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Case Study: Heritage Skills Project

Please note: Heritage Skills was not delivered by Heritage, History & Her but was worked on by Molly Wyatt as an employee of Groundwork South & North Tyneside. All opinions are mine alone and I do not speak on their behalf.

Incredible evaluation video made by the brilliant team behind Wycombe 89 Media.

The Project

I joined this project after a successful funding bid for a project that would share heritage skills with the local community to repair and improve Jarrow Hall’s ‘village’. This was a collection of experimental archaeaology buildings based on the remains of Anglo-Saxon sites across Northumbria. The museum itself told the story of Bede and life at Jarrow Monastery – rare for its use of stone and coloured glass – and so the village and rare breed farm represented life for most people around circa 700.

The original buildings were built in the 1990s and designed to last 30 years which it had been. The project therefore taught volunteers recruited from the local community heritage skills through experts and self-delivery, empowering them to then repair and enhance the village. From thatching to timber- framing, and leatherwork to calligraphy, all their work had to backed by research and fit the aims of the site while developing the skills and confidence of the team.

Page in Groundwork South and North Tyneside's Impact Report. Text reads: Enriching Lives through Culture and Heritage. Inspiring engagement and discovery informed by our past, present and future. Skills from the past, for the future Our Heritage Skills project offers people of all ages and abilities, the chance to learn skills in traditional crafts such as; basket weaving, thatching, metallurgy, embroidery, leatherwork and calligraphy. Working alongside specialists in heritage crafts, volunteers and visitors gain knowledge and understanding in heritage skills that can then be put to good use in shaping the future of Jarrow Hall's Anglo-Saxon Farm, Village. Jarrow Hall apprentice, Molly Wyatt, played a key role in the success of this heritage skills project. 2390 Volunteer Hours 69 Heritage Skills Workshops Delivered 91 Volunteers Recruited Supported by Heritage Fund and Arts Council England. The right side of the landscape page has an image of 4 volunteers around medieval bellows learning metallurgy. The Jarrow Hall logo is beneath this.
The page is from Groundwork South and North Tyneside 2022/23 Impact Report. Clicking on the image will take you to the full report on their website.

Volunteer Recruitment & Management

Molly is seen working with 3 seated older ladies attending spinning. The table features hot drinks and biscuits.
Teaching Spinning at Memory Cafe.
Sharing research findings.
A man holds leatherworking stylus to carve a pattern into a piece of leather
Leatherworking runes and Anglo-Saxon symbols.

I was responsible for volunteer recruitment – delivering heritage taster sessions and outreach engagement workshops across South Tyneside. These focused on recruited different target audiences such as over 65s, 16-25, SEND and those in food poverty. Each workshop was adapted to the interests and needs of the group. E.g. for sewing groups I focused on Anglo-Saxon textiles skills, and history groups on the archaeological background of the site.

Once volunteers were recruited, I engaged in informal discussions with each one to discuss how they both learnt and we could make the sessions as comfortable for them as possible. By framing access discussions in this way, all can benefit from them rather than feeling they don’t ‘qualify’ for support.

This outreach sessions also resulted in a new partnership with Roseway House – a local dementia specialist care home. These weekly sessions allowed those living there to engage in the project and learn skills from the comfort of the home.

These images are thanks to Pauline & Dawn who organise the amazing activities at Roseway House.

Teaching Skills: Workshop Co-ordination & Development

The program required heavy organisation and planning, with half a dozen experts, 136 volunteers and 3 weekly activities. 

I supported the experts in adapting their sessions to work with the access needs of participants to balance this with their practical outputs such as a fully thatched roof! For many of our experts this also meant adapting live to the conditions needed for repair using the improvements in the sector in the last 30 years. 

I also developed new provision for these volunteers to continue working on their new skills – creating Anglo-Saxon DIY (inspired by Men in Sheds projects) and Craft, Create & Catch-Up (inspired by Knit & Natter groups). These groups are both still running as legacies of this project and continue contributing to the village and its living history experience. 

Craft, Create & Catch-Up was a real experimental group – combining those with modern experience in dress-making or with cultural childhoods and social education in knitting and clothes making, with the skills practised at the time the village was set and our research into costumes at a time with almost no physical evidence remaining. Did you know that knitting & crochet hadn’t yet been invented in 700? These groups also had huge social benefit and being part of the project and its legacy groups has become a substantial part of most participants identity and social life.

Research

The research group predated me joining the project but I was able to run workshops to make this accessible to those without academic experience or technical prowess. One of the major challenges of project was explaining where our decisions came from. The staff team consisted of myself and a experiement archaeology Dr., and so we had to establish how we were choosing the ‘best’ sources which to us was just based on prior experience. 

The result of this was a ‘top trump cards’ system. We ascribed a numerical value out of 5 to each primary source for various factors such as geographical relevance, time period relevance and the clarity of its information. For example, the Huldermose Peplos is an incredibly rare surviving peplos (a dress style) from 200 Denmark. This meant it scored high for clarity of information and being the same item, but low for timeperiod and georgraphy. In comparison, a stone carving found at the monastery of a young man wearing a pleated tunic scored well for time and place, but it was unclear how the tunic was made to appear pleated and it wasn’t an actual garment but a stone representation.

Costume Research labelled Illustrations

Explore More of my work:

Enhancing the List: Historic England Research Project​

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Neurodiversity Accessibility Audit for Saltram House & Gardens

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Spyglass: Co-curating a Play on the History of Sunderland

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My Dissertation Project Exhibition: Stories Told In Stitches

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