Today we’ve had the pleasure of launching IrvineScotland.info, a site we’ve been working on for the past month or so along with the great people at Clyde Imagineering.
The site is fairly obviously about the town of Irvine in Scotland, and sets out to make available in one place the history and community of the town. Having sections on the history of Irvine, the town as it now is, a section covering the redevelopment that occurred in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the people both modern and historic who are connected with the town. We’ll cover all these and more over the coming few days.
One of the aims of the site is to bring the history of the town online, and to share it’s culture and historical significance with the world.
The first project we’ve launched along with the site is to document, photograph and bring online the Old Parish Churchyard in the town. The Old Parish Churchyard dates back many centuries and has headstones for friends of the poet Robert Burns, the step family of Edgar Allan Poe, one of those credited as inventing the screw propellor and even a resurrectionist (grave-robber).
However the site suffers from the harsh scottish weather and from vandalism, leading to many headstones collapsing, some of them down a 20 foot drop into a public footpath. Despite amazing efforts to preserve the churchyard and the headstones, the situation is getting worse.
Although we’ve already recorded the main part of the churchyard and put it online, we’d like to complete this project to transcribe the headstones we’ve already captured and make them searchable. We’d like to be able to photograph and do the same for the second churchyard at the read of the Old Parish Church. And we’d like to put the headstones in historical context, to connect them to the histories of the people beyond just the inscriptions.
To help fund this project, we’ve started an Indiegogo campaign, and would be grateful if people could have a look and share it with anyone who might have an interest in Irvine or saving this historical site and sharing it with the world.
The Indiegogo campaign is at
So please check out IrvineScotland.info, check out the campaign, and consider helping out.
Now here’s some footage of the site and me talking about it.
