Aberdeenshire Quotes

“A blue April morning, the shimmer of light, a breath, a passing air, and it was no longer a harsh and stubborn country, its hard-won fields beleaguered by moor and whin, its stones heaped together in dyke and cairn, marking the land like lines upon a weathered countenance, whose past must stay upon it to the end; but a dream, willing men's hearts. In the sun the leafless boughs were gleaming. Birches were like tangles of shining hair; or rather, he thought, insubstantial, floating like shredded light above the soil. Below the hills blue floated in the hollows, all but tangible, like a distillation that light had set free from the earth; and on a rowan tree in early leaf, its boughs blotted against the background, the tender leaves, like flakes of green fire, floated too, the wild burning life of spring loosened from earth's control. On every side, earth was transmuted. Scents floated, the subtle life released ftom earth and assailing the pulses. Song floated. This dour and thankless country, this land that grat a' winter and girned a' summer could change before one's eyes to an elfin and enchanted radiance, could look, by some rare miracle of light or moisture, essentialised.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Weatherhouse

“I know of no part of Scotland so much and so visibly improved within thirty years as Aberdeenshire. At the beginning of that time the country between Keith and Stonehaven was little else than a hopeless region of stones and moss. There were pieces of many miles where literally there was nothing but large white stones, of from half a ton to ten tons weight, to be seen. A stranger to the character of the people would have supposed that despair would have held back their hands from even attempting to remove them. However, they began, and year after year have been going on, making dykes and drains, and filling up holes with these materials till at last they have created a country which, when the rain happens to cease and the sun shines, is really very endurable.”
― Henry Thomas Cockburn, Journal of Henry Cockburn

“In nineteenth century Aberdeenshire farm service was not a career in itself, but a stage in a career that began for almost all in family farming, and would end there for a proportion of servants. Even in the middle of the century enough folk rode what Leslie Mitchell later would call the 'strange, antique whirlimagig of the Scottish peasantry' to ensure that the machine kept spinning. William Alexander called his essay on farm service "The Peasantry of North-East Scotland" because in his time English hired farm workers were conventionally - though incorrectly - described as peasants. But the error conceals a deeper truth. Aberdeenshire farm-servants, crofters, and small farmers were three fragments of a single peasant class.”
― Ian R. Carter, Rural life in Victorian Aberdeenshire

“An intelligent and industrious crofter was proud to show our commissioner a cart of his own particular invention, and which, though furnished with what is proverbially regarded as a superfluity in the shape of of a 'third wheel', seemed exceedingly well adapted to its purpose. It was in use at the time for the purpose of driving home turnips from the field, the team consisting of the owner's two cows; and a more tractable or docile team it would have been difficult to imagine, indeed the assurance was given by a neighbour that not only did they obey their owner readily and efficiently in the draught, but that one of them, in particular, would come from the most distant part of the holding whenever he chose to call and wave his hat as a signal that her presence was wanted for business!”
― William Alexander, Rural life in Victorian Aberdeenshire

“Nineteenth-century Aberdeenshire was seething with land hunger and social strife. The interests of the landowners and muckle farmers were at odds with the democratic ideal enshrined in the concept of 'The Poor Man's County', which proclaimed the value of a finely graded rural economy with the emphasis on smaller farms and crofts as the continuing guarantee of economic opportunity and ultimately, therefore, of social justice. But the cottar class was disappearing as landlords evaded Poor Law assessment by demolishing cottages for married workers. Traditional farm touns and hamlets were being destroyed. As leases expired, holdings were thrown together into bigger units yielding high returns on the kind of investment only great capitalists could contemplate. As entry levels into farming climbed, the land was monopolised in fewer and fewer hands.”
― William Donaldson, Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk in the Parish of Pyketillim, with Glimpses of the Parish Politics about AD 1843

“In the agrarian economy of Aberdeenshire, the crofter, or improving smallholder generally, has filled a most useful part in the past. To them it is due that many hundreds of acres of barren moor have been brought under the plough within the last fifty or sixty years; and from his class, trained up in habits of industry, thrift, and self-reliance, there have continued to go forth into various walks of life men and women fitted to act well their part under any circumstances; the main cause of regret without doubt being that in such limited proportion of numbers have these men and women been retained in connection with the soil as settled labourers, cottars, crofters, and farmers, from the smallest tenant upward. But while it will be readily admitted that the existence of crofts in a county like Aberdeen - and indeed any agricultural county - is in the highest degree desirable; and while one may assert, without much fear of contradiction, that a judicious blending of farm and croft is greatly preferable to either a community of crofers apart from farms, or a collection of farms without a mixture of the crofter element, we are not blind to the difficulties that attend the perpetuation of the crofting system, as we have been wont to view it, under the changed conditions that now obtain.”
― William Alexander, Rural life in Victorian Aberdeenshire

