Old is the new new

Scotland can surely lay claim to be one of the great craft nations. Consider the many inventions the Scots have bequeathed the world that have shaped modern life: from the steam engine to penicillin; the telephone to chicken tikka masala. Beyond the romance of tartan or the kitsch appeal of Tunnocks teacakes, there’s a red thread that connects these innovations, old and new: they all share a canniness of spirit combining rigour and practicality with savoir-faire. This combination underpins much of Scotland’s cultural identity, which we call craft-based, or crafty. It describes the process of identifying a need and skilfully using a resource to meet it with flair. 

Across both the mainland and the islands, a new wave of craft practitioners are embracing heritage craft disciplines from tinsmithing to wood turning, basket weaving to bookbinding, stone carving, natural dyeing and hand-loom weaving. Some have inherited skills from family lines, others have come through a more contemporary route: Instagram rabbit holes; YouTube videos; short courses and longer apprenticeships. This emerging cohort isn’t simply preserving or copying the past; they’re translating traditions into present contexts, finding ways in which they maintain relevance and safeguarding their future practice in the process. 

The rising uptake of heritage crafts is thanks in no small part to the Heritage Crafts Association’s Red List of Endangered Crafts, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The Red List does something simple and powerful by researching existing practitioners and naming specific crafts at risk of extinction each year when their viability reaches a critical level. By putting endangered skills in red, the Heritage Crafts Association highlights something tangible, shareable and actionable. Each year this list receives countless column inches and airtime. The nation’s hearts are captured when we are told that we’re down to the last few folk able to weave horsehair or make pianos and glass eyes. 

Heritage crafts don’t survive on sentiment alone, and awareness only goes so far without the money to pay for time, materials, space and enough energy to keep the workshop lights on. Since 2019 the Heritage Crafts Association has awarded 15 training bursaries to early-career practitioners in Scotland and 19 grants to mid-level Scottish practitioners to help them grow their businesses. Dedicated financial support is crucial; commissions and grants can enable specialist tools, supporting a trainee’s wages or giving an established practitioner breathing room to teach. For crafts that exist on the edge of viability such backing isn’t just helpful it can be the difference between continuation and collapse.

Scotland’s island and rural communities have long relied on the practicalities of making, and the allegiance to craft here is better understood as a continuation rather than a revival. At the same time traditional practitioners are finding younger audiences with a renewed appreciation for craft as a counterpoint to globalised mass-manufacturing. “Buy less, buy better” and the “cost-per-use” calculator are more actively deployed by Gen-X than Boomers. Social platforms allow for the possibility of global connection and market channels, irrespective of geographical remoteness and the pains of tariff-hit trading. The momentum is real, and all over Scotland you find plucky individuals and collectives caretaking heritage crafts in their own guise. They’ll tell you they are driven not by quaint tugs on the heartstrings but because heritage crafts are part of who we are, where we come from and they can offer us paths for the future too. Scotland’s craft surge isn’t about preserving traditions in aspic, it’s about keeping knowledge in motion: teacakes and all. 

Five contemporary Scottish practitioners tell us why heritage craft matters today.

Iseabal Hendry, leatherwork and basketry, Loch Carron
A textile design graduate from the Glasgow School of Art, Iseabal launched her own collection of handwoven leather accessories in 2020. She credits her interest in craft to being surrounded by traditions such as basket-weaving, clinker boat-building and roof-thatching whilst growing up on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands. “Looking to and learning from heritage craft skills makes me feel grounded, deeply rooted in place,” Iseabal explains. “Heritage craft skills connect my practice to the daily practices of the people who lived on this land before me. It links me to a long line of people whose lives look different to my own, but reminds me that we share more in common than I might think.” Recently Iseabal was awarded Atlas Arts’ annual Tobar an Dualchais residency to create work inspired by oral recordings from across Scotland over the last century. This led to an investigation into basket-weaving using a range of traditional organic matter, which Iseabal has continued to explore with a QEST scholarship. Last year, Iseabal was commissioned by Belmond to create woven leather straps for the grand suites on the Royal Scotsman train. It was a pinch-me moment: “The house I grew up in faces the train line that the Royal Scotsman takes to Kyle of Lochalsh,” she says. “As a girl I used to frantically run out and wave at it whenever it passed in all its glory. Little Iseabal would have lost her mind to think she’d one day be commissioned to work on the interiors of their most luxurious carriages.”
iseabalhendry.com

