News for 2010
Help save our museum!
Timespan is asking the community to assist in the fight to help save independent museums across the highlands. The Highland council intends to make budget cuts by stopping funding museums. Without this vital funding museums, including Timespan, are likely to close and be lost forever.
You can influence this by responding to The Highland Council’s Budget consultation by the deadline of 30 June 2010.
Museums provide a vital and accessible link to your heritage, a major draw for tourism and contributor to the local economy of the Highlands.
Timespan was set up in 1986 to preserve the heritage of the Helmsdale District, to encourage learning of that heritage and to attract visitors to the area. It has achieved these goals and more, adding a contemporary art gallery and delivering projects across Sutherland. Timespan receives £14,562 from The Highland Council (THC) per annum and in return it delivers a wide range of cultural services to the community.
- Timespan is at the core of the community with direct community involvement and ownership
- It protects and preserves the heritage of the area for the public benefit
- It provides a principal tourist destination for visitors and locals alike
- Timespan brings economic development and tourism revenue to the Helmsdale community area
- Research opportunities are provided through its historical collections and archive
- It provides a professional service and preserves for posterity collections of national and international importance for the public benefit.
- It provides educational programmes for schools, adults and many other groups
Timespan and other museums across the Highlands are going to struggle to survive if they survive at all without this funding.
How to register your concerns:
Write to your local Councillors
Email The Highland Council on policy6@highland.gov.uk
Copy to David Alston, Budget Leader on david.alston@highland.gov.uk
Contact your MP, MSP etc
Please put ‘independent museums’ in the subject heading.
For more on the budget consultation visit here http://www.highland.gov.uk/yourcouncil/news/blog/
Museum
How to describe the new museum? Well it is entirely unexpected even for someone who has mostly forgotten what the old ground floor looked like. To explain briefly, it was this area that catapulted Timespan into this very challenging redevelopment in the first place. Once home to a large water feature and the geological rocks, the entire space had accumulated so much rising damp that the building was under threat of closure. It really was a question of redevelop or die!
This isn’t so much a renovation as a revolution. Once through the new and elegant museum doors, the Community Timeline which leads visitors to the much loved Crofting Street is colourful and irreverent. It is briefly disorienting to be taken from the beginning of time to the brave new world of the 21st Century but it is an amusing and lighthearted introduction. The Smiddy, Byre, Croft and 19th century Village Shop still tug at the heart strings and remain the essence of Helmsdale. They feel the same and still beautifully display local artifacts but are fresh (that word again) and very appealing. The various soundtracks are enchanting – especially that of a local woman who recalled as a child she had known the last blacksmith to ply his trade in Helmsdale. A beautiful Gaelic lullaby fills the croft.
The Storytelling Room is creative and innovative providing a solution to what was Timespan’s biggest problem. They had to lose the old mannequin exhibits now threadbare and charmless, while retaining the excitement of the stories as they were told 20 years ago. The Storytelling Room provides a cosy yet intense using audio visual to create a sense of history and adventure. The tales are told via five animated films conceived, developed and delivered by local and very talented people with professional guidance. The result is fabulous! This is also a space that can be used dramatically in the time honoured way, with real life story tellers for groups or special events.
Those who asked Timespan for a more detailed interpretation of local history (and there were many) will be very excited by the new exhibition room. It has been designed for flexibility – essential for a modern museum - with a number of stylish modules that lead the visitor effortlessly through a very personal narration of past times. The combination of images, texts and artifacts draw together sensitive and riveting accounts of murder most vile, the Highland Clearances, the Kildonan Gold Rush and river and sea fishing including of course the extraordinary days when Helmsdale was responsible for supplying most of the UK with herring. Going through the exhibition room is a totally absorbing experience. There is much to read that draws on different segments of Helmsdale’s history and although complete, the exhibits do the proper job of raising curiosity and demand further investigation. And so to the archive which has been designed to facilitate those very enquiries.
It’s important to see Timespan’s new Community Archive for the simple fact of its existence. Airy, filled to the rafters with documents, photographs, books and files – all of which are accessible, this is the product of an enormous amount of hard work. Timespan is to be congratulated for putting such a major emphasis on the important matter of recording and collecting information and the detail of community life. While the growing popularity of genealogical research has been the spur to establishing the archive, its greatest value is that it will provide local people with the opportunity to really explore their heritage and share personal knowledge and memories with others.
Timespan’s Heritage group has made an enormous contribution to the research and collation of the museum’s displays and archives. They also have their own area – the Community Exhibition Room – in which they have reinstated their popular Gartymore display which is another opportunity to lose (find?) an hour of your time immersed in the history of this fascinating area.