The Weekly, every Sunday: one place worth going and one thing worth reading.
Interesting news · Tuesday 28 July
5,000 years of Scottish graffiti goes on show at Stanley Mills
Perthshire · from historicenvironment.scot
Photograph · historicenvironment.scot
Marking Time, an exhibition tracing 5,000 years of Scottish graffiti, is now open at Stanley Mills in Perthshire.
Curated by Dr Alex Hale of Historic Environment Scotland, it treats graffiti as an archive rather than a nuisance: ancient carvings, wartime messages scratched by the displaced, lovers' initials and present-day street art, gathered in images from across the country. The argument is that the urge to leave a mark connects a Neolithic carver to a teenager with a spray can, and the evidence is persuasive.
The setting earns its keep. Stanley Mills, six miles north of Perth on a bend of the Tay, is one of the best-preserved cotton mills of the Industrial Revolution, worked for 200 years and now in HES care. See the exhibition, then the Bell Mill of 1787, held to be the finest surviving 18th-century workspace anywhere.
An ivy-clad distillery of 1798 on the edge of Pitlochry, making the malt at the heart of Bell's, with tours, tastings and a bar made from an old copper mash tun.
A colourful cafe at the Cairn O'Mohr winery near Errol, opened in 2021, cooking Perthshire and Dundee produce with a street-food twist and fruit wines to match.
Barefoot dancing in the grass, festoon lit lawns, firepits for toasting marshmallows, stargazing windows. Weddings at Guardswell are relaxed and a lot of fun.
After decades of steep decline, Scotland’s capercaillie, one of Britain’s most endangered birds, is showing early signs of recovery in the Caledonian pine forests.
