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Interpretation through story
May. 2nd, 2026 05:38 pmWe spent the afternoon at a lecture jointly organised by the City of Durham Trust and the World Heritage Site. The speaker was Colleen Batey, currently World Heritage Site Honorary Professor: a new post, and one which sounds as if it will give her scope to do all sorts of interesting things.
The original plan was for the session to be divided between two speakers: but then Jane Lovell looked at the Bank Holiday rail timetable, and realised that it couldn't be done, so instead we had a single talk with a dual focus. Colleen Batey's revised title was Interpretation through storytelling: case studies from Orkney and St Kilda. I'm not convinced that these two cases cast much light on each other. The Orcadian example looked at the interpretation of the Earl's Bu at Orphir, as described in the Orkneyinga Saga, and camre to the conclusion that the Saga gave an accurate description, but that subsequent interpretation had settled on the wrong building as the drinking hall. At St Kilda, the question seems to be, who gets to tell the story? But if you'd announced a talk on "Some digs I have worked on in Orkney and St Kilda (with pictures) I'd still have been there...
Most tantalising prospect: the possibility of a projct to research the mason's marks of Durham Cathedral and compare them to those found in St. Magnus' (which I think must refer to this project, and see whether the same masons really did work on both...
The original plan was for the session to be divided between two speakers: but then Jane Lovell looked at the Bank Holiday rail timetable, and realised that it couldn't be done, so instead we had a single talk with a dual focus. Colleen Batey's revised title was Interpretation through storytelling: case studies from Orkney and St Kilda. I'm not convinced that these two cases cast much light on each other. The Orcadian example looked at the interpretation of the Earl's Bu at Orphir, as described in the Orkneyinga Saga, and camre to the conclusion that the Saga gave an accurate description, but that subsequent interpretation had settled on the wrong building as the drinking hall. At St Kilda, the question seems to be, who gets to tell the story? But if you'd announced a talk on "Some digs I have worked on in Orkney and St Kilda (with pictures) I'd still have been there...
Most tantalising prospect: the possibility of a projct to research the mason's marks of Durham Cathedral and compare them to those found in St. Magnus' (which I think must refer to this project, and see whether the same masons really did work on both...
