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Geographers have long demonstrated an interest in charting the geographical and bodily dynamics of work and employment. However, within this scholarship very little attention has been paid to historical geographies of craftwork. This paper seeks to address this deficit while also engaging with the evident and evidentiary methodological issues associated with the historical study of practices worked through the body. To do so, the paper experiments in the recuperation of the working spaces and working practice of three Scottish taxidermists. The creative challenge of this type of recovery work is to ascertain what can conceivably be said from those things that remain to mark the working of bodies and bodies at work at these sites. Yet from curated remainders we glean vital insights into the practices and class politics of 19th-century natural history enquiry, the silenced agencies of a workshop devastated by the First World War and the more-than-human histories of elite blood sports and land ownership in the Scottish Highlands. And this is to emphasise that these materials, even in their textual representation in this paper, count: that they can create knowledge and invite affective experience of the past. Overall the paper seeks to emphasise the serious commitment to conceptual and methodological innovation required when geographers engage in researching bodies (both human and animal) 'at work' in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers are demonstrating increasing interest in the power and significance of craft and artisanal practices. However, within this scholarship very little attention has been paid to theorising or tracing the conveyance of craft practices over time and place. This paper seeks to address this deficit by demonstrating how craft conveyance has been achieved through historical geographies of apprenticeship. To do so the paper firstly reviews how the figure of the apprentice and the forms and geographies apprenticeship have been recently reconfigured. Secondly, and by drawing on the work of anthropologists and geographers, it argues that the model of learning between master and apprentice is more dynamic, relational and context-dependant than that espoused in Richard Sennett's seminal text on craftsmanship. Moreover, while geographers have begun to think through how craft practices become sedimented in place over successive generations, the main contribution of this paper is to think and work through how craft practices travel from place to place over successive generations. Specifically this is to examine how the corporeal and material practices of a workshop gain not just temporal duration but also spatial extension. This will be achieved empirically by retracing how the ‘Wardian-style’ of taxidermy practice travelled from London to Glasgow through the movements of Wardian apprentice Charles Kirk. Following non-representational theorisations of practice, and what I shall term the ‘journeyings’ of Kirk, the paper demonstrates that rather than passively absorbing the ‘secrets’ of a workshop the apprentice actively co- and re-produces its corporeal and material practices and carries them forward where they are actively reworked into and by new communities and ecologies of practice. The paper concludes by emphasising the relevance and resonance of apprenticeship for rethinking and retracing craft conveyance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]