Fascinating snapshots of Scotland taken by a Fife photographic pioneer feature in a new book.
The images taken by Dunfermline’s “gentleman photographer”, linen manufacturer and merchant Erskine Beveridge, between 1880 and 1919 are featured in a new paperback, Wanderings With a Camera in Scotland, published by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS).
Gallery: Erskine Beveridge’s ‘Wanderings With A Camera in Scotland’
Photographic advances gave Beveridge the freedom to travel in both Scotland and America without the burden of transporting a darkroom and chemicals.
Ready-made glass plates could be easily purchased and processed later.
Travelling across Scotland, he took hundreds of images that captured Scotland’s rural heritage, offering revealing glimpses of the differing lifestyles.
Around 700 glass plates were discovered in the 1960s by a former employee at the St Leonards linen works in Dunfermline just before it was demolished.
Recognised as the work of the wealthy merchant, these glass plates were saved and taken to RCAHMS for safekeeping.
The images stirred the imagination of author and RCAHMS’s head of collections Lesley Ferguson, who visited places around Scotland to try to get a better understanding of the man and his photography.
She took her own contemporary shots of sites he featured and has also transcribed a number of his journals, which she discovered in a Dunfermline library and which describe, day by day, some of his travels round Tiree and Coll and a sailing holiday round the islands.
“Beveridge had a fascination with the past and was keen to share his knowledge with others,” she said.
“The photographs show Scotland on the brink of major social and economic change.
“From black houses in the Western Isles and Highland crofts in the shadow of Ben Nevis, to remote castles in Argyll and busy harbour views in Fife, they are a remarkable record of a bygone era.”