Callanish as Greyfriars Bobby
Three issues collided this week: the depopulation of the Highlands; the commodification of culture and chronic over-tourism. The’re deeply connected.
The Herald told us that ‘Proposals have been put forward to charge an admission fee to visit the world-famous Callanish (Calanais) Standing Stones on the Isle of Lewis.’ And that ‘the proposal forms part of plans “to establish the site as a true world-class heritage attraction”.
The fee proposal coincides with a £6m revamp of Calanais visitor facilities being built in response to a “surge in tourism to the Western Isles”, driven largely by day trips by cruise ship passengers. Historic Environment Scotland said it would soon ask Scottish government ministers to approve its proposal for a fee.
We predicted this coming crisis back in July ‘Cruising Grounds and Fairy Tales’ when we pointed out that the cruise destination would have dramatic effects with limited local economic gain.
The World of Cruising (in-house mag) gushed: “It’s all go for Stornoway! The Hebridean capital has breached record numbers of cruise-ship visitors, and that’s before the new deep water cruise port opens next year. Big things are on the horizon, and it’s about time…There has been a welcome boost for businesses in the Outer Hebrides lately, with an influx of cruise passengers lapping up the culture.”
Calum Brown continues: “The seven-day period ending on July 6 proved to be the busiest cruising week on record, with more than 8000 passengers from seven cruise ships absorbing the area’s unique mantra.”
When people talk about charges or tourist taxes they are missing the point. Local infrastructures and cultures are being fundamentally altered for the benefit of a tourist class which operates an entirely extractive practice, often for dubiously shallow personal experiences, navigated by a handful of local (often not local at all) gatekeepers.
Where is the impetus “to establish the site as a true world-class heritage attraction”? Who defines what that is? Who judges the impact of such commodification?
Edinburgh is already a theme-park. Glenfinnan is a Harry Potter gift shop. Skye’s Fairy Pools are an Instagram anchor.
Culture Washing sits neatly next to social cleansing.
This week we learnt from the census that Scotland’s population has increased to 5,436,600, the highest on record. But also that the population of the Western Isles is down 5.5% from 2011 to 2022. The biggest population decrease of anywhere in Scotland. We also learned that Highland household numbers and population are increasing, but at the lowest rate across Scotland, and the % of over 65s is among the highest. People are retiring there. What we need is an active growing younger population with children. Without this, there is no living language, no schools, no economy, no community. Such things can’t be sustained by Air BnB and visitor centres or campervans or cruise ships.
We need to reclaim the economy in order to protect our ecology.
We need to replace extractive destructive industry with restorative circular economies.
We need to replace influx with re-inhabitation.
Ian Fordham, the chair of Urras nan Tursachan (UnT), which owns the Calanais visitor centre and backs the fee proposal, said there was an “urgent need to tackle the impact of increasing visitor numbers at the site”. He said about 120,000 tourists a year visited Calanais and that figure was expected to nearly double by 2035.
Indigenous culture and language cannot survive such forces.
The Calanais stones were erected from about 2900BC onwards, predating the stone circle at Stonehenge. It’s not a product.
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You could add the US ‘development’ company buying up the area around Loch Tay and now elsewhere in Perthshire.. There’s a poverty of imagination that is trying to turn places into disneyfied theme parks. Anything that justifies the obscene levels of inequality in the world is going to fuel these developments. The fightback needs to be multifaceted – partly cultural and partly legal curbs on ownership of large estates.
It might be worth looking at the way in which the community council in Ullapool has steered a lochfront development with the enjoyment of the local community in mind, not just the passing tourist and ferry passengers.
Thanks Cathie – will look at Ullapool model, cheers
Sustainable tourism in Scotland is a complex issue. How do we cultivate a tourism in our local communities that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addresses the needs of our visitors, the industry, the environment, and ourselves as hosts?
