Interweaving and Intervening

Abstract This article is informed by and contributes to the recent groundswell of research on the affordances and limitations, opportunities and challenges of walking. Crucially, it brings these concerns into dialogue with critical heritage studies, establishing a discursive field at the intersection of scholarship on walking, memory, heritage, and public history. It does so by discussing an ongoing practice-led research project that centers on creating, leading, and evaluating historical walking tours and self-guided trails of a large public park in Glasgow, Scotland, using this site as a way to interrogate the city’s connections to empire. The author argues that walking can be a tool for interweaving under-represented histories—here, histories of slavery, colonialism and imperialism—into dominant heritage discourses, and through such an intervention lay bare the dissonance between presence and absence that underpins constructions and expressions of heritage. This leads to the theorization of walking as a critical heritage practice—a means of actively scrutinizing the politics of remembrance and forgetting. Therefore, this article presents a case study that can inform similar efforts to increase public knowledge of so-called hidden and forgotten histories and, by extension, promote critical engagement with sites of civic memory and critical understanding of heritage as a social and cultural process that harnesses the past in order to construct a sense of place, belonging, and identity in the present.