Your History 2

Here's a big phrase "intangible cultural heritage".
Big in the sense of "wordy", big also in the sense of "really quite important". So what is it?

ICH is tradition, superstition, stories, songs, rituals, festivals...the parts of history and heritage that a community preserves by passing it along to itself. The stuff you cant touch, but that you can hear and experience...in short..all the really cool stuff. So, in our neck of the woods in Inverclyde, ICH would be things like the New Years Day Dip, Comet Festival, Going Galoshans, stories about The Catman and so on - living traditions.

However...tradition needs more of a helping hand than it used to, as communities shift and change and people communicate differently, we pass less and less along in the way we used to...but no one would want us to lose decades and centuries of traditions forever.

Edinburgh Napier University are compiling ICH on a wiki. That sentence may sound a bit weird to you, but have a look at the Intangible Cultural Heritage Project in Scotland to see how you can help keep your communities traditions alive.

Follow them on Facebook here.

And enjoy some classic New Year Intangible Cultural Heritage with this clip of Up Helly Aa...