Guest post from Stephen Jackson, Stephen Jackson is Senior Curator, Furniture and Woodwork at National Museums Scotland, and the author of the book Scottish Furniture, 1500-1914.
Is the national museum a repository of last resort? Sadly, not. Our storage capacity and operational resources are strictly finite and our collecting must balance historical and artistic merit against future needs and the financial cost of preservation in perpetuity. This recent case study concerns the now redundant church at Dun, in Angus. It was built in 1834 after the heritor, Margaret Erskine, Marchioness of Ailsa, decided to convert the medieval church into a family mausoleum, and thereby push the working church further away from House of Dun. The pulpit, dated 1615, had been removed during the late eighteenth century but was restored to the new building.
As an early-seventeenth-century furnishing event, it had an eye-catching genesis. In 1610 the lairdship of Dun fell to a boy of ten, who was placed in the care of his father’s cousin, the minister of nearby Ecclesgreig (St Cyrus). In 1613, however, his uncle and aunts succeeded in poisoning him. They were prosecuted and executed while his younger brother inherited and the minister, John Erskine, was appointed to the parish of Dun. It was he who commissioned the new pulpit, resplendent with his own arms. This gives us something of a parallel story to that of the pulpit erected at Parton in Kirkcudbrightshire in 1598, and given to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland in 1865. In that instance, the father of the minister, Robert Glendonwyn, had purchased the church lands of Parton in the wake of the Reformation and wrestled the right of presentation from a senior branch of his own family who remained Catholic into the nineteenth century.
We don’t enjoy taking things out their contexts and nor do we want to build up a large holding of similar large objects. Yet when Anna Groundwater, Principal Curator, Renaissance and Early Modern History at National Museums Scotland and I learnt of the vulnerability of the Dun pulpit, we sought to calculate just what was at risk. We knew that there are not many more than fifteen seventeenth-century Scottish pulpits surviving, and that only four, at most, are older than this one. Several that are still in use are cared for in non-parochial settings, and hence comparatively secure, while the Dun example possesses a good degree of physical integrity compared with others that were over-restored in the past. Thus we accepted it as a gift from the General Trustees of the Church of Scotland, and with support from the Pilgrim Trust our conservators went about the complicated task of removing it, in collaboration with specialist contractors. We decided not to take the nineteenth century pedestal and staircase. Within the confined medieval structure for which it was made, although closer to the floor, it would have been even more imposing.
Prosperity and renewal during both the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries resulted in considerable heritage loss. The twentieth century was largely a period of neglectful survival, yet anyone consulting the architectural historian George Hay’s 1957 inventory of church furnishings will read of once well-regarded objects that have since vanished without trace. Museums are not a one-stop solution for vulnerable heritage, however, and the enjoyment of things that remain in situ is greatly to be encouraged.
Our thanks to Stephen for sharing his reflections on our blog and at our launch symposium.
