ALMOST £900,000 of lottery money has been awarded to a project to commemorate next year’s 500th anniversary of the Battle of Flodden, writes Janice Gillie.
Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum Ltd has been given £887,300 from the Heritage Lottery Fund for its four-year Flodden 500 project to provide an ongoing legacy as well as events in 2013.
In April it was awarded the first £81,700 of the cash, with this first tranche of funding used to work up a full application, with the successful outcome announced this week.
The Battle of Flodden, which was fought on September 9, 1513, was the last occasion when a British monarch was killed on the field of battle.
Lord Joicey, of Ford and Etal Estates, on whose land the battle site is mostly located, says the battle’s significance in the story of the two nations is too often overlooked.
“It is wonderful that the Heritage Lottery Fund has agreed to support the application by the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum to ensure that Flodden not only reaches a wide audience among schoolchildren, amateur researchers and all those who want to increase their skills in archaeology and palaeography, but also to build up the geographical and cultural connections through enlarging the ecomuseum itself,” he said.
The cross-border group, set up to mark the anniversary, initially established a new type of museum, an ecomuseum, connecting different sites or projects all associated to the central theme of the battle.
Eleven sites with links to the battlefield, including the Fletcher monument in Selkirk, were included as part of the project.