Michie / Fenton / Beech Glenesk

The History and Culture of a Scottish Glen
70th Anniversary Auflage
ISBN: 978-1-78885-806-9
Verlag: John Donald
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Glenesk is one of the most beautiful of the Angus glens. Though surrounded by high peaks in its upper reaches and seemingly remote, it is no isolated backwater. A network of hill-paths through the Mounth links Glenesk to Deeside and neighouring Angus glens, while its lower end opens out to the low country of the east. This is one reason why the Glen is so rich in the relics of life and work of the people who have lived there and who have passed through it from early times onwards. This is the story of an upland, rural community, told from the perspectives of the people themselves and covers almost every aspect of glen life. From the distant past to modern day, the book looks at people's changing relationships with the landscape, the buildings they lived, worked and worshipped in and the tools they used. Official documents record the effects of the famine and wars of the 17th-century, and the deprivations suffered either at the hands of marauding Highland caterans or the renegade offspring of their landlords. The text is complemented by many origianl, period photographs which portray the everyday life of the Glen.

Margaret Fairweather Michie was the local born teacher and historian who founded the Glenesk Folk Museum. Her love of the Glen, its people and history continues to inspire.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Michie, Margaret Fairweather

Fenton, Alexander

Beech, John

Leseproben

MARGARET FAIRWEATHER MICHIE 1905–85: A MEMOIR*

RONALD G. CANT

Greta Michie – to use the family name by which she was generally known throughout her life – was born at Cairncross in Glenesk on 29 November 1905. Her father, George Simpson Michie, had succeeded his father Duncan Michie in the tenancy of this grouping of two hill farms (Upper and Mid Cairncross near Tarfside) which formed part of the Dalhousie estates in the Glen. It was indeed as a gamekeeper to the Dalhousies that this Duncan Michie – after whom Greta’s own brother was named – had come to Glenesk from Corgarff on Donside in 1839, serving later as ground officer and acquiring a farm tenancy. This association with the Dalhousie lairds, continuing into Greta’s own lifetime, was characterised by a mutual respect and understanding on the basis of which her greatest achievement, the Glenesk Folk Museum, would be established in 1955.

George Michie’s wife was Alexina Whyte Fairweather, daughter of a prosperous and much respected shoemaker at Carmyllie in Angus. Her brothers included three distinguished ministers of the Free and United Free Church and she brought to her home in Glenesk an appreciation of literature, art, and music, the last shared in part with her husband even if his tastes inclined to the vernacular and hers to the classical. Family life at Cairncross was active, stable, and affectionate. Both Greta and Duncan (two years her junior but her constant and cherished companion) began their schooling at Tarfside and came together again for part of their later education at Montrose. When he left to join his father in the work of the farm Greta was taken into the household of a cousin of her father, herself the mother of two girls also attending the Academy. By this kindly arrangement not only was Greta spared the loneliness she had known at Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh but introduced to whole new aspects of traditional country life through the lively reminiscences of ‘Aunt Barbara’ of her own girlhood in Glen Lethnot.

In 1924 Greta entered St Andrews University to begin the four-year course of study for the MA Honours degree in Modern History and English. She was happy in the companionship of her fellow-students in what was then a quite small community of three to four hundred, many becoming lifelong friends. She was notably successful in her class work but was prevented by illness from doing herself justice in the final examinations, and after teacher training in Dundee took up an appointment in a primary school at Brechin in 1929.

If her professional career thus assumed a form somewhat different from what she herself may have envisaged, her imaginative enterprise enabled her to achieve results uniquely influential in their scope and character. With her young pupils she established an immediate rapport, persuading them that learning could be a joyous as well as an endlessly interesting affair. Furthermore, as Brechin was less than twenty miles from Cairncross she was able to spend a good deal of time at home and to enlarge her already well-developed interest in the history of the Glen community. This continued after she moved from Brechin to Montfieth where she remained (teaching both History and English to junior secondary standard) from 1935 to 1947 and being accepted in 1946 as a research student in her old university, working on the topic of ‘The Depopulation of the Glens of Angus’.