“The estate on which my Uncle Sandy had been a tenant was one of those on which the relations of landlord and tenant were spoken of as being on a paternal footing; the idea of its being a commercial relationship was strongly resented and declared to be the suggestion of radicalism of a very red type, only fitted, if not designed, to excite prejudice against the landlord class, whose distinctive benevolence forbad their ever going farther than to take what they wanted, and proclaim the grand old doctrine of 'LIVE and let live.”
― William Alexander, My Uncle the Baillie

“THE PUDDOCK

A puddock sat by the lochan's brim,
An he thought there was never a puddock like him.
he sat on his hurdies, he waggled his legs,
An cockit his heid as he glowered through the seggs.
The biggsy wee cratur was feelin that prood,
He gapit his mou an he croakit oot lood:
'Gin ye'd a like tae see a richt puddock,' quo he,
'Ye'll never, I'll sweer, get a better nor me.
I've femlies an wives an a weel-plenished hame,
Wi drink for my thrapple an meat for my wame.
The lasses aye thocht me a fine strappin chiel,
An I ken I'm a rale bonny singer as weel.
I'm nae gaun tae blaw, but th' truth I maun tell -
I believe I'm the verra McPuddock himsel.'...

A heron was hungry an needin tae sup,
Sae he nabbit th' puddock an gollupt him up;
Syne runkled his feathers: 'A peer thing,' quo he,
'But - puddocks is nae fat they eesed tae be.”
― John M. Caie, The Puddock

“But at the end of February, out of a cold black north a dozen meandering snowflakes fell. They drifted about the air like thrums - blown from the raw edges of the coming storm. Next morning, colour had gone from the world. Shapes, sounds, the energies and acuteness of life, were muffled in the dull white that covered both earth and sky. No sun came through. The weeks dragged on with no lifting of the pallor. The snow melted a little and froze again with smears of dirt marbelling its surfaces. To the northward of the dykes it was lumped in obstinate seams, at the cottage doors trodden and caked, matted with refuse, straws and stones and clots of dung carried in about on clorted boots. The ploughs lay idle, gaunt, like half-sunk among the furrows.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“But oftner the nights were clear, marvellously lit. Darkness was a pale lustrous gloom. Sometimes the north was silver clear, so luminous that through the filigree of leaf and sapling its glow pierced burning, as though the light were a patterned loveliness standing out against the background of the trees. Later the glow dulled and the trees became the pattern against the background of the light. The hushed world took her in. Tranqil, surrendered, she became one with the vast quiet night. A puddock sprawled noiselessly towards her, a bat swooped, tracing gigantic patterns upon the sky, a corncrake scraighed, on and on through the night, monotonous and forgotten as one forgets the monotony of the sea's roar; and when the soft wind was in the south-west, the sound of the river, running among its stony rapids below the ferry, floated up and over her like a tide. She fell asleep to its running and wakened to listen for it; and heard it as one hears the breathing of another.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“This place is dead,' he thought. The world he had come from was alive. Its incessant din, the movement, the vibration that never ceased from end to end of the war-swept territory, were earnest of a human activity so enormous that the mind spun with thinking of it. Over there one felt oneself part of something big. One was making the earth. Here there were men, no doubt, leading their hapless, misdirected, individual lives; but they were a people unaware, out of it. He felt almost angry that Lindsay should be dwelling among them. He knew from her letters that she was in Fetter-Rothnie, and, convalescent, had written her that he would come to Knapperley; but that her young fervour should be shut in this dead world annoyed him. She was too far from life. The reconstruction of the universe would not begin in this dark hole, inhabited by old wives and ploughmen.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Weatherhouse

“Life recommenced. Dogs barked, cocks crew, smoke rose, men shouted, women clattered their milk pails. Soon figures moved upon the empty fields. Somewhere a plough was creaking. Garry turned turned his head towards the noise and searched the brown earth until he saw the team. Seagulls were crying after it, settling in the black furrow, rising again to wheel around the horses. As he watched, the sun reached the field. The wet new-turned furrow was touched to light as though a line of fire had run along it. The flanks of the horses gleamed. They tossed their manes, lifting their arched necks and bowing again to the pull: brown farm horses, white nosed, white-footed, stalwart and unhurrying as the earth they trampled or the man who held the share.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Weatherhouse

“Around him he noted that the woods were flaming. A fine flame was playing over the leafless branches, not gaudy like the fires of autumn, but strong and pure. The trees,not now by accident of life but in themselves, were again etherialised. For a brief space, in spring, before the leaf comes, the life in trees is like a pure and subtle fire, in buds and boughs. Willows are like yellow rods of fire, blood-red burns in sycamore and scales off in floating flakes as the bud unfolds and the sheath is loosened. Beeches and elms, all dull beneath, have webs of golden and purple brown upon their spreading tops. Purple blazes in the birch twigs and smoulders darkly in the blossom of the ash. At no other season are the trees so liitle earthly. Mere vegetable matter they are not. One understands the dryad myth, both the emergence of the vivid delicate creature and her melting again in her tree; for in a week, a day, the foliage thickens, she is a tree again.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Weatherhouse