By Susan O’Connor, Director
As an architectural historian I was a little surprised to come back from a recent study tour to Slovenia with more knowledge of the call of the chiffchaff than of the local built environment. But, surrounded by nature experts on this Erasmus+ adventure, it was inevitable that I would encounter a very different view of what cultural heritage is.
We were attending the International Wildflower Festival, held annually in the alpine region of Bohinj to the north west of Slovenia, an hour’s drive from the capital Ljubljana. Like our own Doors Open Days, the Festival promotes tourism based around cultural heritage assets, and I was particularly interested to find out how they would integrate built heritage into their nature-focused programme.
Bohinj has a very unique built heritage in its hayracks, known locally as stogi – vernacular timber structures usually built beside houses. They were designed with an open-sided structure for drying hay and are now used as car ports, workshops and covid-safe meeting places. Their distinctive forms can be seen all over the region, whether marking field boundaries or nudging up against each other in more urban settings.
With my Doors Open Days hat on, as soon as I saw them, I was expecting tours of the hayracks, t-shirts of the hayracks, build-your-own-hayrack workshops, how to make your hayrack accessible seminars…and there was nothing. It became clear that the Festival’s concept of cultural heritage did not include vernacular building, and this stood in marked contrast to our thinking in Scotland.
This got me thinking about how we pitch Doors Open Days, and whether we are missing a whole dimension of cultural heritage. We focus on buildings, places and spaces where there has been a human intervention, largely ignoring the role of nature in delivering cultural heritage. Would one of my new nature-loving friends look at our programme and see an empty space where the wildflower-spotting or bird-watching in urban areas should be? In our annual celebration of all things built, are we missing a significant part of the picture?
It is of course natural that the primary focus of our urban areas is buildings, and that the International Wildflower Festival’s is nature. Bohinj forms part of the Triglav national park – an area of 840 square kilometres of outstanding natural beauty that occupies roughly half the size of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. The aim of the Festival is to promote the region during its off-season period by organising events such as wild plant foraging, bee keeping and cheese making that people can take part in, while local restaurants create wildflower-themed menus.
It provided a valuable lesson in co-working and design between commercial businesses, the local tourism agency and the National Park staff. It felt like the entire region had engaged with the Festival.
And it has left me with a question to ponder: do we need to let more of nature into Doors Open Days? It’s a question I will be looking to address as Doors Open Days 2022 develops over the course of the coming months.