In the evening of Friday 21st of November, we had a very enjoyable, interesting and well-presented talk by Chris Fleet, Map Curator at the National Library for Scotland (NLS), on ‘The Mapping of Perthshire and Breadalbane through the Ages’.

Pont Maps of Scotland 1580-1614

Chris has worked at the National Library of Scotland since 1994. His main focus at NLS has been on curating digital mapping, including the electronic legal deposit of modern map datasets, as well as managing long-term projects to make available historical maps online. He has researched, written and spoken widely on these subjects, and is a co-author of Scotland: Mapping the Nation (2011), Edinburgh: Mapping the City (2014), Scotland: Mapping the Islands (2016), and Scotland: Defending the Nation (2018).

His talk examined selected maps of Perthshire and Breadalbane over the last four centuries, looking at who made these maps, why, and who they made them for. Over the centuries, different purposes including state integration, military conquest, agricultural improvement, and improving communications resulted in very different maps. He particularly focused on how particular map-makers gathered their information, and how this resulted in very different maps. He finished up by looking at new online content of interest on the NLS maps website, particularly new maps, gazetteers, viewers and tools.

You can view his talk here: ‘The Mapping of Perthshire and Breadalbane through the Ages’

Due to the vagaries of the winter weather and the proximity to Christmas, we do not hold a December meeting and talk. We start again in January but, again due to the vagaries of the winter weather in January and February, we present both of the January and February talks only on Zoom; our final winter talk in March will be presented ‘in person’ once again in the Breadalbane Community Campus building in Aberfeldy. The list of the January to March talks is presented on the poster below:

More details of the content of each of these talks will be provided in the website in two to three weeks before each talk.

Our next winter talk, ‘Abbeys and Castles of Dumfries and Galloway’ will be presented only on Zoom by Stefan Sagrott on Friday, 17th January, at 7.30 p.m., and we invite you to attend this free talk. Stefan is the Historic Environment Scotland’s Senior Cultural Resources Advisor (South) and is responsible for all the HES properties in Dumfries and Galloway.

If you wish more information on or want to register for this talk, please contact Ian at bhsaberfeldy@gmail.com and he will send you the Zoom link for this talk.

Our February talk, ‘Rock Art from Loch Tay to the Atlantic Façade’, will also be presented only on Zoom and we will publish more information on this talk in due course.
 

There are four talks remaining from the 2023-24 winter season. The January and February talks are presented only online on Zoom, whilst the March and April talks will be held ‘in-peson’ in the Breadalbane Community Campus building in Aberfeldy.

The first of these talks, ‘The Black Watch’ presented by Major Ronnie Proctor, will be held on Zoom on Friday, 19th January, starting at 7.30 p.m.. To view this talk you must register in advance with Ian at bhsaberfeldy@gmail.com.