Museums And Archives

Hutton Unearthed: A new National Soils and Peat Map Archive

Hutton Unearthed will create a unique archive of national soil and peat maps and imagery to enhance public and community education and understanding, and research collaborations. By restoring, curating, archiving and opening access to the collection of maps and aerial imagery collected since 1947, an Open Science resource will be created for future generations, preserving knowledge of Scotland’s environmental heritage and enabling its use by policy makers, land managers and public. Funding is sought to undertake urgent work to safeguard this heritage. This will comprise restoring and preserving very fragile, irreplaceable, original maps of Scotland’s soil and peat, prioritising digitisation work. Significant additional materials will be curated (e.g. field notebooks, annotated aerial photographs), and memories and ‘soft knowledge’ captured from the aging cohort of surveyors to tell the story of Scotland’s soils and mapping and its shaping, over the past 80 years, by government, research, environmental and agricultural interests.