spend a lot of time developing skills and we’ve got stone conservators as well. We’ve also got scientists, architects, architectural technicians and engineers so we’ve got a good group of people working on conservation. And the [stone] mason will carry out some detailed work on the stones to try and mend any damage and keep the stones in the condition there in at the moment.
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