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Remembering Iain Jackson
Yesterday I received the news that Iain Jackson has passed away. Iain had been in a friendly competition with Atila Ege for the top spot of who visited the most WHS over the past years. He ended up with an amazing number of 915 visited WHS, which is even more remarkable given the strict rules he applied for himself. Iain died suddenly in his home in Edinburgh, leaving behind his wife Freda and son Euan.
Iain had been 'bagging' World Heritage Sites since late 1987, so actually well before this website started. He did so for years in isolation, until he found out that there were people like him focusing on the World Heritage List. In the mean time, Iain had made his own set of ‘rules’ about what is needed to ‘tick off’ a WHS.
That meant for example that a visit was only valid when it was done AFTER a site had been admitted to the List. While 99% of us are looking forward to each year’s WHC meeting to see which bonus WHS they will get this year from trips done in the past, Iain must have dreaded that session. It meant more revisits to regions where he had been in the past, just to pick up the new WHS. Rigid as this approach may seem, when I talked with him about it he convinced me that in a way it was more efficient as well. He travelled from WHS to WHS, not wasting time on TWHS or other sights which may or may not become a full WHS in the future.
Another one of his rules was that for a serial WHS, he needed to have visited 50% of the locations plus 1. You will not encounter the Rock Art of the Mediterranean basin on his visited list. He also refused to cross out Edinburgh and nearby Forth Bridge, although he lived there.
My personal interaction with him was infrequent. We did exchange some e-mails now and then, but Iain was not the kind of person that spends his time behind a keyboard. He would write a review of a seldom visited WHS only after nudging from me or other community members. He did so in a wonderfully understated way – about Colombia’s San Agustín in 1996 for example when a large stash of drugs was discovered in a bus where he was travelling on.
At his profile intro on this website he wrote “After every visit I have written by hand a 2 page report of that visit noting the date, weather conditions, names of any companions, together with a description of the site and my impressions of it.” I was always intrigued by those reports and during a visit to his home in 2015 I had the privilege of browsing through these handwritten papers. This only after me asking to see them – he was too modest to force these upon a visitor. His personality was the most opposite to an alpha male-type competitive traveller that you could think of.
Since we first started doing our yearly WH meet-ups in 2015, Iain has always been present. He was there visiting the sites (although he had been to several of them before), at the drinks and the dinners, chatting to everyone. This way he also touched the hearts of many of the younger WH travellers.
We will pay tribute to Iain on this website this week.
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