Iona, although a small island off the larger island of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland, has one of the oldest, richest, and most complex place-name records in Britain and Ireland. It also has a complex modern landscape as a result of multiple user-groups interacting with the landscape of the past in different ways. This project interrogates the dynamics of the namescape (the historical and changing landscape of names) of Iona and its environs, shedding light on the past, and proposing new ways of curating place-names as part of heritage management. The 'Life of Saint Columba' written around AD 700 by Adomnán, the ninth abbot of the monastery of Iona, gives our earliest detailed impressions of this landscape, including some of our earliest recorded Gaelic place-names in Britain or Ireland. In the modern period the island became a destination for tourists and antiquarians, who interacted simultaneously with older texts and traditions and with the landscape and monuments they found, creating, curating and reinvigorating names. In the past century a traditional Gaelic crofting community has evolved into a more mixed economy, with a greater range of year-round occupations, augmented by seasonal auxiliary staff and faith-tourists. Permanent organisations, e.g., the National Trust for Scotland and Historic Environment Scotland now have differing management responsibilities towards the built and natural environments of the island, joining the international faith group, the Iona Community. This has created a complex dynamic of new names, translated names, and forgotten names, in Gaelic and English, a contested landscape of heritage and naming. These place-names (settlement names, landscape and coastal features, monuments) have never been subjected to formal rigorous analysis, despite the fragility of many of the names used by the Gaelic-speaking community in recent times. That fragility (highlighted by recent deaths) makes it vital that we subject this namescape to a programme of rigorous research, publication, curation and dissemination to the public and to official public bodies, and that we do it now. The team we have assembled for this purpose represents cumulative and long-standing expertise on Iona's history and heritage, on place-names and place-name survey, and on Gaelic and history in the adjacent island of Mull. In assembling this team at this time, the project is of utmost timeliness. The core tasks of the project will be to research in-depth the place-names of Iona, to make that research widely available to the public through an online resource, and to bring them to publication in a volume of the Survey of Scottish Place-Names. Because of its long-standing links to Iona, this will also include the place-names of the nearby small uninhabited island of Staffa, also managed by NTS. The research will involve an in-depth investigation of the earliest records of Iona and its landscape, as well as work with modern recordings of Gaelic place-names, and new fieldwork into contemporary usage among the various communities who inhabit and work on Iona. The research will be set against the context of the neighbouring island of Mull, examining how Iona may share features with or differ from its environs. Our work on the concerns of curating heritage place-names will be explored in an international conference on 'Authority and Authenticity', with subsequent essay collection. We will engage fully with a variety of beneficiaries from the project, producing a number of key ancillary outputs designed for the public and for the aid of heritage management: an interactive website allowing exploration of the names and the landscape; a popular guide to the place-names; standardised lists of names. We will further engage with the public and with heritage management bodies via a variety of events, including workshops, and a conference in 2021, the 1500th anniversary of the traditional date of the birth of Iona's founder, St Columba

Wildlife populations naturally experience a wide range of infections and disease. Understanding how they circulate in the environment, how they are evolving over time and how different hosts are affected is key to understanding both their impact on different animal species and their potential to spill-over into domesticated animals and humans. We are currently experiencing a major outbreak of Avian Influenza that is having a major impact both on wild birds and commercial poultry at a global scale. This is a disease caused by infection by a group of Influenza A type viruses of which water birds are the natural host. These viruses usually circulate in wild waterfowl and shorebirds with relatively little impact. However, the past year has seen a significant change in the impact of one particular subtype of avian influenza called H5N1. Mortality reports in wild birds have been highest in seabirds with over 200,000 dead birds reported over a three month period in Scotland alone. These are novel hosts that up until this point have been relatively unaffected so we currently lack information about how this disease is impacting in these novel host populations, hindering our ability to make informed decisions about any potential mitigation strategies that might be put in place or evaluate their likely success. In this project we have three main objectives. Firstly, we will track the evolution of the virus over time and space across a range of different host species. This will tell us about possible routes of transmission but also help us track how the virus is changing as it evolves and to identify any viral changes that may alter its pathogenicity or its ability to jump between species. Secondly, we will focus on the hosts and explore what proportion of birds are exposed and survive infection. We will do this in populations that have been monitored over many years so their individual life-histories, age, and migration routes are known to help us identify which whether particular parts of the population may be more vulnerable or more important in transmission. Finally we will use the data we are collecting to create a modelling framework that represents the wider population of different species to test how resilient different populations might be to this disease and to use as a tool to evaluate and prioritize potential mitigations that can be put in place to minimise any impact on host populations and limit future disease spread.