The UN’s Sustainable Development Group (the SDG) promotes tourism as one of the tools that will, it hopes, increase the economic benefits to small island developing states like Scotland by 2030. The Scottish government’s tourism strategy is currently premised on the outcomes of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). That outcome was to approach tourism as a significant contributor to the ‘three dimensions’ of sustainable development (economic, environmental, and social), thanks to its close linkages of those dimensions its ability to create decent jobs and generate trade opportunities, and to task its member states to support sustainable tourism activities and relevant capacity-building that promote environmental awareness, conserve and protect the environment, respect wildlife, flora, biodiversity, ecosystems, and cultural diversity, and improve the welfare and livelihoods of local communities by supporting their local economies and their human environments as a whole.
The local, independent, not-for-profit trust, Urras non Tursachan, which manages access to the Calanais Stones through its visitor centre, is also guided by the outcomes of Rio+20. For the past 30 years, it has worked in partnership with the national and local government to bring valuable tourism to the local community and deliver consistent growth in visitor numbers, turnover, and profitability. As a non-profit trust, the surplus value generated by the company isn’t distributed to its stakeholders, but is reinvested in the curation of the Calanais Stones themselves.
The Trust has recently proposed introducing a visitors’ fee (a kind of locally levied tourist tax) to help meet the whole operation’s running costs. The rationale behind the proposal is that the revenue raised by such a charge will help offset the real-terms reduction in the revenue it receives in public and private grants and donations as a result of austerity and inflation.
I don’t see anything wrong with this. In fact, it’s an excellent example of local activism, whereby a community, thinking globally, uses its own local assets responsibly and sustainably to its own benefit, while retaining local community ownership of those assets and avoiding their losing them ‘nationalisation’.
Sustainable tourism in Scotland is a complex issue. How do we cultivate a tourism in our local communities that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addresses the needs of our visitors, the industry, the environment, and ourselves as hosts?
The UN’s Sustainable Development Group (the SDG) promotes tourism as one of the tools that will, it hopes, increase the economic benefits to small island developing states like Scotland by 2030. The Scottish government’s tourism strategy is currently premised on the outcomes of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). That outcome was to approach tourism as a significant contributor to the ‘three dimensions’ of sustainable development (economic, environmental, and social), thanks to its close linkages of those dimensions its ability to create decent jobs and generate trade opportunities, and to task its member states to support sustainable tourism activities and relevant capacity-building that promote environmental awareness, conserve and protect the environment, respect wildlife, flora, biodiversity, ecosystems, and cultural diversity, and improve the welfare and livelihoods of local communities by supporting their local economies and their human environments as a whole.
The local, independent, not-for-profit trust, Urras non Tursachan, which manages access to the Calanais Stones through its visitor centre, is also guided by the outcomes of Rio+20. For the past 30 years, it has worked in partnership with the national and local government to bring valuable tourism to the local community and deliver consistent growth in visitor numbers, turnover, and profitability. As a non-profit trust, the surplus value generated by the company isn’t distributed to its stakeholders, but is reinvested in the curation of the Calanais Stones themselves.
The Trust has recently proposed introducing a visitors’ fee (a kind of locally levied tourist tax) to help meet the whole operation’s running costs. The rationale behind the proposal is that the revenue raised by such a charge will help offset the real-terms reduction in the revenue it receives in public and private grants and donations as a result of austerity and inflation.
I don’t see anything wrong with this. In fact, it’s an excellent example of local activism, whereby a community, thinking globally, uses its own local assets responsibly and sustainably to its own benefit, while retaining local community ownership of those assets and avoiding their losing them ‘nationalisation’.
Of course, it was the vast inequality of wealth in the Edwardian/Victorian age that began the turning of Highland Scotland into an ornamental theme park. The old fairytale castles and hunting estates are still there, strangling opportunity for generations of rural Scots and maintaining the depopulated tabula rasa that makes yet more outsider-extraction look like something worthwhile might be happening (it aint).
