How to be a local historian (and create your own heritage trail)

About this Event

Love history? And being outdoors? Help us to create a brand-new heritage trail for the Garnock Valley by nominating your favourite old places. We’ll show you how to research their histories, so you can add them to the trail!

What you’ll learn

We all have our favourite old places that we like to visit on walks, and enjoy with friends and family. But how do you find out more about their long-lost past?

This online class will show you how to:

• identify your local heritage sites
• what you can look for when visiting your favourite old places
• where to look for more information online, like Canmore, PastMap and other online collections
• write a heritage description to share with others
• update information online

If you enjoy the class, you can then nominate a place and sign up to join our project and help us to create a brand-new heritage trail for Garnock.

Why we’re making this crowdsourced heritage trail

Garnock Connections aims to protect and promote the incredible natural landscape in North Ayrshire. With the Garnock River at its heart, our aim is to enhance and reveal the beauty and history surrounding it for everyone in the region to enjoy.

This workshop will be run online by DigVentures and Rathmell Archaeology as part of the Garnock Connections project, and is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

What’s next?

This online class is open to everyone in the North Ayrshire region who wants to learn the basics of doing local history research. We will be focussing on sites within the Garnock Connections project area. If you love it, you can sign up to for more!

This is just the first in a series of online classes designed to help you learn about, enjoy and contribute to the Garnock Valley landscape.

In fact, there will be a follow up event on December 16th that we strongly encourage all participants to sign up to, where we will teach you how you can begin to present your data, and go from having information to a heritage trail that others can enjoy.

If you decide to sign up for more, you’ll be able to nominate a place, create a heritage description, and get it added to the trail!

We’ll also be scheduling more online events on similar themes throughout the Autumn and Winter.

Hopefully, we’ll eventually be able to organise some outdoor heritage events for you to be part of too!