Core Research Question: How successful have approaches to immersive technologies at major heritage sites in Scotland been currently, both in terms of outcomes against business plan expectations and in terms of visitor response, and what kinds of future development are supported by the evidence? Research Methods: The proposed Research Methods in this initial pilot phase will lay the groundwork for the exploration of the effectiveness and potential of the core Immersive Technology Research Question. Under the guidance of the PI and research team, the pilot project RA will set up a questionnaire to test visitor response to the immersive dimensions of the Culloden, Robert Burns Museum and Bannockburn sites, as well as at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow (which has secured one of the highest -if not the highest-non-traditional museum audience in the UK) and the National Library of Scotland at Kelvin Hall. In parallel, they will set up observations and a focus group round the proposed collections and policy developments at Newhailes by the National Trust for Scotland. These approaches will follow the methodology used by the PI's CDA to evaluate audience response among the 60 000 visitors to the When Glasgow Flourished exhibition in 2014 and by the PI's Beyond Text RA to evaluate responses to the material Burns January exhibition in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow in 2010 and 2011; and by the CI Economou's RA in three different immersive exhibitions in Rome, Athens, and Ename as part of the Marie Curie CHIRON project between 2005-2008 (Economou & Pujol Tost 2011). The project team will identify audience focus groups from the existing visitor and client contact base of the partner organizations, and will explore their visitor experience while also exposing them to new developments in Immersive Experience technology. Consideration will be given to the development of future 'Smart' response evaluations, such as Fitbit and smartphone visitor response monitoring. Immersive experiences are means of 'composing' memory (that is, creating the conditions in which the memories which are publicly expressed are those which are formulated within a range of socially acceptable contexts. In the motorized era, trails have fulfilled the same function of embedding preferred memory narratives, while immersive experiences-delivered in part or whole through the medium of technology-strive to present a fusion of memory, place and performance to create a close and lasting relationship of visitor memory to the experience purchased by the visit. Immersive technologies have (although research on this is not yet developed and its development is a key component of the proposed partnership) arguably similar effects to electronic mass media in the composure of memory, but effects which are possibly delivered in stronger and more lasting terms. We will also work with Soluis as our digital partner, to create a decision-making model for policy and audience development. Research Context: The research context is that of both the recent rapid growth of the heritage sector, and within that the centrality of cutting edge immersive experiences for tourism, the heritage industry and audience development The development of immersive experiences at 'fantasy' venues such as the London, York, Blackpool and Edinburgh 'Dungeons' from Merlin Entertainments is a connected activity. Some of these visitor experiences are relatively recent, and audience feedback is at an early stage: however, there is some evidence that fully or predominantly CGI immersive experiences such as Bannockburn are less appealing and effective to a comprehensive audience demographic than they are to particular groups. Research Outputs: Website, a policy paper, a risk assessment, a visualization decision making tool and presentations at the AHRC Showcase, and connected events-e.g. presentations at DH conferences and a media/social media strategy.

The central focus of this research is producing reliable, accessible and scholarly reading texts of Robert Burns for both the academic and general reader in the 21st Century, specifically Burns's Poetry and Correspondence. The Poetry has not been freshly edited in complete form since the 1960s, and the present edition will take advantage of around 75 new manuscript and 55 new print material discoveries. The two volumes of 'Poetry' will also include a proportion of 'Song' texts, which have been presented and read, historically, as 'Poetry' texts. Much will be made in the descriptive apparatuses and criticism produced by the 'Poetry' part of the project of 'Burns Song as Poetry'. Similarly, the Correspondence will capitalise upon around 100 new manuscript and 60 new print material discoveries. These three volumes of letters will also be the first time ever that there has been an edition of any kind, let alone a scholarly one, that brings together both sides of Burns's correspondence in its fully extant form. Correspondence to Burns has either never been published previously (about 50 per cent of this material), or it has been badly edited and often bowdlerized in print. As well as attempting to produce as complete and helpful a reading experience as possible through the application of modern textual editing techniques and providing explanatory annotation (of historical matters, the Scots language and other biographical and cultural information), 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Poetry and Correspondence' also allows a 'behind the scenes' or 'hands on' approach for the reader who desires it. This will occur through four substantial online workshops on the editing of Burns, including the large hinterland of forged and facsimile material sometimes mistaken for the real thing. Editorial possibilities and choices are explained for the editing of Burns song, poetry and correspondence (the material for the first among these three drawn from the AHRC-funded 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century', 2011-16, and the resultant Oxford University Press volumes published, or to be published - 2014, 2016 and 2018). These workshops are intended to be accessible to the generally interested 'layperson' as well as providing insight for other scholars and also archivists, curators, librarians and rare book and manuscript dealers, all of whom make up the substantial Robert Burns area of the Cultural Heritage sector. This online material will also be directly related to the 'Introductions on the Text' sections of each of the new OUP volumes. Similarly, and with additional benefits to the Burns Tourist sector, the interactive map of Burns's correspondents and their locations provides an accessible and path-breaking mapping of Burns's social, cultural and intellectual networks during the late eighteenth century. The research for 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Correspondence and Poetry' will also be showcased in public-facing workshops at four different geographical locations where there are holdings of Burns manuscripts: Alloway, Dumfries, Edinburgh and Irvine. Likewise three articles in peer-reviewed journals will also be of specialist editing interest to the academic community.