Huge inequality of income and wealth will always turn the poor man’s home into a playground of frivolity. If we get rid of inequality we will reduce this kind of exploitation. We need to find a way to make a house in Twickenham the same price as a house in Bishopbriggs.
The way to raise house prices in Bishopriggs to the same levels that you find in Twickenham is to make the former as attractive a place to live as the latter.
The way to repopulate the Highlands is to encourage mass migration there from our current centres of population.
The way to reduce inequalities of income is to pay everyone more or less the same salary according to their needs, irrespective of the work they do.
Letting folk in free to see the Calanais Stones just doesn’t cut it.
Very well said Mike, I couldn’t agree more. The Highlands have been commodified, packaged and sold for too long. The licensing of local accommodation providers, including ordinary crofters trying to let a room to help make ends meet will drive them out of business. And the money is to be spent on … Promoting yet more utterly destructive over-tourism from cruise ships and the drive through, ‘safari’ tourists – the most destructive forms of exploitative consumer tourism for climate, culture or communities. And this from a government that is supposed to stand up for people (SNP) and planet (Greens). We are being utterly betrayed and destroyed for corporate greed. But let no-one say a word against either party because only Unionists would do that. Scotland is actually run entirely for the private profit of the world’s wealthiest.
Wheesht, John! Mike seems to think that it’s okay to put ‘ordinary crofters trying to let a room to help make ends meet’ out of business in the fight against the Evil Landlord.
Can’t quite see the link between the licensing of accommodation and the apocalypse you go on to describe.
The same issues of land/resource ownership are right at the centre of this. Mass tourism has been deliberately used to replace the above issues as the answer to the “Highland problem”, and the “free market” in housing has allowed a mass movement of people – primarily from England – into one of the most fragile cultural regions on the planet. None of this is coincidence. BBC Scotland deliberately portrays what used to be referred to as “white settlers” as the saviours of the Highlands and Islands.
Anyone can be a Highlander if you simply buy a house here and breathe the air. Native history, culture, identity, continuity, sense of place, etc, have been confined to the dustbin of the heritage industry.
A Somalian wildlife photographer, raised in England, who has bought a house in Ardnamurchan but spends his working life at English wildlife parks, dons a kilt for “Strictly” and is lauded as “Ardnamurchan’s own”. The media-manufactured ferries “crisis” creates a handy group of go-to spokespeople for the “communities” affected. All are from England – from Ardgour or Mull business people to Mull/Arran ferry committee chairs – and all are doing their best for their adopted communities. The latest is Mr Ian Fordham, of the Callanish tourist centre. The housing crisis isn’t an issue for him; it’s visitor numbers. The solution? Build a bigger centre where more retirees from Kent can work part time, as “new” Islanders, living in their renovated, £350k croft house while lamenting the shortage of “local” labour to run their two holiday cottages, and all bought from the proceeds of their semi in Canterbury.
Now we have yet another Highland wildlife series being produced by BBC “Scotland”. Big deal you say. This will be the fourth in as many years, where the North is portrayed as being empty of people and crying out to be filled. It’s well known the effect these have on population movement; that’s why they are made. No, I’m not kidding. That comes straight from a friend within the BBC.
Highland culture is no more ‘fragile’ than any other. Like any culture, it changes over time with the demography of its population. You sound exactly like one of those ‘essentialist’ Little Englanders, who lament the passing of their ‘traditional way of life’ under an incessant wave of migration and the cancelling of their ‘indigenous’ culture and heritage by ‘incomers’.
The population of the Highlands is changing, and Highland culture is changing with it. That’s how human culture has always been; that’s how it evolves. Highland culture must like any other evolve or die.
The ‘Little Englanders’ belong to a narcissistic dominant culture pretending to be victims, both in culture and practice. That is the exact opposite of the problems, cultural and practical, facing rural Scotland. Fortunately the folk addressing the housing, the language, and the other genuine threats to community viability are unlikely to take such a trite determinist view very seriously.