Kristie de Garis, drystone walling, Perthshire
Kristie grew up in Caithness and today lives with her family in Perthshire. She is a photographer, writer and drystone waller, able to construct walls with stacked stones that rely solely on gravity and no mortar. On the importance of preserving heritage craft skills, Kristie says: “It’s important to keep heritage craft skills alive because they embody standards that modern life often sidelines, but still deeply needs. These skills are based on paying attention: to materials, to place and to the consequences of decisions. This allows the work to stay at a human scale, with accountability remaining close to the act of making.” Last year, Kristie published her first book Drystone – A Life Rebuilt (Birlinn), which tells the interwoven story of Kristie’s journey through craft and life. “The first proper section of drystone I ever built was a small repair in a muddy Perthshire field after a storm. I remember the sudden absorption of the work itself, sorting stones by hand, losing track of time,” Kristie says. “That night, exhausted and sore, I lay in bed scrolling through photos on my phone: gap, then wall. Gap, wall. It was the first thing I had ever built that would last. The wall existed because my body had done the work, and it would remain long after I was gone. That fact quietly shifted how I understood value, permanence and my own physical presence in the world.”
kristiedegaris.com

Jonathan Hill, instrument making, Edinburgh
Based in the Georgian Customs House at Leith, the old port of Edinburgh, Jonathan is a maker of historic and modern stringed instruments. He was awarded the Heritage Crafts Woodworker of the year in 2022. “Heritage crafts can be a form of storytelling through objects that connect us to the past,” explains Jonathan: “These objects can connect life today with life from a different time, which I find interesting. Having a human connection with the things we use definitely nourishes us in a way that something mass-produced does not, and handmade bespoke products usually give greater quality and utility to the user.” Studying and measuring historical instruments to understand their construction minutely is important to Jonathan: “It gives me an understanding of working practices of the period, the tools used, the methods employed and the context in which the crafts people worked,” he says. “I try to follow historical working practices as closely as possible, using the same set of tools and the same methods, whilst bringing in some contemporary themes. The balance between the product being useful in today’s modern world and the process of recreating the past is key.”
jonathanhill-luthier.com

Lucy Macdonald, hand-weaving, Banchory
Lucy launched Arra Textiles in 2016, developing hand-woven textile collections of artworks, homeware and accessories which explore layered compositions inspired by the surrounding land and seascapes. “This is knowledge that has been passed down through generations, evolving with new perspectives and adaptations over time,” says Lucy. “It is part of our shared heritage and forms so many aspects of our culture and traditions.” Over a decade of work, Lucy has developed a fully traceable and locally grounded studio model, connecting materials back to land and process. “I showed nine tapestries as part of Collect Art Fair during Covid, which propelled my learning forward,” Lucy explains. “I wasn’t able to source material or dyes due to restrictions, but I was able to get raw fleece from my local friend Diana’s two sheep called Roy and Cobweb. I did all the wool processing myself and learnt how to dye with local plants. Two of the tapestries are now hanging in a superyacht in Miami. It tickles me to think that Roy and Cobweb’s wool is so well-travelled.”
arratextiles.co.uk

The Marchmont Workshop, rush-seated furniture, Scottish Borders
In 2018 Richard Platt and Sam Cooper apprenticed with Lawrence Neal, one of the last rush-seated chair makers in Britain. In so doing, they became the latest torchbearers in a line of six generations able to harvest, dry and weave rush, alongside turning, steam-bending and finishing their furniture by hand. “We believe heritage craft skills matter because they connect land to object, maker to environment and past to present,” Sam explains. “They are skills that don’t just show who we are, but where we have come from. They show how the world around us has shaped our work and in turn how we have shaped our world.” The pair founded the Marchmont Workshop and run a successful small batch production workshop making classic pieces alongside their own contemporary models. “Our reason for practicing is not nostalgic, but about ensuring a legacy for our craft,” says Sam. “When skills are passed on, it allows them to adapt, evolve and remain relevant even as time would seek to leave them behind.”
themarchmontworkshop.com

Words By Hugo Macdonald