One of the best parts of this project is getting to visit many of Scotland’s wonderful museums, and the Fisheries Museum is one of these. It has a collection of East Coast fishing baskets which is second to none. I’ve been to the museum several times during the project, and it is the key museum for the fishing element of our overlapping basket communities, with a vast range of fishing baskets. Linda Fitzpatrick, the curator, is very knowledgeable about Scottish fishing communities and very supportive of the project.

My focus is often on how baskets are made, so Linda’s knowledge and explanations about fishing as a way of life in Scotland over the past 100 years really helps me to understand the way that fishing baskets were used. I’ve looked at the Fisheries collections and photographed the baskets on display. They include an extensive range of long line and short line sculls and baskets, rips, quarter crans and even a Yarmouth swill. On this visit, the plan was to look at the museum’s photo-archive in their library, and view a few baskets from the store.

I was very lucky, because both librarians were working the day I visited, and gave me a new ‘line of enquiry’ in the census records. This told me than in 1861, there was one man, Thomas Oliver from Kilrenny, just outside Anstruther, who worked as a fishing basket-maker. That was very useful information, because one of the difficulties with the project is to find by whom and how such baskets were made, the question being, were they made by a few skilful individuals, or did everyone have to make their own? From this information, seems that the former is more likely.

My final task was to go through the picture archive in the library. This is another great source of information, especially the ‘Fisherfolk’ section, which has many images of fishwives and fisher-lassies preparing bait and doing their rounds selling fish with creels and sculls on top. Hopefully, a few of these images will appear on this website before too long.

See also Linda Fitzpatrick’s article on Fishing Baskets here

Skye Museum of Island Life

While Jon and I were on Skye, Caroline Dear invited us to her studio, where her work revealed a profoundly impressive exploration of the potentials of heather, hair moss and other materials. She also recounted several local stories, including one about two brothers from South Uist who used to travel to Uig in order to cut hazel for making creels, and another account of a Skye postman and his son who made frame baskets from willow over wire frames. It was always very valuable to discuss research with local basket-makers and textile artists. Watching basket-makers at work inspires local people to tell the practitioners of the use of basketry through personal family experiences and memories, as illustrated by Caroline’s account.

It is ironic that while Skye is famous for its former basket factory at Kilmuir, which supplied much of Scotland with baskets for the herring industry, and that while there are many picturesque postcards of crofters working with mudags during spinning, or carrying creels when collecting peat or seaware, yet almost no baskets exist in public collections from this island. We discussed this with Caroline, and her view was that this could perhaps be attributed to Skye’s popularity as a tourist resort, even in the late 19^th and early 20^thcenturies, so that possibly tourists had bought them as souvenirs, or that Skye had come earlier than other western isles to the import of plastics and other consumer goods which became substitutes for baskets. A further possibility might be that the perception of domestic and other manual work associated with baskets as shameful, as Isobel Grant described, also impacted earlier on people here, and may further account for Skye’s lack of existing basketry heritage.

Peat creel, Skye Museum of Island Life

Our final day in Skye held a meeting with Mr Jonathan Macdonald, founder and custodian of the Skye Museum of Island Life, followed by a tour of the museum. During his life of more than 90 years, Mr Macdonald had worked for the Skye Osier Company, also known as the Kilmuir Basket Factory, which was set up in Skye through the Highland Home Industries Bureau in 1908-9, and closed in 1956. He had also set up the Skye craft shop, famous for its variety of crafts, before founding the museum in north Skye near Kilmuir in1965. The museum consisted of several renovated thatched cottages, including a croft, a weaver’s cottage, a barn, an old smithy and a ceilidh house. Mr Macdonald kindly agreed to see us, despite the numbers of visitors daily passing through the museum. He talked of the willow sites established in Skye at Monkstadt, St Columba’s Loch and at Hungadder, both of which supplied the Company, and working for the company itself. A man had to make 18 quarter crans a day in order to make a realistic living, he said.

The Ose, or Skye basket

All the artefacts in the Museum were illustrated with beautiful drawings and texts which detailed the practical uses associated with each object. There were examples of mudags for spinning fleece, a ciosan, a beautiful condition peat creel, heather ropes, and the Ose or Skye basket. Through the work at the Kilmuir basket factory, this basket became associated with Skye in the 1950s. It was sometimes called a ‘hen basket’, reputedly first made to carry a broody hen, although its origins are much older than the Skye basket factory, and it is found on British illuminated manuscripts from the 12^th century onwards.

By Stephanie Bunn

Frame basket at the Highland Folk Museum QP22

Rachel Chisholm, curator at the Highland Folk Museum, had been very helpful with preparation for the visit, sending us a comprehensive print out of the collection in advance. With museum visits, it is always difficult to achieve seeing as much as one would like of the collection in a short visit because of the time required to process each artefact carefully. Rachel really supported us with this, allowing us to photo the baskets, and we saw and documented almost every basket we had hoped to.