I think it’s disingenuous to say that what has happened and is happening in the Highlands is a result of “evolution” of culture. Since 1745 the forces that have shaped and changed the highlands and impacted the people there overwhelmingly has been driven by people and organisations from elsewhere. Ordinary Highlanders have had little if any say in the huge changes that have happened in terms of land ownership, land use, social and societal changes.
This is the equivalent of me moving into your master bedroom, changing all the pictures on the walls, ripping out your kitchen, putting in a patio in your garden and knocking down a few walls and then when you complain i respond with “nothing stays the same, this is merely the next logical step in the development of this house, stop complaining”. It completely disregards who and what is driving the change and that the people who live there and have a longstanding connection to the land and place have very little power to shape or direct the changes for their own good and the good of the local community.
You endlessly harp on the in the comments about how you think political power and organisation should be devolved to the most local level possible. It seems that only applies to Dumfries and Galloway in your view.
Why do you want to revert to culture in 1745?
They don’t. The date and their narration of the event, in which they cast themselves in the role of ‘victim’, are totemic in nationalist mythology.
That’s exactly the situation here, BSA; Roddie’s complaining that a culture that was once dominant in the Highlands has fallen victim to ‘cancelling’ by foreign (and particularly English and Somali) incomers.
But I agree that the problems, cultural and practical, facing rural Scotland (‘l’Écosse profonde’) are deeper than the cancelling of its supposedly ‘native’ culture by migrants. They are, as Brian says, structural; they’re baked into the economy of rural Scotland and, in particular, into the ownership of its land, labour, and capital. The factors of production that have shaped the culture and demography of Highland society since the 18th century have been concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer owners, to the impoverishment of the commonwealth. As Mike alludes to in his opinion piece: the root problem is wealth-extraction, not migration or ‘cancel-culture’; it’s the extraction from the commons of the surplus-value or profit created by labour through its deployment of capital to transform land in the production of even greater wealth.
As I keep harping on:
1. this structural feature of capitalism – its inherent vampiric propensity to extract wealth from the commons as private property – is unsustainable and tends towards a perpetual state of collapse or crisis, a tendency that some of us see being realised in the so-called ‘polycrisis’ or ‘world-revolution’ that’s bringing the modern world down about our ears;
2. what we usefully can do in response to the polycrisis is work towards the reconstruction from the ruins of capitalism of an economy that isn’t premised on the extraction of surplus-value from the commons as private property but is premised rather on the reinvestment of that surplus-value in the production of public goods (work towards communism, in other words);
3. practically, ‘working towards communism’ means ‘unionising’ or forming community action groups or ‘syndicates’ that assume greater and greater democratic control over the community’s own resources of land, labour, and capital as capitalism collapses into its ‘polycrisis’ or ‘world-revolution’ and its institutions wither away;
4. at the same time, it practically means resisting the demagogues who would exploit the polycrisis or world-revolution and prey on our hopes and fears to promote their own ideological and other private agendas.
What’s called for is unionisation/community development AND critique rather than nativism and cultural conservatism. To appropriate Brian’s metaphor, it’s about storming the master bedroom and taking it into common ownership, and then letting everyone put up whatever pictures they want.
Roddie, While I agree that what we are seeing is the further ethnic cleansing of the Highlands, I’d just like to say that I think it is important to avoid a possible slide into racism. That can only fuel the fire by setting people against each other. And it touches an aspect of Scottish history that needs to be acknowledged.
You say, “Anyone can be a Highlander if you simply buy a house here and breathe the air. Native history, culture, identity, continuity, sense of place, etc, have been confined to the dustbin of the heritage industry.” I appreciate that this is indeed a widespread attitude, but it is not shared by me or many other people. You cannot actually become a highlander in this way. It is not really about where people come from – the Highlands have experienced both immigration and emigration for centuries. Many people who have moved into the area here in Wester Ross over the last few years actually have family connections here. At least some are returning diaspora. But it is about attitudes to the extraordinary and under-appreciated cultural heritage of the Highlands, and about the perennial contempt of the urban dweller for the rural.
