Stuart Cosgrove: Duty that comes with the territory

ALL of us at some time in our lives have worried about loss - the loss of a parent, a friend or a place that we remember since childhood, somewhere redolent of memory and myth. It could be Victorian swimming baths, the house you were born into or the first cinema you ever visited.

Imagine a scenario in which we lost the most precious things in Scotland - our heritage.

Since I was a teenager, I have developed a full-blown love-affair with Detroit, a city now so damaged by post-industrial decline that many of its most glorious buildings are now ghostly shells surrounded by brownfield sites, and old derelict and unoccupied houses.

In the 1950s, when the car-assembly industry was at its height and superficially the city was thriving, Detroit was hit with a virulent outbreak of Dutch-elm disease caused by wood beetles secreted in imported antique furniture. Within a few decades, the tree-lined avenues of this once great city had rotted to nothing more than tangled thoroughfares.

In 1967, the inner city riots, which killed 43 people, also laid waste to most of the remaining trees, and indirectly pressurised the city's greatest success story, Motown Records to move westwards to Los Angeles.

In less than a lifetime the most precious things about Detroit came under threat of bad luck, neglect and unforeseen coincidences. To this day the city's main station, Michigan Grand Central lies like a haunted wreck; the phenomenal Beaux-Arts architecture broken and decaying.

Scotland has much to learn from the story of Detroit. Among the most precious and life-affirming things surround us daily are simply there and always have been, trees, buildings and mountain ranges estates. But what if they weren't there and like Detroit we only had the impoverishment of our past to talk about.

It has taken my love-affair with Detroit to fully understand and appreciate Scotland and especially the work of the National Trust for Scotland, the charity tasked with preserving and energising Scotland's heritage and thus our soul.

The trust has not always had great publicity. In recent years it has been beset by problems, many of them brought about by the complexity of the task, but few people I speak to have any sense of the scale of its operation.

It is required to care for 130 key properties, including castles, great houses and estates, prehistoric and historic sites. It runs museums, nurtures 200,000 acres of countryside, encompassing 46 Munro mountains, 394 miles of mountain footpaths, seven national nature reserves, 45 sites of special scientific interest, St Kilda - the UK's only dual World Heritage Site, 248 miles of coastline, 16 islands, Scotland's only voluntary marine reserve and the habitats of over more than million breeding seabirds.This is a breath-taking list of obligations, one that obscures a million other challenges and dwarves almost any other public or charitable venture in Scotland, bar government itself.

Unfortunately, we occupy a society that is often imprisoned by cynicism; people who don't care, casual onlookers who think they could do better and worst of all, third-rate commentators who are hard-wired to write about problems but conspicuously absent when it comes to solutions.

We also live in a society which, according to the maxim, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and the power of these two forces, criticism and a devalued outlook on life could seriously damage Scotland's heritage.

Fortunately, set against this withering cynicism are much more powerful forces; the magisterial beauty of Scotland, the great historic narratives we have inherited, and the boundless passion of people who care about the land they live in.

There are many other reasons to be optimistic about Scotland and its heritage. The rise of conservation as both an art and a science means that historic buildings, precious real estate and art objects are now in the caring hands of a generation of practitioners who are more informed and passionate about preservation than at any point in our history.

Volunteerism in Scotland is on the rise across almost every part of our civic society, whether it's guiding visitors, lugging rubble or helping store away precious cargo.

Most of all we have inherited an era where animals and wildlife are now routinely protected and where the callous cruelty that Scots once showed to our wildlife is now on the back-foot and one day cruelty, not the wildlife, will be forced into extinction.

Another rising trend in Scotland is the gathering excellence of curatorial culture, whether it's shaping an exhibition, caring for an artefact or delicately guarding history.

The trust's work currently extends from preserving Pompeo Batoni's magnificent full-length portrait of Colonel William Gordon, at Fyvie Castle in Aberdeenshire, to much more humble objects, such as the battered old tools used by the great stone carver Hew Lorimer, in his sculpture studio at Kellie Castle in Fife.We must never forget that heritage is about preserving the future, not just the past, and it's about finding the magic in the everyday, not just the artefacts of kings and queens.

These positive forces in curation, volunteerism and conservation, which the National Trust must continue to harness, more than outweigh lazy cynicism or the fear of the mountainous challenges ahead.

Ensuring Scotland's heritage is safe for future generations to enjoy is an obligation, not a luxury.

All things in life eventually take me back to Detroit and so, reflecting on where Scotland is now, it may be worth remembering the motto of that beleaguered city - Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus - "We hope for better things, it will arise from the ashes".

In Scotland, we are entering a phase where we can dare to hope for better things, including a more effective and ambitious management of our heritage. But unlike Detroit, we have not faced the ashen darkness of decline and there is no disaster to repair.

We have a nation so deep in heritage our greatest problem now is how to manage the perpetual enjoyment of its riches.

• Stuart Cosgrove is director of Creative Diversity, Channel 4 and presenter of BBC Radio Scotland's Off the Ball.