How can reviving a lost craft and Scottish material culture
help rejuvenate a forgotten coastal dune landscape ?

The Clearances depopulated vast areas of the Scottish Highlands, rupturing
communities, their culture, and ultimately the landscapes they inhabited.
Through extensive intergenerational knowledge, these communities created
a reciprocal ecology based on craft, material culture, and self-sufficiency.
Lost to time and extraction, this understanding of land now clings to history.
As stewards of the land, the highlanders followed ancestral rhythms dictating
their harvesting, cultivation and building practices. These low-level
activities sustained dynamic systems in the land that now sit stagnant. My
research-led project examines an overlooked coastal landscape that has
supplied material to coastal communities across Scotland for thousands of
years.
The Marram biotope is a coastal sand dune system that is inherently dynamic,
previously managed through grazing and harvesting, but now often
lies still, arguably due to human inactivity. My project aims to regenerate this
overlooked landscape on a conceptual local-industrial scale through necessary
human intervention and craft revival.
The theoretical design proposes a Pier that dissects the densely vegetated,
stagnant dune of Cambusdarach Beach — part of the Silver Sands of Morar
coastline, a mainland hotspot of sand dune environments on the west coast
of Scotland. The Pier stands within the Marram biotope as a piece of craft
infrastructure, enabling the observation, research and ultimately regeneration
of the landscape. Through the harvesting of Marram, heather, and
Grouse in over-established areas of the dune, large areas of sand can be
exposed to the wind, creating sinks of mobile sand. The material is then processed
and thatched into contemporary modular panels, which are used to establish
“Silos” of storage and learning on the Pier.
The pier becomes a framework through which lost craft is not simply remembered,
but practised, enabling the restroation of the sand dune’s
dynamic cycle.