Further Historical Research
Historical research undertaken by Dr Richard Oram, during Phase 1 of the project, has confirmed the sheer wealth of industrially related documentation relating to Prestongrange.
"What has emerged from this work very clearly is that this was no backwater but, from the outset, was intended to be a significant commercial venture that could challenge the local dominance of Leith. There is a very powerful story to be told here;.there is a very substantial documentary record relating not only to the concentration of sites around Morrison’s Haven which are the focus for the current project but also for the barony of Prestongrange in general. All work to date, including this current report, do little more than scratch the surface and draw attention to a series of key themes. What is also very evident is the interconnectedness of the material, with the salt, coal, glass and pottery works all being closely interdependent, and the mills and harbour itself being inseparable from the wider industrial picture. Past studies which have focused on one dimension of the industrial operations in the district inevitably draw down barriers which artificially separate the mutually supportive activities. Prestongrange offers the opportunity to explore an early seventeenth- and eighteenth-century example of the kind of industry more familiar in the nineteenth-century ‘Industrial Revolution in the west of Scotland'"
Dr Oram also added:
"One aspect that has come through particularly strongly in the records consulted for this work is the strength of the human dimension. While most documentary research can provide detail about the social and economic elites who financed, developed and grew rich on such operations, normally the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum who laboured in them are invisible. At Prestongrange and Morrison’s Haven, there is a clear opportunity to maintain a strongly human angle within the work and to explore the lives of the ordinary coal- and saltworkers, the fishermen and sea-men working there between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. It is rare for such a record material to survive and the opportunity to make this data available to a wider public should not be missed"
To read more about the historical research undertaken during Phase 1 why not download the report
