Thirteen years on: the Bennachie Landscapes Project experience. Learning from the past, shaping the future

This book, Cultural Landscapes of North-east Scotland, originated in a series of presentations given in a conference of that name at the Garioch Heritage Centre in late September 2023. It seemed to be a suitable point at which to consider the Bennachie Landscapes Project in respect of other research being carried out across the area. A broad range of speakers were invited in order to share their work and to make us all more aware of each other. Although many of us knew, to some extent, of each other’s research, it gave an opportunity to meet and discuss it in greater detail. The difficulty in retrieving all participants from convivial breaks throughout the two days attests to the success of that aspect of the conference! This ‘conviviality’ is a marked feature of ‘community’ research and deserves further reflection. Graham and Vergunst (2019) explored community heritage specifically as research, a form of inquiry that links past, present, and future in meaningful ways. They argued that for communities, ‘what enlivens relations with the past is more an ongoing process of finding out, sharing, debating and undertaking small-scale acts of stewardship. These are stories that are worked on and pieced together collectively and with meaning for current circumstances, not simply uncovered.’ These relatively small scale, localised projects (but not necessarily local in a parochial sense) do not just retell that past, but actively work on the present and future too. The purpose of this chapter is to try to gain a sense of how community-based and collaborative research works from the ground up, with a focus on social relations such as conviviality.