THE MATERIAL LANDSCAPES OF SCOTLAND’S JEWELLERY CRAFT, 1780–1914

Written by the curator of Scottish history collections at National Museums Scotland, this book is a highly original account full of new information from contemporary letters, newspapers, novels and paintings. It is essential for anyone interested in jewellery and wearable ornaments or in Scotland’s cultural history – from developments in geology which prompted discoveries of wonderfully coloured stones, to the political landscape that helped these materials to become powerful receptacles of meaning and memory.

Five chapters create a seamless narrative. In the first the author discusses the processes of making. The second sheds new light on the familiar copies of historic jewels by seeking to understand them from the makers’ point of view, as newly crafted relics of Scotland’s past.

The third chapter reveals the importance of native silver and gold. We learn about the brief one-year gold rush in Sutherland in 1869–70, the Duke of Sutherland’s introduction of licenses to curb the invasion by foreign prospectors and his ending of it due to the disruption of fishing, game-stalking and sheep-raising.

Tensions between land use, nature’s gifts and the exhaustion of supplies is one of the themes of chapter four, which covers Scottish ‘pebbles’; there is much that is new here. Even the word ‘pebble’ ignores their beauty, the work involved in slicing and polishing them to release their colour, the knowledge required to source them, and the trade networks that linked rural landscapes with urban specialist lapidary workshops. The author skilfully shows how scientific advances were intertwined with personal experience of landscape. The final chapter deals with living things, in particular the afterlives of Scottish freshwater pearls.

An introduction and conclusion complete the text, with full notes and bibliography. The book bears a seemingly hefty price tag for a small octavo format but this compellingly written and well-illustrated book is unquestionably worth the outlay.

THE MATERIAL LANDSCAPES OF SCOTLAND’S JEWELLERY CRAFT

Sarah Laurenson, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023, hb £81, ebook £64.80

Condensed from a review by Judy Rudoe in DAS Newsletter No. 130