STEVE Byrne still remembers the moment he discovered his hometown had its own basket.
In Arbroath, the fisherfolk once carried an “Arbroath kishi”, a distinctive local basket.
“You get these regional basket‑making variants that are often tied to bygone trades and ways of life, but the forms are still out there,” he says.
Still out there is key. Skills, trades and knowledge as much as songs and stories are still out there among Scots and two major shifts are now hoping to reshape how we think of our traditional crafts.
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The first is the UK’s new Living Heritage Inventory, set up after the UK Government ratified UNESCO’s 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2024. For the first time, the UK has begun listing not just buildings and battlefields, but practices such as oral traditions, social practices, performing arts – and, crucially, crafts.
Highland clootie wells, skep making, and kilt tailoring are among the crafts already submitted as expressions of interest for the list.
Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland (TRACS), where Byrne is chief executive, is one of two Community Support Hubs in Scotland, working alongside Museums Galleries Scotland to guide people through the process of getting their traditions recognised.
“We’ve taken a lot of inspiration and knowledge from other countries,” Byrne tells the Sunday National.
“The upside of the UK taking so long to sign up to the convention is that we have about 20 years of other countries’ experiences to look at. We’ve spoken to people in the Netherlands, Singapore, Ireland, Finland and others who’ve implemented the convention, and they’ve shared what has and hasn’t worked.”
The call for submissions is open for four months, with information sessions and drop‑ins aimed at demystifying what might feel like a remote, bureaucratic exercise.
“Ultimately, we’re interpreting a high‑level international treaty around traditional culture and making it meaningful to people in their everyday lives,” Byrne says. “Turned the other way round, what the convention captures is that everyday life: the local songs and dances, fire festivals, and seasonal celebrations that now have the benefit of this UNESCO convention.”
The reason to include crafts in the project is made clear by the latest Red List of Endangered Crafts. Compiled by the charity Heritage Crafts, the 2025 list shows 165 craft skills across the UK now at risk – 72 critically endangered and 93 endangered.
Traditional sporran‑making, for example, is now classed as endangered, with only a handful of makers still producing hand‑crafted pieces in the old way.
“Traditional handmade sporran‑making is endangered in Scotland because of mass markets and mass production elsewhere," Byrne explains. “Things that we think of as intrinsic culture are at risk because the traditional ways of making them have almost slipped by the wayside through lack of attention, and that is exactly what the convention is trying to help us improve.”
That endangerment extends to all practices, such as knitting patterns for fishermen’s guernseys, or the particular way a community ties a creel or dresses a festival horse.
These are the kinds of skills that the Living Heritage Inventory’s “crafts” category is for – whether they are practised by a single tradition bearer or by hundreds of hobbyists.
Recognition, though, is only one side of the equation. The second shift is financial. This month, TRACS relaunched Creative Scotland’s small grants scheme as the Traditional Arts and Culture Fund, with one key change: traditional crafts have been added to the remit for the first time.
Previously known as Tasgadh, the fund used to support music, song, storytelling and dance. Now, £43,000 will provide grants of up to £1200, a 20% increase, to 18 applicants across the country, including crafters.
“Traditional crafts, almost for their own sake and the ways things have been done for many decades, don’t always fit conventional funding criteria, which often emphasise innovation and fusion – not always what traditional crafts are about.
“There are, of course, variants, but there has been a great reception in the traditional crafts community to see crafts now included alongside music, dance and storytelling.”
Previous applicants who received awards of between £250 and £1000 include Sangstream Scots Folk Choir, celebrating the heritage of Midlothian miners in song; puirt à beul workshops for Dundee Gaelic Choir; Cabraich Community Arts' weekly song and story ceilidhs in Stornoway; storytelling development at Glenesk Folk Museum with the Grampian Association of Storytellers, and the creation of new work in Scottish stepdance by Deiseil Airson Dannsa.
When asked why all of this is important, Byrne says that with many households working, and fewer extended family members living close by, finding the hours to teach, learn or organise can be difficult, and these traditions are ultimately being lost as in this day and age, time is our scarcest resource.
In his view, the fund and the inventory are both ways to give communities the confidence to treat their own ways of doing things as worth passing on.
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Byrne goes on to stress that this is not about waving the flag.
“That’s where I’ve landed in my own thinking, having been an academic and a folklorist and researcher, and having had to process these questions alongside my own thoughts about the politics of Scotland,” he reflects. “This is about the importance of local distinctiveness and the things that make us different, in order to recognise the importance of diversity.
“That becomes a tool that allows us to see that we are different in some way and to recognise those differences in others, and through that, though it sounds paradoxical, to find commonality, asking ‘how do you celebrate this thing in your community? Here’s how we celebrate it in ours’. That’s really the thinking: using it as an opportunity for people to highlight difference and celebrate diversity by coming together around it.”
Byrne and his colleagues are preparing round‑table sessions and Monday afternoon “office hours”, inviting anyone with a question – from fisherfolk superstitions to that near‑forgotten knitting pattern – to come and talk.
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