I’d first heard of Innerpeffray Library when my colleague Frances was looking for notable Scottish libraries to advertise to iConference attendees. Then this summer, friends who live in Stirlingshire suggested a visit. (I can’t drive and my cycling is currently limited, so I don’t think I could have got there unaided.) So yesterday, Ian and Jane picked up Elly and me at Stirling station and took us out for a delightful trip.

We parked outside the school building, and ambled along the trail. This is the part that felt most photogenic – once in the library I was too entranced by the books to take many photos.

Along the trail

The chapel

It was slightly surprising to me that we could go into the chapel, which is dedicated to St Mary. The description on Innerpeffray’s website mentions that the 16th-century owner ‘paid for priests to pray for the welfare of [his] family’. This puzzles me: why wouldn’t he pray for his family himself, rather than delegating this task? Or was it that priests were supposed to have more power to influence the deity than lay people? In any case, a later owner started to lend his books, initially stored in an upstairs room in the chapel.

Entering the library

We finally went into the library itself. As I understand it, this was built along with the school when the library collection outgrew the attic and the contents were needed by students. We were greeted by Lara Haggerty, the library manager and Keeper of Books. (The library is entrusted to a small charity, The Innerpeffray Mortification, and (I think) there has been a Keeper of Books reporting to the Mortification since it was was created in 1696.) Lara gave us a brief introduction to the library’s history and purpose, then entrusted us to her colleague Jean Ann who was in the main library room upstairs.

Jean Ann asked us what we were interested in reading – the library welcomes visitors reading the books so long as they treat them gently. The lapsed chemist in me was lent a book on assaying, apparently from the era when chemistry was starting to free itself from alchemy. I struggled to understand the text, partly because I didn’t have some of the vocabulary. (For example, I didn’t know that a centner was a measure of weight.) Also, the author wrote about preparation of touch-needles for assaying, but I couldn’t find a description of how to use them Perhaps the author assumed such knowledge, perhaps I didn’t find the relevant part of the book. Finally, for me, assaying would involve finding the weight mass of a sample of the object being tested, the mass of gold in in it, and then calculating the proportion of gold. I didn’t find a trace of such calculations in the book. This isn’t a criticism of course – it’s interesting how things were done in the era of Leeuwenhoek, compared to an era where balances accurate to 0·01 gram were routinely available to scruffy school-gits like I was.

Jean Ann then passed me a book of physics lectures from maybe a century later. I recall the fist lecture had a clear description of inertia, although it didn’t use that term. I was also fascinated by a couple of pages on display elsewhere.

After whiling away a couple of hours wrapping our heads around centuries-old writing, we went downstairs to the shop to chat with Lara, and buy books. I was of course attracted by Librorum Ridiculorum (Of Ridiculous Books) – its cover shows Scouts in Bondage among other questionable titles.

The final part of our visit was chatting over drinks in the school building. We were impressed by the honesty-based sales, range of hot drinks, and the library’s commitment to eco-soundness.

So huge thanks to Lara, Jean Ann and their colleagues for a thoroughly enjoyable visit, and to Jane and Ian for chat and a lovely dinner. We will be back!