The museum has a very comprehensive collection of Highland and west coast baskets. What has become clear during our research for this project is that there is far less material available, either in museum collections or documented in archives, for baskets from the west and the Highlands, as opposed to from the east of Scotland, or the Northern Isles. This is not because baskets were not used in the west. Far from it, they were a feature of almost all aspects of life, and basket use in crofting in these regions in many cases endured far longer than in fishing in the east or in Lowland agriculture. However, as Isobel Grant, who made this great collection, commented, she found that people from the Highlands and west coast were far less proud of their heritage than elsewhere. Indeed, she said that people simply did not think she would want their artefacts for her collection. This being said, she still managed to acquire many important and representative examples of baskets from these regions during her collecting of ‘all manner of homely things’ for the Highland Folk Museum.

Thus, there were many straw and bent grass coiled baskets, ciosans, formerly used as meal measures from the Uists and the west coast. From North Uist, also made from bent grass, were several beautifully constructed horse collars, revealing the effort which went in to making these everyday artefacts used for working with animals. There were willow bannock baskets from across the Highlands, willow frame baskets, probably made by Travellers from Wester Ross, straw bee skeps of many shapes and sizes, several with caps, oval willow mudags for holding fleece to be spun, and a range of pot scrubbers and brushes made from heather, bent grass and even one from hair moss. There were several excellent peat creels, including one made from heather from Badenoch, another from rattan from North Uist, and an example from Skye, very fortuitous, since so few examples are to be seen on Skye itself. One of the most significant pieces was a bent grass grain sack from South Uist. This woven sack, made from the same technique as woven saddle pads, is the only other example, aside from the one collected by Erskine Beveridge for the National Museum of Scotland, of a basket known in Gaelic as plata mhuillin, or plata shil, and used to protect grain from splashing by salt water while transporting it by sea to the mill.

Grain sack Highland Folk Museum, QP23

We were also allowed to visit the furniture store in the museum, where we saw how basketwork from willow, rush and straw was used in furniture, made at a time when it would have been cheaper to make chair backs and seating from locally available plant materials rather than imported stuffs, or even wood.

Suffice it to say that there is a great debt owed to the collecting of Isobel Grant in the 1930s, which, along with the continued work of the Museum, enables us to see this material today and understand its role in people’s lives in the past. (More on Isobel Grant in the People section of this website; in Highland Folkways; and in Edinburgh Central Library which also holds her photo-archive.)

Ian Tait, Director of Shetland Museum, in the museum store, with a large wool basket

Ian Tait, the director of Shetland museum, has been a great correspondent during this project. Despite the great demands on his time, Ian devoted the whole day to me when I visited with Jon in 2012. This began with a tour around Shetland Museum, which has to be one of the most well set out and rich collections of material culture in Scotland.

Shetland Museum FIS 2008.111 heather and flos bait kuddi

I learned a huge amount during this tour. Ian has thought a great deal about Shetland’s basketry heritage and conveys it very clearly. The Eshaness basket – a 7th century willow basket – came from Shetland, although it is now held in Edinburgh. Ian was able to talk us through from the pre-Viking and Pictish era onwards to the ‘complete break with the past’ in Shetland’s material history which came with the Vikings. A key moment, he said, in Shetland and Orkney history, was the 15th century marriage of the Scottish prince with a Danish princess, through which event Scotland gained Shetland and Orkney from the Danes. From this time on, the lack of wooden imports from Scandinavia brought an increased us of straw, heather and grass in architecture and smaller artefacts, which may account for the number of basket items made from these materials.

Shetland Museum AGR 2012.125 straw bait kuddi

Our whole afternoon was spent in the stores with Ian, and we were able to see the magnificent collection of kishies, bødies, kuddis, toigs, ropes and other artefacts, in all manner of material, from black oat straw to docken, which the museum holds. It is difficult to imagine we could have achieved more in a day.

By Stephanie Bunn

By Stephanie Bunn

By Stephanie Bunn

Strathnaver museum collection

Here is the basket collection at Strathnaver Museum, Sutherland from Joanne B Kaar.

I went to the depository of Museum nan Eilean in February 2012 to see what baskets they had in store there. You need to contact the museum in advance to see these baskets as only a few are out at any one time in the museum itself.

Child’s creel, Museum nan Eilean

Most of the baskets have not been made here on the islands and are of limited interest. But there are several creels. I was particularly interested in the use of kuba cane in some of them, presumably because of its resistance to rot from seawater.

There are also some quarter crans from the fishing industry, presumably coming from Norfolk, but possibly from Wick.

There is a cliff rescue helmet, the same design as one found by Julie Gurr in the Arran museum. I wonder who made these and how many were distributed to rescue services along our coasts?

Cliff rescue helmet, Museum nan Eilean

There are a couple of long line baskets woven in willow with hazel ribs. Presumably these were made here on the islands. One is documented as being made in the 1920s by Angus Campbell in Tarbert.

I was disappointed not to find any frame baskets. I have been looking for one all-over as hundreds of these would have been used in the herring industry here. But they probably rotted and fell apart. I haven’t met anyone who remembers this type of basket being made here. Maybe the skills of frame basketry died out. Maybe all the ones used in the herring industry were shipped in along with the quarter crans.

Museum nan Eilean has collections of archaeological, social, domestic and economic historical interest of the Island , including artefacts, photos, prints, paintings and archives. http://www.cne-siar.gov.uk/museum/stornoway/index.asp