The experience aimed to reconnect students with historical land practices—specifically the shieling systems and seasonal movement of livestock (transhumance)—through the senses. It invited people to experience what it might have been like to live, move, and make food in these traditional ways.

This Butter experience was about using food as a lens to explore how people once lived in rhythm with the land. It used the process of butter-making not just as a culinary act, but as an entry point into a wider cultural system—one shaped by migration, seasonality, and intimate knowledge of the landscape. Through carefully curated smells, tastes, sounds, and textures, participants were encouraged to think with their bodies, not just their minds, and to connect personally with unfamiliar histories.

Rather than simply learning about transhumance or shieling life, the workshop offered a chance to feel it—through smoke-scented air, herb-rich butter, the warmth of bannocks, and the stories embedded in the land. It created space for curiosity and memory, and for reimagining how traditional food cultures might inform more grounded, seasonal, and place-based futures.