I was the Regional Archaeologist for the Highlands from 1994-2004, and then ran a consultancy, Highland Archaeology Services Ltd., for 12 years. I may be English by birth, but I have spent nearly 30 years trying to stand up for the native history, culture, identity, continuity, sense of place, etc, and keep them out of the dustbin of the heritage industry. It doesn’t make me a ‘highlander’ but it does make me a fellow traveller. It got me into a lot of trouble over Castle Tioram, Urquhart Castle, the Hilton of Cadboll stone, battlefield sites and other cases, and made me unpopular with a certain (remarkably well-connected) element in Scotland that regards Highlanders with contempt as ‘Teuchters’ and despises and dismisses Gaelic language and culture.
The problem really is deeper though. It is the perception of the entire planet and its people everywhere as mere resources to be exploited and destroyed for private profit. As David Ogilvy famously said, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative”. I fundamentally disagree with that claim.
Before I came to the Highlands at the start of 1994 I ran the BSc(Hons) Heritage Conservation degree at Bournemouth University. It was an interesting experience that forced me and my students to examine what it was we valued and wished to ‘conserve’, how and why. I do not agree with the view that people and planet exist only to be commodified, bought and sold. A cultural heritage has many important values, and not just to those brought up within it, but for us all. An ecosystem does not exist to provide ‘ecosystem services’ to humans. But it is the prevailing ideology, and those who rule Scotland have either bought into it or are too feart to challenge it. I see the new facilities at Corrieshalloch Gorge are actually signed as ‘Your Gateway to Nature’. Well, I prefer my nature, and my cultural heritage too, un-claimed and ungated. In fact, I am nature. When paradise is torn down to put up a parking lot it is no longer paradise. It is actually outrageous to promote narcissistic cruise ship or motorhome- based tourism that destroys local communities. And even more of one to expect local B&B providers to pay for it and drive themselves out of business. The basic problem is the commodification of everything – the idea that the world only exists to be exploited for personal profit. That is a history we have seen far too much of in the Highlands over the last 300 years. In fact the Highlands are notorious for it.
It’s an ideology that is destroying us all. It starts with the super-rich, who have always held the rest of us in contempt, because they believe that money is its own justification and ‘entitles’ those who have it to do as they please, where they please. The attitude percolates down to the self-centred attitude of many of the drive through, ‘wild safari’ tourists – I was told by one person that since Wester Ross is dependent on tourism we should just put up with whatever we got. It is explicit in the commitment of the World Economic Forum to ” to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas” – but (left unsaid) only for its plutocratic members’ benefit, naturally.
For a future to be possible, we need to say no to this ideology. We need politicians and public servants that will have the courage to look ‘corporate culture’ in the eye and stand up for the land and people they are supposed to represent.
How on earth can you ‘avoid a possible slide into racism’ while agreeing that ‘what we are seeing is the further ethnic cleansing of the Highlands’. The f*ck*ng EDL talks of ‘ethnic cleansing’ by incomers. It’s the language of racism.
Bang on the money there
Sounds like less tourists and more sheep. Then the younger generation will apparently become sheep farmers, play the fiddle, attend the church of small freedom/kiss the pope’s toes, throw the cap in the fire when they open a whisky bottle, and the Mallaig harbourmaster will forever be a mason. But the most remunerative thing to do with a sheep field on Skye is to build a house on it. The sentiment is a bit like plowing up Byres Road and planting it with tatties.
It’s nice and all that. But it’s just some stones, in a field, on a drizzly Scot’s island at the end of the day*. There was a time when it was only old hippies like me and historians who gave an actual fcuck about standing stones and stuff like this. Now it’s “World Class”. Eh?
Why should a wealthy, retired cruise-liner-holidaymaker from Germany-USA-China-Denmark-South Korea give a monkeys about some upright stones? These passengers are being sold an illusion.
