Behind the scenes in winter: Drum Castle

Transcript

One speaker: Caitlin Jamison, Collections Care

I'm Caitlin, and I work for the National Trust for Scotland here at Drum Castle, and I look after collections care.

I love the winter time because I can just dive in and get projects done; I can spread my tools and equipment out and really get busy.
During the winter months I am doing a lot of preventative conservation and working with my volunteers.
We're doing research, we're cataloguing the library books and we're basically preparing the castle for each season as it comes around.
If I wasn't here in the winter months, there would be nothing to see in the summer months.
That sounds quite dramatic, but if you're not actively managing the environment, if you're not actively managing the collections, if you're not looking after the archives, looking after the library, they will very quickly fall prey to pests, to mould, to damp - all these sorts of things, so it's really important to be behind the scenes and to be taking care of these things in an active way.

In the library here we're currently going through and cataloguing and cleaning all 4,000 books.
We're about 700-800 books in at the moment.
It's taken about a year to get to this point so it's going to be quite a long project, but we've made some really fascinating discoveries that we wouldn't be able to do in the summer months if there's people coming and going.

These heritage places, they're not static. There's much information to be gleaned from the archives, from the library books and from the collections.
It's important to tease those stories out so that we are always having new and exciting things to be sharing with our visitors.
A fascinating discovery I just made a few weeks ago, is that the 20th Lady of Drum Castle, Anna Irvine, exhibited her artworks during her lifetime. This is mid- to late-Victorian era, so quite challenging for a woman to have her work accepted and included in exhibitions like at the Royal Scottish Academy, so it's quite an achievement which we didn't know about.

Thank you to all our members and visitors for supporting the National Trust for Scotland.
Without your help we would not be able to look after these important places.