Centre for Scottish & Celtic Studies

It is with great please that I write to report on the successful delivery of our conference held in Glasgow at the beginning of December. Individual statements of expenditure will be provided to each sponsor, but I provide here an overview of the event which is common to all. The front page of the programme demonstrates how many sponsors were required to deliver this event, and in all cases, without that support this conference would not have happened.

As can be seen from the attached programme, the scope of papers was extensive, and the delivery intense! In total we had more than 30 individual contributors and 19 presentations on day one and a further 16 on day two. The major sponsorship provided by Historic Environment Scotland enabled so many speakers to be accommodated, with many receiving also travel costs from this support. This was a highly significant award for the conference, fulfilling as it did/does a key element in the Archaeology Strategy Agenda for Scotland. The conference was fully booked at 150 delegates; these included local, national and international representatives with both professional and amateur interests. Within this number, 38 were current students from several universities (for example UHI, York, Aberdeen, Oxford, Kiel, Durham and Nottingham, although predominantly from Glasgow where much of the more recent postgraduate study in the Viking period has focussed). Many of these students were supported in their attendance by grants from the University of Glasgow and particularly from the Scottish Society for Northern Studies.
In addition, our keynote lecture given by Prof Judith Jesch at Govan Old parish church on the evening before the main conference began that had an audience of 181 people and was followed by an excellent reception hosted by the Glenmorangie Whisky distillery in recognition of their current research focus on the Viking collections at the National Museums of Scotland. The funding from the Hunter Archaeological Trust with Glasgow Archaeological Society enabled this to be delivered, and we are most grateful in this for the tremendous assistance and enthusiasm from the Govan Old team, Frazer Capie and his colleagues, for making this work so efficiently. Earlier in the day, more than 60 delegates had been hosted by NMS colleagues Martin Goldberg and Adrian Maldonado and were guided through collections both on and off display, with the additional contributions by James Graham-Campbell and Tom Horne. This was a highlight of the conference for all those who were able to partake of this, especially the opportunity to hear about the choice pieces of Scotland’s Viking culture housed in the national collection from those knowledgeable scholars .

Further assistance from Glasgow City Council in the form of a reception held at the Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove is gratefully acknowledged. The gracious welcome by the Right Hon Lord Provost of Glasgow, Councillor Eva Bolander was much appreciated, and with her Swedish origins to the fore she was most enthusiastic about the event and gave a warm Glasgow welcome to the delegates present. Much wine was offered, much wine was consumed.

The bookings were handled through Eventbrite and many of the costs associated with this crucial administrative tool were covered by the sponsorship of the Viking Society. The organisation was handled by Elizabeth Pierce, Tom Horne and myself, but without the tremendous support of Christelle le Rigueur, University of Glasgow who handled the financial elements, nothing would have happened on time and broadly within budget!!

Our next stage is to contact all speakers with a call for the digital output due within the next few months. This is designed to be a first stop in the on-line hunt for information on the many projects on Scotland’s Viking heritage and will provide updated links to the multi-disciplinary papers published in academic and other sources. A brief summary of the project, location map and images of the site/object etc with the bibliography of all extant sources will be a useful resource to have available for students and all other interested parties. As a tool for site management, display and interpretation, this will be a significant resource. This will be followed by an edited volume which will serve as an update to Vikings in Scotland: An Archaeological Survey (Graham-Campbell and Batey 1998) and will be the first such multi-disciplinary and up-to-date volume written by the people undertaking the cutting-edge work on Scotland’s Viking past. It is anticipated that this volume will be available in about two years’ time.

Dr Colleen Batey

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First published: 3 May 2021