The idea that a too-wealthy-but-bored, sedentary retiree can waddle onto a cruise ship somewhere then waddle off somewhere else and experience an authentic human experience between a served lunch and dinner is just daft.
I don’t know how you stop this madness. But if we can’t, then at least let all the coin fall into the hands of the locals and be used to make their communities a place where their kids can afford to, and want to, live.
*I know it’s not just stones. But if you don’t care about them, then that’s all they are.
“I don’t know how you stop this madness” – well you have to reclaim control of our economy and the out-of-control tourist industry
Aye. “out of control” is the way I’ve experienced it.
I couldn’t believe the number of people last time I passed through Glenfinnan and Glencoe. Cars parked on the verge everywhere, people running across the road at random. Like a kind of fever. What are they all looking for? Mental.
And you are also right that the actual quality of this experience is extremely shallow and dubious
Don’t you see the irony and the sheer denialism in complaining about the number of people passing through Glenfinnan and Glencoe while passing through Glenfinnan and Glencoe?
I do, of course.
In my own defence, I hadn’t flown half way around the planet to be there.
That still begs the question of what taking control means. How do you stop the tourists coming? This is the nub of it as over-tourism is basically defined as too many tourists for a place to cope with. They are going to start charging to visit Venice, not primarily to raise money but to put people off. Should we charge to visit the Highlands and Islands? Or, somehow put a limit on visitor numbers?
It is the same question for the complaint here about all the English ‘coming over here’. What is the solution? Literally stop them at the new border of an independent Scotland? Discriminate specifically against English people over house buying and the like? Notwithstanding the obvious bigotry behind some of the comments here about the changing population of the Highlands, this general cultural identity question must be faced, not ignored.
These hard questions are not designed to say nothing can be done but they must be asked and answered as otherwise the complaining all seems like hot air morphing into mindless prejudice.
I don’t have a problem with ‘taking back control’ through the regulation of free movement within our borders, providing that the ends for which that power is exercised (e.g. making tourism more exclusive; stopping outsiders from places like England and Somalia settling in ‘our’ country) are worthy and the means by which those ends are pursued (e.g. introducing a short-lets licensing system that fails to discriminate between exploitative landlords and benign cottage industries) are just.
Of course, this raises the additional questions of ‘Worthy to whom?’ and ”Just’ by which definition of justice?’ and the deeper political question of whose interests are to be privileged in deciding those additional questions (e.g. the ‘migrant’ or the ‘native’; the distant ideologue or the local retired nurse who’s working to supplement her pension).
I mean ‘how would you stop tourists coming’? You could start by diversifying your (our) economy? Not building a huge cruise liner port might be an idea? Not planning entire cities around (and for) tourists would be another?
But how does ‘diversifying your economy’ stop tourists coming. The tourists will come whether you diversify your economy or not. Edinburgh has an economy as diverse as any comparably sized city in the world; yet tourists still flock there in their millions.
I think the people of Lewis would be cutting off their noses to spite their faces by passing over the income generating opportunities that the standing stones (and the new deep water terminal at Stornoway) offers them and failing to use that income to build a more diverse and therefore more resilient economy.
And isn’t the claim that entire cities (like Edinburgh, presumably) have been planned around and for tourists nothing but hyperbole?
Just to voice my agreement Mike. The issues of over tourism are the result of over promotion and the type of market created. We don’t have to ‘stop’ the visitors coming. We just don’t need to create deepwater berths for cruise ships, where (like a lady I knew) at least some of the passengers spend their lives on board because they like being waited on hand and foot and have little interest in the places they visit. The excursions ashore are all managed by the cruise company and passengers are herded into selected honeypot sites, as Callanish will now become. Then its back on the bus, back on board and nothing there for locals but the extra coaches on the rod and th inaccessibility of places that are important to them. We simply don’t have the infrastructure for all this, and building it would just destroy the destination. Mass tourism is a failed model.
