Oral History
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Voicing Ben Lawers: The Oral History and Tradition of North Lochtayside
This short project began in April 2005, and will be completed at the end of September, and seeks to collect, archive and analyse interview material relating to the oral history and tradition of the area. This has involved recording interviews with around two dozen local residents representing a range of ages, backgrounds and experiences covering topics relating to the themes of material culture, social organisation, custom and belief. In addition to these community interviews, several sessions have been held within Kenmore and Killin primary schools (with Glenlyon Primary scheduled for the new term) in which the pupils have interviewed local volunteers on a similar range of themes. These have proved to be very successful, for as well as generating over a dozen hours of valuable audio and video material, they may well provide a methodological model which can be adapted for use by other schools. The main themes to emerge from the project to date are summarised below.Changes in material culture
Several informants have talked in detail about the changes they have witnessed in agricultural production tasks including hay– and silage–making, ploughing, use of the threshing mill and the processes of gathering, dipping and clipping sheep. We have gathered oral accounts of the use of horses and manpower in earlier times, the introduction of machinery in the post–Second World War era and its impact on neighbour interactions and informal support networks. The subject of transport has also elicited a wealth of detail on the importance of the railway to the community and the impact its closure in the mid–1960s had on local employment, transportation to school and the marketing of cattle and sheep to outlying auctions and buyers.
Gary West conducting and interview with local informant
Changes in social organisation
| Many informants commented on changes in the organisation and cultivation of food resources at an individual and community–wide level over the past 50 years. Many have lamented the decline of milk cows from the Ben Lawers area since the First World War, as well as the decline of the single–family use of gardens for the growing of crops such as potatoes and turnips. Informants have also discussed their views and observations of the ways in which wider market forces have dictated changes to the practice of animal husbandry and the consequent impact on neighbour interactions. This includes the professional contracting of tasks once seen as reciprocal labour between neighbours, the de–professionalisation of the local shepherding tradition and the changing boundaries and understandings relating to common sheep pastorage among Ben Lawers’s hill farms. |
Interview being conducted with primary school children |
Custom and belief
Themes emerging here include harvest customs and celebrations, community ploughing matches, life cycle customs and calendar observances. A number of interviews covered surviving folktales concerning shepherding, death and the prediction of weather, as well as various prophecies associated with the Lady of Lawers, a local ’seer’. Family memories of accounts of fairy mounds and local water bulls were also discussed. A great deal of oral history on travelling people in the Ben Lawers area has also been collected, including first–hand observations on characteristic bow–shaped shelters used in travellers’ encampments; the behaviour of ’hawkers’ and ’gauin–aboot buddies’; and their ingenuity for music–making with local natural materials such as elm and birch.Once transcription of the recordings has been completed we hope to produce a book and accompanying CD on the theme of ’Voicing Ben Lawers’.
| Gary West, J Dickson & S Mackay School of Scottish Studies [External Link] University of Edinburgh [External Link] |
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