Detail from a poster from the ‘Eat More Herrings’ campaign to promote consumption of the UK fishing catch. Crown copyright, National Records of Scotland (AF56/1045/1/4)

The SRA conference, delayed from the autumn, due to COVID-19, took place online on Wednesday 12 May 2021 and was on the topic of sources for the history of fishing and fishing communities in Scotland (medieval, early-modern and modern). Some of the sources covered were artefacts and physical objects (including museum collections), film and sound archives, parliamentary papers, central government records, harbour trust records and fishery society records. Speakers included historians, archaeologists, ethnographers, museum curators and archivists:

Chairs:

Professor Chris Whatley (University of Dundee)

Phil Astley (Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives)

Ishbel MacKinnon (Perth and Kinross Archive)

Speakers:

Peter Jones (Nottingham Trent University)

‘We cannot see them...they have gone out of our reach’: sources for a national history of Scotland’s sea fisheries in the nineteenth-century

Mollie Horne (D C Thomson Archive)

Aberdeen Harbour Board: engagement in the time of COVID

Alison Diamond (Argyll Estates Archives)

The Duke of Argyll and the British Fisheries Society

Dorothy Kidd (National Museums Scotland)

Fishing and Fishing Communities: a glimpse at National Museums Scotland's collections

Jen Gordon (Scottish Fisheries Museum)

Knitting the Herring: unravelling the histories of fishermen’s ganseys

Alistair Stenhouse (University of Aberdeen)

An Archaeology of Intertidal Fish-traps in Northern Scotland

Lorna Summers (University of Aberdeen)

The Coble and the King of Fish: the salmon fishers of Portsoy

Iain A. Robertson (formerly Perth College)

Sources Relevant to the Scottish Salmon Fisheries

Margaret Ritchie (Independent researcher on Scotland’s fishing industry)

Casting and Re-casting the Nets: trawling sources for Scotland’s fishing heritage

Ann Cameron (National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive)

Fishing for Films in the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive

The Annual General Meeting of the Association took place online on Friday 27 November at 12:30pm.