If you close your eyes and think about Scotland, a few things maybe come to mind:
Sheep, maybe. The weather — it rains a lot. And castles. These structures, which were
built defensively, are actually rather vulnerable to climate change. It's who we
are, it tells us where we've come from, and it needs to be there for the future.
Historical Environment Scotland, a government body of castle caretakers,
recently published a report saying that a majority of their sites are at risk
from weather changes. What we've seen in the last couple of decades, really since
the 1960s, are some pretty rapid changes. We get quarter of more rain than we did.
The temperatures are increasing. Our coasts are under threat by extreme
weather and rising sea levels. And we think that's beginning to have a
measurable impact on our monuments. I want to just underscore how many castles
there are in Scotland. There's 330 sites that the government looks after.
There's 8,000 scheduled monuments, many of which are abandoned castles. There's
50,000 other listed buildings, and, in fact, a quarter of all buildings in
Scotland are historic. The historic environment in Scotland is not
necessarily any older than many other parts of the world, but it is
particularly vulnerable. We're in quite an exposed part of the globe, right
on the edge of the Atlantic. We get everything that's coming. Like any incoming
force, it's a problem for the structures themselves. The castles of Scotland are
an internationally important icon of Scottish history. And for the people who
live in them. And the fuss is also because people live in castles, and
therefore they don't want their houses deteriorating around them.
We always catch the wind here, we're the highest point for hundreds of meters
around, and consequently, if you lose a slate and water starts penetrating from
above, then you have all sorts of serious problems. And there's a significant
increase in average rainfall in this area. Changes in the weather elevates
what would be normal maintenance work on the estate to something that cannot be
ignored. Oh, this has been the wettest autumn, winter that anybody can remember.
Water is really the engine of decay. Coastal erosion, fluvial flooding
from rivers, rain water flooding, dramatic increases in rainfall. More extreme
rainfall events, more wetting and drying, wetting and drying, so the more times
that you get a wetting and a drying event, the more decay you have. Cement was
thought to be the right solution to these sort of problems because it's hard,
it's impermeable, but over time it becomes brittle, and you can see here it's
cracked, and what it's actually done is trapped water and moisture underneath it,
and that's actually caused the stone to decay. I mean, effectively, that's turned
to soil. But we're actually up here on top of the building, and that's why we've
got to get a lot of this cement off, because it's doing more damage than it's
doing good now. Our growing season is five weeks longer. For us managing
historic monuments, that actually means we get plants, which form roots into
masonry. Moss, lichen, algae growing on buildings.
All the interventions are time-intensive, expensive, and ideally subtle. Building
low-level walls to mitigate sea surges, putting rebar into cliffs, using a lot of
mapping techniques to understand how moisture permeates a structure, but for
the sites that the government does not care for, it falls on the shoulders of
private castle owners. Or because there are just so many castles, it simply goes
unchecked. There are a number of important castles in this area, one of
which is clearly deteriorating and another of which is a major tourist
attraction and a significant part of the local economy. But increasingly, it's
difficult to maintain these buildings as a consequence of very, very wild weather.
They're almost like litmus paper. They're actually an indicator because they're
quite sensitive. They're old, they're vulnerable. We think that gives us an
indication, really, of the sort of effects that might happen to kind of wider
society.
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