‘BACK home, we do it like this,” she says, and carefully places a woven basket with traditional Eritrean bread, called “Himbasha”, onto the beam supporting one of the thatched huts in the new Scottish Crannog Centre.
Then she smiles at Reggie, the Cran-dog, who had been sniffing expectantly, and in the next move, turned to the fire, took kindling, and together with a New Eritrean, from Scotland, who was already dressed in traditional Eritrean clothes, they began to light the fire.
I am stuck by the seamlessness of the gestures, the knowing that is held in the body, the actions which occur without needing thought or talk, just on autopilot. Though this visit, for my Eritrean-Scottish friend, is a first to the Scottish Crannog Centre’s new village, it is a familiar architecture and way of doing things, it is like being home.
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As the fire takes and flames in the hearth, the site comes alive with people. A crannog, for those of you who may be wondering, is the name given to the Iron Age lake dwellings which appear in the Scottish and Irish lochs around 2500 years ago.
As always with archaeology, no-one quite knows if this was an architecture for animal husbandry, defence or just showing off. “We have some facts from science,” says the museum guide to visitors wondering at finds like the Iron Age butter dish, or the blue cobalt bead from the Middle East, or the pristine plough which was found under the door lintel, “but we don’t know, we have to interpret”.
The Iron Age village that was opened on April 1, 2024, after the old crannog burned down back in June 2021 is at Dalerb on the banks of Loch Tay. It’s part of the Perth Unesco City of Folk Art and Craft and is a multi-award-winning museum.
You must suspend your traditional ideas of what a museum is when you go to the crannog and never more so than during the annual Rise and Shine Festival, now in its third year. During this most special of weekends, the crannog plays host to the world, to those who, like the Crannog People, know what it is like, when they are burned and broken, and dreams are turned to ashes.
The Unesco Chair Team for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts co-creates this event with the most hospitable crannog staff, and with refugees and people seeking asylum who all join to craft and share, bringing different arts and crafts from all over the world to life.
As people cook and share and sing together, visitors, members of the public, are welcomed and join in themselves by asking questions about strange objects and practices, and in seeking interpretation and finding connections.
In one hut there is Iron Age cooking – a reconstruction of recipes based on the scientific analysis of particles of food found at crannog sites in Scotland. In the same hut, there is an Azerbaijani tea ceremony under way, where tea is what brings peace after much war and turbulence. Then there is the delivery of a huge case of pakora and a vat of chai from one of the members of Maryhill Integration Network and an Iron Age cook making bramble and oat cranachan, and the feasting begins.
In the now Scottish-Eritrean hut, there are people from around the world being inducted into the delightful and quite profound ways of an Eritrean Coffee Ceremony.
As charcoal forms in the fire, raw coffee beans are roasted, beads of incense burnt and small cups of exquisite coffee and ginger are sampled by visitors. Children learn how to pound the beans or waft the incense with a mashrafa – a woven palm-leaf fan – and in the timelessness of ceremony, people forget the race-riots, their fear or the gaslit shame, and are bound up in the wonder of asking questions, and drinking coffee, and gazing into the embers of a fire.
In the village square on a regular basis the cow horn blows and the wonderful Solo Way Choir of Ukraine women – formed on one of the ships used to accommodate those evacuated and granted humanitarian protection in Scotland – begin to sing.
There are many tears in the gathering as people hear the music of home, in the fresh air, and it touches in a way that can bring forth a cleansing and kindle hope for what has been lost and what may come again.
One of the choir’s participants proudly brings out her extraordinary harp – a bandura – inscribed as a musical instrument in the register of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and like so much music, it has survived a long period of persecution and proscription, into the present.
The bridge holding the bandura strings meets that of the lyre bridge found in a crannog from 2500 years ago, and the site rings to the lilting music. It is an echo down the ages into the things of peace and fleeting hope that we cannot articulate or easily understand.
In the giant hazel-woven beehive – the structure on the site which is an archaeological reconstruction – there is storytelling under way between a Gaelic singer and storyteller, a Métis-Mohawk storyteller and a Shona-Ndau storyteller. One of the stories is the story of the construction of the beehive and it leads to stories of bees, and stories of honey, and stories of fire, and invitations to reflect.