What we surely need is to build more self reliant, happy communities (everywhere) that people don’t need to ‘escape’ from. Then travel can be a slower, more engaged, meaningful, even inspiring experience , and can really benefit everyone.
But that said, John, the Scottish government estimates that tourism in the Hebrides currently generates £65m each year and supports more than 1,000 jobs and hundreds of hotels, bed and breakfasts, and other businesses. Sure, most of that wealth is currently extracted from the islands, but a) it’s difficult to see how that kind of income could be replaced by alternative economic activity and b) how the wealth that tourism generates is distributed is another matter.
The deep water terminal, which will enable larger vessels of all kinds and not just cruise liners to berth in Stornoway, is expected to provide an additional 200 jobs. That’s not an insignificant amount of work in a town of just 5,000 souls.
At the end of the day, however, it should be the people of Lewis and Harris who decide how and to what purpose their assets are to be employed.
In this specific case, is it these cruises (pre and post-deep water port) that are the main problem?
I went to Callanish in 2000 and it was very quiet indeed. I don’t remember any cruises arriving at Stornaway. The whole of Lewis and Harris were the least touristy places in the the whole of Highlands and Islands. Tourist were barely catered for anywhere. This was a mixed blessing personally but kind of refreshing too. I have not been back since; have things changed dramatically there?
The two salient changes since you last visited is that Stornoway has become part of itinerary for cruise ships plying the Norwegian, Iceland, Scotland ‘triangle’ and a local, independent, not-for-profit community trust, Urras non Tursachan, has taken on the curation of the Calanais Stones, which involves managing access to the Calanais Stones through its visitor centre.
Passengers from the larger cruise ships currently have to be ferried into post from an offshore anchorage by flotillas of local boats, to be meeted and greeted by Island Ambassadors, local volunteers supported by Visit Scotland. The deep water terminal that’s currently being developed will enable those ships to berth in the port itself.
The community trust has for the past 30 years allowed visitors free admission to the stones. However, it recently announced the introduction of an admission charge to help raise revenue from the stones’ visitors for its CALANAIS 2025 initiative; a kind of locally levied tourist tax if you will.
Objectors to the introduction if the charge complain that it will restrict native access to the site. I’d encourage the community trust to follow the example of many similar trusts doun hame here, in Dumgall, and issue, as well as a tourist charge, free ‘postcode’ memberships to local residents, which would give the latter the unlimited free access to the stones they’ve always enjoyed.
They also complain that the site attracts ‘overtourism’, which in turn degrades the island’s fragile ecosystem and/or its archaeology and/or its fragile native culture. Rather than manage the impact of tourism through the judicious curation of the island’s attractions as per the outcomes of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), as the relatively young tourism sector in Iceland does, these objectors would rather just stop tourists from visiting Lewis and Harris at all – or, at least, make it a more exclusive privilege.
This is a well written piece. Having been brought up on Lewis in Callanish and my childhood was spent around the stones I am horrified about this latest desire by this company. My mother (Margaret Curtis, know as the Queen of Callanish) was the local amateur archaeologist and spent her life learning about the Callanish Stones and discovered many further sites around the island. She died two years ago and would have been up in arms to keep this free to all.
I’d encourage the community trust to follow the example of many similar trusts down here and to issue, as well as a tourist charge, free ‘postcode’ memberships to local residents, which would give the latter the unlimited free access to the stones they’ve always enjoyed.
I’m also impressed by the community trust’s plans to use the income it will levy from tourists to develop initiative a young archaeologists club on the island, Gaelic-speaking tours of the site, ‘meaningful’ and ‘valuable’ experiences for local young folk through the John Muir awards scheme, and access to skills and technology that will enable the local community to survey and investigate its landscape in non-invasive ways, among other things, as part of its CALANAIS 2025 initiative.
I’m sorry your mum would have been up in arms over the community’s use of this local asset to develop its resilience.
This would be the desecration of Callanish all in the name of prostitution to big businesses. Ian Fordham should be ashamed of himself and head back sooth.