Culture Fund 2023-2024 Case Study: Eday Community Enterprises

We invited and paid for the Orkney Camera Club to come to Eday for the day. The aim was to photograph cultural and natural heritage around the island and provide some workshops and learning for the community.

We took the camera club around the island to photograph a number of key sites, monuments and people. Members of the community were invited to come along and discuss photography and methods with the Camera Club – five residents came along. We went to Carrick House, the Crowbar Arch, Castles beaches and caves, the West Side, the Setter Stone, the old cemetery; several older folk then participated in activities and were photographed, which was great fun for all involved.

The Group then had lunch and again members of the community were invited along for a Q&A sessions to which several more residents attended.

The outcome is that we will have a range of photographs which are going to be displayed in the Eday Community Shop Café, with some potentially being held in the Heritage Centre too.

Cultural Heritage: part of the visit included to Sandybank, where Ernie Miller ran a ‘shop’ for many years. It hasn’t been open since Covid and Ernie is now in his eighties. We have managed to capture some fantastic photographs of his shop, which is really important for the island’s history and also of his collection of vintage tractors and machinery. He thoroughly enjoyed giving the group a tour and he and his partner featured in a number of photographs. Further photographs were taken of older Orcadians such as Alistair Scott working on his wood carvings. Again these photographs are really important for Eday’s cultural heritage.

Providing an opportunity for the community to partake in photography and learn more skills in this area was really beneficial and it transpired into discussions about how more islanders could be involved in the Camera Club remotely. It also spurred more interested from the Camera Club in terms of coming out more frequently to Eday and potentially bringing more groups out for photography. We managed to show them a number of places that they didn’t even know of and they thoroughly enjoyed the trip.

The long term benefits are for Eday and being able to capture some places and people in a moment of time for prosperity is really important.