Tag Archives: History
Our semi-derelict cottage is still recognisable as an 1800s croft house.

Faithful to its past

Two hundred years ago, the Hill of Foudland and its Skirts a couple of miles to our north were dotted with slate workings whose workers lived in croft houses of a similar vintage to ours. Our main house has moved far beyond its humble beginnings, but the semi-derelict cottage at the end of our steading [...]

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And on the third day…

I’ve been reading a small book on the history of slate crofting in the Glens of Foudland, two miles up the road from us. Ann Dean’s Foudland: Slate Quarries and Crofters in Aberdeenshire details the lives of the quarriers come crofters, including their eating habits. It says one of their staple meals was a broth/brose of [...]

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A section of Roy's Military Survey of Scotland, 1747-1755, showing Dunnideer

Croft dates to at least 1747

When we first considered buying Stonehead Croft ,we asked the then owners how old the croft and its buildings were. ”How old is the croft? Oh, 1890s,” was their reply. A few years later, our solicitor turned up old deeds that revealed the croft was first established as a separate entity in 1871 when Carlos Pedro Gordon [...]

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Blogging for 15 years!

As I was looking through my archives earlier I spotted the date on some of my earliest HTML files—August 1994. They date back to when I came up with the Bowerbird Cafe, a web journal that rambled through food, poetry and anything else that caught my interest. This was in the days before the term [...]

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Finds from the tattie field

One of the delights of preparing fields for cultivation is the opportunity to turn up “treasure” for the boys’ collection. While there’s nothing particularly significant in this haul, it all came out of the potato field after M’s tractor had been through it. Starting from the left, we have:

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