Image: Millie Rapson and Adeline MacPherson singing at the Gaelic MOD, mid-1950s. The Rapson family are local to Helmsdale – famously associated with a Brora bus company – and Millie and her relatives have won many prizes for their Gaelic singing. Image courtesy of Timespan, Helmsdale.
The east Sutherland coastal village of Helmsdale has, in Timespan, a rather wonderful heritage museum that opens its resources as much to local residents as to the inevitable NC500 visitor. Part of the vision is a mobile service that aims to feed stories, songs and poetry back into the core community, particularly to older residents, sustaining cultural memories rather than simply ‘harvesting’.
As the Timespan website proclaims: “We believe that cultural institutions are a political and public space which belongs to society, and as such, have a responsibility to shape a brighter new world based on principles of equality, emancipation and inclusion.”
The ’Songs and Poems Old & New’ project, with a free photo-illustrated song book and sing-along CD, is a good example of this curation of people as an integral part of local heritage, a collaborative project demonstrating best-practice in heritage-making at every step.
“Inspired by community life in Helmsdale, Kildonan & Loth” (as it says on the cover), the book was compiled and edited by Jackie Aitken, Timespan’s Digital and Heritage Curator, working with the ‘Made in Helmsdale’ community choir directed by local musician Ruth Whittaker, and with new writing from the Helmsdale Writing Group led by Cait O’Neill McCulloch. The resource is hand-delivered to older people with cards and letters from local Primary School pupils.
Every aspect of this project uses words and music to enhance wellbeing in the community. Ruth and others have put a lot of thought into finding and arranging music that can be sung by the choir; the CD’s singers are clearly having a grand time working through the results. Older material has been found and researched from the Timespan archives, commemorating local histories and characters and allowing a lively insight into their past lives. New writing was created in 2023 by the Helmsdale Writing Group; the whole is presented as a continuation of the tradition of ‘bards and skalds’ (p.38).
Some songs, such as the first one in the collection on the Kildonan Gold Rush of the 1860s, are sung to the originally envisaged music as far as this can be traced (in this case, Sandy Grant’s 1869 poem “I’m Off to Kildonan” was sung on Moray Firth Radio by John Mackay in 1991, as gleaned from a Highland Am Baile website recording).
In other cases where the original tune is unknown, Ruth Whittaker and others have set poems to melodies with singable meters and styles; some traditional, others new.
Topics remember herring boats, the clearances, homesickness experienced by exiles, school experiences, the sound of local placenames, and a local tune to a metrical translation of psalm 71.
Personal favourites of Soundyngs include ‘The Cheese Valley Song’ by Margot Macgregor, written in the 1950s to satirise unlikely rural tall-tales, served up alongside a photo of the (individually-named) group of ladies who sang it back in the period, and a note that the melody ‘is passed down through the generations in the oral tradition’ (p.30, CD track 7).
What these songs prove in aggregate is that bothy ballads aren’t the only repertoire of songs created by folk in close Scottish communities to celebrate and sometimes poke a wee bit of affectionate fun at their contemporaries.
Woven together, songs, poems and photographs, with careful captioning, provide a grand prompt to old memories, and a fun way to generate a living local culture.
Further Reading & Resources
- Songs & Poems Old & New, ed. Jacquie Aitken, CD sung by the Made in Helmsdale Choir, dir. Ruth Whittaker (Timespan / People’s Mobile Archive, December 2023)
- Timespan, Helmsdale webpage