Story projects
Loch Leven Stories partner projects & case studies
P4 at Kinross Primary spent 2022 term 4 exploring and re-connecting with their community through creative map-making and storytelling, as Loch Leven Stories partnered with the school's Living Communities Fund grant-aided community re-connection project.
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View each class's fantastic project summary here: (opens in a new window)
P4a: https://sway.office.com/kQ0CEnSGjicUD67p?ref=Link
P4b: https://sway.office.com/0NAVKphpvAlHhx7P?ref=Link
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What are maps?
The children explored maps of their area made indifferent times, by different people and for different reasons. Esther also shared some examples of artists using maps to tell stories about themselves and their experiences and as a way of sharing knowledge and ideas.
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Personal community maps
The children spent some time thinking about places in their area that are important to them and planned personal maps that showed those important places and how they connect to each other.
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Community storytelling
Children worked with storyteller Dougie Mackay who shared traditional oral stories that conveyed a sense of place and landscape. Esther supported them to create illustrations and story maps based on the tales they'd heard. The children also created 'wishes', one each for themselves and one for their community, inspired by the story 'The Clever Wish'. Children had the chance to experiment with story-making based on their personal community maps, and performed oral stories to nursery pupils.
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Collaborative class maps
Each class then worked together to create a map of their community, combining personal important places, their understanding of the area's geography and some of their hopes and dreams for the community. The maps were displayed at Loch Leven Community Library in November 2022.
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Kinross Primary Community Project
Kinross-shire Light Up the Night
A Kinross-shire community window-decorating project, 2020-21
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Households and businesses across the community decorated and lit up windows to create a trail of light through the area. In 2021 a 'People and Place' theme helped participants think abut the stories that connect us to here, the places that mean something to us and what it is we want to tell each other about ourselves.
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Read a summary of the project here (PDF opens in a new window)
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Light Up the Night Kinross-shire 2022 took place over the weekend of 26-27 November, to tie in with the Winter Festival Festive Street Market. Find out more by visiting the Light Up the Night Kinross-shire Facebook page or searching for @LightUpKinrossshire
For Women Who... Tell Stories
Loch Leven Stories worked with anti poverty charity Broke Not Broken's women's group to explore storytelling based on our own personal experiences of living in the Kinross area.
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Discovering and sharing our own 'ordinary' stories can be a powerful way of making connections with others. Having the stories we choose to tell, valued and heard, can be an empowering experience.
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Two free storytelling workshops in July 2022, facilitated by Jo Dowd of Hillfoots Tales, helped us begin to share the tales that make us who we are. We began by telling stories about strong or intriguing people in our family histories. The second session looked at place. We explored an alphabet of place, thinking about the unique and special features of our area. We then used objects as prompts to tell personal stories based on memories and experiences of life in and around this area.
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The group worked with film makers Megan and Eilidh of Megan Rooney Media to create a short film called RECLAIM, themed around reclaiming places, spaces and voices locally through experiences shared and markers left.
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Reminiscence Group High Street project
Loch Leven Stories is working with members of the Kinross-shire Reminiscence Group, to share memories and stories of Kinross High Street.
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As a busy market town Kinross's High Street was a bustling, noisy, busy thoroughfare, with almost every business imaginable to be found there - from a printer to drapers, corn merchants and multiple chemists and shoe shops. We are explored ways to share the treasure-trove of tales and memories the group hold about shops and shopping, with the wider community; especially those who may have moved to the area more recently.
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Throughout November 2022 a High Street Story Trail poster trail revealed memories, stories and history about the buildings themeselves and the shops and people connected to them, giving today's High Street shoppers a glimpse into the past. The information on each poster was created from a combination of group memories and personal stories, written reminiscences, Kinross (Marshall) Museum archive material, official records and historic postcards from the collection of David Millar. Thanks to Dr Catherine Kent for research and observations on historic buildings.
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Kinross High Street c.1960
Image Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, ID JV-D-5106
Download a pdf document of all 8 Trail posters here. Scan the QR codes to bring the posters to life with Reminiscence Group members talking about shops and shopping.
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Download or print a copy of the Trail map and quiz here.
The Kinross-shire Reminiscence Group meets monthly at the Kinross Day Centre and is for local people and those who have moved to the area more recently who are interested in discussing local and social history in Kinross-shire and other areas. If you'd like to find out more, please contact the Group Secretary on 01577 531152.
Kettle Hole Kinross
Through Autumn 2022, local musicians and songwriters Sandy McInnes and Christine Kyle of The Leveneers, with musician Nigel Ewen, collected songs of Kinross-shire.
By recording in-the-field performances and capturing the tales behind them, the pilot project aimed to bring together a diverse body of musical material that tells stories of the 'kettle hole' of Loch Leven and the people who live around it. While rooted in the folk tradition, the project aimed to collect music and song from many different performers to create a contemporary songscape of here and now.
Kettle Hole Kinross is now exploring ways of widening the pilot and gathering more music, song and story material that reflects the culture and diversity of those living around the Loch.
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To find out more contact KettleHoleKinross@gmail.com.