In 1947 Greta came back to Glenesk to take charge of the now single-teacher school at Tarfside. If this involved some loss of professional status and emoluments, it had the compensation of reduced commitments for someone of rather uneven health and the attraction of becoming for the next fourteen years more deeply involved than ever before in the life of the glen folk. These years were of crucial importance to rural communities of this kind, characterised as they were by changes in farming methods that involved a yet more drastic reduction of population. More fundamentally, however, they marked the final disappearance of the old self-sufficient country life that had existed since men first settled in the glens. On previous homecomings Greta had noted the traces of early dwellings, cultivation, and tracks on the hillsides and pondered on the factors that had produced such change. She had also begun to collect old artefacts and, in her research, documentary evidence on all aspects of glen life in earlier days. Now, while continuing and extending these activities, she began to record, and wherever possible to preserve, every evidence of the past life of the community.

From these endeavours emerged the Glenesk Folk Museum of 1955. Its creation came at a relatively late stage in the development of ‘folk studies’ and Greta was well aware of the debt which it owed to the pioneer work of Artur Hazelius in Scandinavia and Isabel Grant in Scotland. Nevertheless her conception of its character and function was very much her own. On a visit to Norway some twenty years before she had been greatly impressed by the way in which certain smaller ventures of the kind were related to the everyday life of the communities in which they were set, integrating the present with the past and providing a historical perspective for the ongoing activities of the whole social group. She was also in her way a pioneer of what would come to be known as ‘total history’, not through any theoretical preconceptions but in the innate width and warmth of her understanding.

Thus the museum grew quite naturally out of the work of a good teacher with her pupils and the community from which they were drawn. It was indeed in recognition of her ‘services to rural education’ that she would receive the award of MBE in 1956. Outside the school Greta encouraged the continuation or recording of local crafts and customs so that when she came to write to Lady Dalhousie for help in finding accommodation for her growing collection of objects and information illustrating life in the Glen she was in a position to guarantee that this would be no mere assemblage of antiquities but a living portrayal of a community with an unusually interesting past and some prospect of a future in continuity with what had gone before.

The response of Lord and Lady Dalhousie to Greta’s request was all that could have been hoped for. Early in 1955 they called a meeting in Tarfside and with an assurance of active local support arranged to form the Glenesk Trust for the general wellbeing of the community. As a centre for its activities they made over the shooting lodge at The Retreat just below Tarfside. Here accommodation would be provided for the museum collections, also a craft shop and a tearoom, with space for future extension if required. These would be staffed by local people during the summer season and it was hoped that at other times there would be craft classes and a variety of activities to associate the historical collections with the current life of the Glen. For the post of Honorary Curator Greta was the inevitable choice.

In these early days the arrangement of the museum was necessarily simple and in part frankly makeshift. Yet it embodied from the outset the principles that its creator had developed in her own approach to the history of the glen community. Exhibits were rarely shown in isolation but in association with their context, whether by means of a photograph of a vanished building or bygone craft, a tradesman’s bill or the inventory of a displenishing roup, family letters or reminiscences. Many of these were bound into large volumes which visitors were encouraged to study for themselves, a daring innovation this when it was first introduced and difficult to continue in its original form, yet justified by the way in which it involved the reader in past life and customs as no enclosed exhibit could. Enclosed displays there undoubtedly were for objects of special value, and the curator did not hesitate to include among them items of external provenance such as fine china and furnishings where these had formed part of family life in the Glen.

In her work at the school and the museum Greta was always alert to make use of any opportunity that might come to enlarge their ambience – as on the occasion when a quite casual visit by Helen Cruickshank (known to Greta since her Montrose days but not yet a close friend) ended in her writing a set of character sketches to be acted by the children. She also agreed, with other authors, to the inclusion of several of her poems in the remarkable produced by Greta for the Glenesk Trust in 1958 and in an extended form in 1961. As the unusual merit of the museum became more widely known it attracted visits by individual scholars in its field together with a wide variety of cultural organisations. At times indeed it formed the centrepiece of special conferences and study-courses on the locality. These contacts encouraged Greta to publish articles, often in partnership, on aspects of life in Glenesk, together with a general survey of the parish of Lochlee for the Angus volume of . She also gave radio talks though all her friends wished that she could have found the time and energy to do even more.

In 1961 Greta gave up Tarfside school and moved into a flat at The Retreat. From here she travelled to Edzell where she taught History and English at the Junior Secondary School. Although successful and happy in her work here and at the museum, she was greatly shocked and saddened by the sudden death of her brother Duncan in October 1963. Two years later she retired from teaching to concentrate on what would be the concluding phase of her curatorship, guiding the...