BACKGROUNDIn Scotland alone there are an estimated 446,000 pre 1919 dwellings (totalling 20% of the building stock) and of these the vast majority of these are stone masonry (McKinney, 2007, Urquhart, 2006). Innumerable low rise domestic buildings, historic bridges, viaducts, infrastructural masonry (i.e. retaining walls etc), castles and palaces exist in the UK and across the world. These are built with traditional lime mortars which are widely believed (Ashurst, 2007, Beckman, 1995, Fawcett, 2001, Kent, 2005, McKibbins, 2006) to be susceptible to soluble binder leaching and consequent deterioration. Understanding the rate and severity of deterioration in these materials is extremely important, and is a matter of informed concern about structural safety (Chiesa, 2006) and risks of falling masonry (Halstead, 2005). 1275 incidents of falling materials and debris from buildings were reported by 25 local authorities, over a 2 year period, and of these 80% involved buildings of 100 or more years old (Soanne, 2008). Masonry accounted for 40% of the reports, with the greatest number of issues relating to external walls.The ability of soluble binder (free lime) to leach from the body of the mortars is related to the dampness of the fabric, with saturated, cold conditions being ideal for its propagation. The future likelihood of these conditions in building fabrics is increased by the consequences of global warming (Cassar & Hawkings, 2007). McKibbins (2006) suggested that saturation of porous masonry materials is a major problem in traditional arch bridges, with increased, lime leaching and creation of secondary porosity leading to washout of fines, increased susceptibility to freeze thaw cycling, frost attack and concentration of stress in localised regions. It is evident that this has implications for the structural integrity of bridges but traditional mass masonry walling is equally vulnerable. Both Kent (2005) and Fawcett (2001) support this view and have shown that binder migration in traditional mass masonry structures may potentially lead to wall core voiding, believing that this may have implications for the stability of the structure with the loss of bond potentially occurring between the inner and outer leaves of masonry, and consequent reduced stability.PROGRAMME & METHODOLOGYThe research will investigate the rate and quantity of soluble binder leaching from traditional lime mortars, assessing the material's physical performance. In addition, the laboratory work will be correlated with samples taken from various projects to cross check the effect of soluble binder leaching upon the macro and micro pore structure and surface characteristics of the mortars. All proposed tests will be undertaken initially on sound samples and then on those that have been subject to accelerated deterioration using electrochemical migration and chemical extraction. An assessment of the basic moisture transfer mechanisms will be undertaken using sorptivity tests based on 'sharp front theory' modelling (Hall & Hoff 2002) which is suitable for fragile (deteriorated) samples. Physical tests will be undertaken to determine the tensile and compressive strength of the mortar samples, and thin section petrographic analysis and Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy will be used to assess the surface characteristics and pore structure of selective, representative materials.The data will be cross correlated with on site samples provided by the industrial partners. The work will lead to the development of predictive models for the assessment of soluble binder leaching in traditional mortars and it affect upon masonry structures.INDUSTRIAL COLLABORATORSThe following will contribute technical expertise and access to construction sites; Historic Scotland; City of Edinburgh Council; National Trust for Scotland; Construction Materials Consultants; Laing Traditional Masonry; Scottish Stone Liaison Group and Jacobs Engineering.