Keg de Souza | Mapping crofts and The Commons with the Kilmuir kids

Mapping crofts and The Commons with the Kilmuir kids

22 June 2014

I have been in residence with ATLAS at Kilmuir Primary School in the Isle of Skye, Scotland. (http://atlasarts.org.uk/projects/keg-de-souza-micro-residency-kilmuir-linicro/)

The kids have been teaching me a lot about crofting, Scottish highlands subsistence farming, (more info on crofting here: http://www.crofting.org/) through a series of drawing workshops. They have been drawing their own crofts, what they grow/farm, food they forage for and other things that happen on common land. In Scotland they have the ‘right to roam’ law which allows you to be able to walk on anyone’s land, provided you are respectful. Being in Skye and especially Kilmuir, which is rather remote (and beautiful) you can really see the land formations clearly and through the kids I have noticed how vast their knowledge of the land, including animals and food is. One such interesting observation was that the Gaelic speaking kids had words for each mountain and particular land formations which don’t exist in English, so essentially if you speak Gaelic you will inherently have the language to describe the land in more detail.

Sheep on a croft in Skye.

The kid’s perception of space and land ownership are vastly different from many of the city kids I have met in the past. There is an openness to sharing space and we have been discussing ideas of ‘The Commons’ a fair bit. There has been a long list, and many drawings of the various edible things that are able to be foraged from common land in Skye.

Some of the drawings of food able to foraged on common land.

(the shoreline between high tide and low tide is the commons)

On Wednesday during a mapping workshop everyone laid out their drawings onto a huge sheet of paper where they lived in relation to each other and the school, most kids knew where everyone else lived. They also placed the photos they had taken on the disposable cameras I left with them last time I was in town where they were all asked to take two photos of their crofts or photos that related to local food in some way. The photos were all so well thought out – before I knew what they were of I saw a picture of someone’s dog and a man I presumed was someone’s grandad but when they described why they took those pictures the dog helped them hunt and the old man had been crofting for 70 years it made me realise how much thought and understanding they had given to the request.

Once the individual drawings and pictures were in place, then they filled in the gaps with what was around their crofts – from the mountains to the sea and all in between. There was a lot of discussion and negotiating to decide where various elements were.

Photos of the giant map of Kilmuir