The crannog isn’t a museum where you leave a feedback form – though reviews on TripAdvisor are welcome – as the Crannog People don’t have a marketing budget. The invitation is to write a reflection for a place in the world, or an issue that is concerning, or is one bringing a sense of gratitude and to give this to the fire.
This invitation comes from the traditions of indigenous people far from Loch Tay, who place trust in earth, wind, fire and water for discerning wisdom and ways ahead. My reflection is, of course, for Gaza, for refugees, and for a bright flame of peace, offered to the kind of fire that means you can boil water or roast coffee, or cook pakora, offered to a tended fire that creates, not a fire that devastates.
Fire, and its aftermath, and its rekindling to bring life and loveliness, scent and stories, is at the beating heart of this phoenix of festivals.
The idea for it came about after I’d visited the crannog shortly after the devastating fire and the huge gestures of solidarity and fundraising which led Mike Benson, the crannog’s indefatigable and inspiring director, to decide immediately to do what the Crannog People of the Iron Age would have done – cross the water, migrate and rebuild. In visiting the old Crannog Centre, it was clear that many of the artefacts and much of the experimental archaeology there could learn a great deal from the tangible heritage and intangible cultural heritage of those from around the world, especially those who are refugees living in Scotland.
So, we filled out those interminable forms to scrape together some money to bring some of the groups I work alongside, like the Joyous Choir, Maryhill Integration Network, our Unesco RILA Scholars and others, alongside the Crannog People. What everyone had in common was the loss – to fire or destruction, or persecution – of a special place or home.
All were struggling with difficult landlords or legal claims, with the need to build a home in a new place, that was strange, with small boats and log boats, coracles and rafts. All were finding that in the process of making ordinary life again and sharing the joy of this with one another, through hospitality, something quite exquisitely simple and beautiful was discovered, and new bonds of kindred spiritship were forged.
So many of the objects in the museum brought gasps of wonder or recognition being made of natural materials, which are still part of the living traditions, village life and recent memories of many people across the world.
As those traditions are put under erasure by colonialism, capitalist extraction and environmental degradation, it is in places like the crannog that a global sense is re-found of the way we are connected to one another through our inventive uses of natural materials – clay, twine, cloth, grains, pigments, spindles and whorls.
This, of course, is integration at its best.
Just as real enduring peace is ordinary, is known in the ability to put a sleeping child to bed without fear of needing to flee or hide from artillery fire in the night, or the chance to make a traditional, beloved meal without fear of persecution or scarcity, so integration is made in ordinary things – Eritreans making coffee for crannog visitors, people volunteering to be wrapped in a sari, or participating in storytelling, or singing, or joining a slightly anarchic puppet show.
Last week, at the University of Glasgow, Scotland’s third New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy was launched. It is based on five years of intensive research and work with communities of lived and learned experience. It contains six key principles and an antidote to the shameful Refugee Convention busting legislation of the previous UK Government.
Integration from day one of arrival
- A rights-based approach
- Restorative and trauma-informed
- Involvement of people with lived experience
- Inclusive, intercultural communities
- Partnership and collaboration It remains to be seen if the new UK Government will adopt this principled and globally acclaimed approach of which Scotland can be rightly proud. We can hope, and we can campaign, and we can – in the words of Andy Sirel, co-founder of JustRight Scotland, at the launch – just “do the thing”
As the Rise and Shine Festival at the Crannog Centre “did the thing”, there was a breathing space for joy, for freedom from fear and want, even if only for a day. Visitors arrived a little cautious, only coming for a couple of hours, and ended up staying all day and waving off the bus back to Glasgow.
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The crannog people made up a hundred Jeely Pieces as food for the bus back to Glasgow, with a handwritten joke in each one (thanks Erin and Mike!) and a handwritten note on each brown bag: “Thank you for being part of the Crannog Community”.
In the land of refugee policy, we place a great emphasis on a warm welcome for refugees, but it’s the warm farewell, and the repeat visits, that really tell people they belong, that there can indeed be a home from home.
As I said, not an ordinary museum, but proof that another world is possible.
Alison Phipps is Unesco Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at the University of Glasgow.
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