The director of National Museums Scotland has defended its future plans for a major Viking hoard which has been awarded to the museum, and not Dumfries and Galloway, where it was found.
At a meeting of the Culture Committee at Holyrood, Dr Gordon Rintoul maintained that the museums (NMS) was the right place for the historic horde of Viking material to be based in a series of exchanges with Joan McAlpine, SNP member for the South Scotland region.
Ms McAlpine, convener of the committee, asked why the Viking hoard - now the subject of a £1.98m fundraising target by the NMS - could not be permanently displayed in Dumfries and Galloway.
Derek McLennan uncovered the 10th-century hoard, which includes silver bracelets and brooches, a gold ring, an enamelled Christian cross and a bird-shaped gold pin, in a field in 2014.
The body that rules on such property, the Queen’s and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer (QLTR), recently decided the hoard should be allocated to NMS for display, provided it pays the money to the finder.
Dr Rintoul said: "First of all the material is clearly of national and international importance and one of our functions is to collect, and make accessible, material of that nature.
"Second, this particular hoard is going to require considerable expertise and resources to preserve it, a lot of that is very skilled work over many years.
"It also needs to have substantial research work undertaken to reveal the full significance.
"All of that is going to require resources, expertise, and facilities and in our view we are best place to provide that."
He added: "Since last summer we have been consistently been in dialogue with Dumfries and Galloway council and have consistently said to them, our proposal is that we acquire it, safeguard it, raise the money, undertake all the conservation work, the research work, and share the result with Dumfries and Galloway Council, and we have proposed to send a representative proportion of the horde, for the long term, to the new Kirkcudbright Art Gallery.
"Our plans are not that we acquire it and keep it all in Edinburgh."
Ms McAlpine asked for more detail on that proportion, but Dr Rintoul said it was "impossible" to say at this stage.
He added: "Much of it needs conservation work, much of it is fragile so it is not known how much of it can travel, or how it can be displayed or for how long.
"For example one of the key examples is a very rare pot, rather uniquely its wrapped in textiles...can that be displayed at all? It is an unknown quantity. Until we raise the money we cannot make the assessment to make a decision, what, where and how long."
Dr Rintoul said that Dumfries and Galloway did not have the expertise to look after the hoard.
He said: "No one else has the expertise.
"Dumfries and Galloway's museum service in the last decade has been reduced in size significantly, they have no conservation laboratory, no conservators, and they have no curators with expertise in Viking age material. We have by far the largest conservation facility outside the British Museum."
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