Northeast Scotland Quotes

“With them we may say there died a thing older than themselves, these were the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song...”
― Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song

“Farm Life seems to have settled down in Scottish academic circles to tombstone status: a relic to which authors give a respectful nod before plodding off in other directions. When last I looked, this still was the only book-length study of nineteenth century agricultural change in a lowland region. That still puzzles me.”
― Ian R. Carter, Farm Life in Northeast Scotland, 1840 - 1914: The Poor Man's Country

“To outsiders, and particularly to the condescending Olympians who swarm in Edinburgh's New Town, this cultural self-sufficiency usually appeared to be the merest parochialism - the result of the northeast's isolation from civilisation. Civilisation for such people meant - and means - the New Town, of course. This attitude blights attempts to understand northeast social life; but it could never have squared with the facts. In the nineteenth century, which still casts a long shadow over Scottish social life, the northeast was one of the most literate regions in a highly literate country. Newspapers were read widely and with care. Political questions were conned with particular care, and the conclusions drawn were usually rather radical.”
― Ian R. Carter, Farm Life in Northeast Scotland, 1840 - 1914: The Poor Man's Country

“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

“The maids - by which I mean the long succession of magdalens and half-wits that did the heavy work about the house - lived in one of the back (attic) rooms. Of course it was not considered necessary to give a kitchen wench a decent room - she wasn't accustomed to it and wouldn't have known what to do with it. A creaky bed, a cracked mirror, and a rickety table were all she deserved and all she usually got... a hole into which she could creep at night and which she could emerge at half-past four, eager for another day's work. Now my grandmother was not of that school of thought, but she was not a revolutionary either and, though the maid's room had some amenities such as a wardrobe and a chest of drawers, it was by no means a Paradise in which a lonely girl might be soothed to sweet slumbers. It was long and narrow with a skylight opening on the north. The walls were distempered a cold blue. There the domestics spent their dreary nights diversified with spasms of bucolic love at the week-ends.”
― John R. Allan, Farmer's Boy

“The etiquette of the bothy and stable was equalled in rigidity only by that of the court of Louis IV. Each man had his place and was taught to keep it. For the second horseman to have gone into supper before the first horseman would have created as much indignation as an infringement of precedence at Versailles. The foreman was always the first to wash his face in the bothy at night; it was he who wound the alarm clock and set it for the morning, and so on and so on. The order of seniority was as strictly observed between the second horseman and the third, while the halflin always got the tarry end of the stick... But the foreman had pride of place in everything. He slept at the front end of the first bed - that is, nearest the fire; he sat at the top of the table in the kitchen; he worked the best pair of horses; and he had the right to make the first pass at the kitchen maid.”
― John R. Allan, Farmer's Boy

“As you walk across the lower slopes of the hills you may find a heap of stones that was once a house, and trace among the bracken the rectangle that was once a field. They are melancholy things, witnessing that courage, determination and all the ancient virtues are not enough to bring life out of a stone. A hunger for land drove the people there, and the insatiable hunger of the soil drove them away again. Those ruins are at the stony limit where a human tide spent itself before it began to ebb away.”
― John R. Allan, North-East Lowlands of Scotland